If you haven’t noticed yet, RyboMedia officially has a new face, logo, mascot, icon – whatever you want to call him. If you’re new to the site, or just blind, it’s the rhino!
So, the hard work is done, thanks to William Woody (an excellent designer and videographer if you need one). Now I need your help for the fun part – a name. Something fun, easy to remember. Got any ideas? Post below, write on the Facebook page, @reply to rybo, or email me!
A good friend has been working with me to design a few logos for the site. I say working with to mean, I tell him a general idea and he spits out awesome sketches. Anyway, he’s completed a few (all very tentative) and we’d like you to look at them. Let me know which ones you like – comment, email, or tweet your favs. Remember, these are just sketches – the final with be more detailed and clearer.
Thanks!
For months now, I’ve been noticing a trend in a few of the blogs I follow. Namely, many of the ones that get popular…start to suck. I like to think that I am semi-picky about the blogs I follow in Google Reader – after all, I don’t want just any ol’ garbage cluttering up my news. The problem comes when I go down my list of subscribed blogs and start using the “Mark All as Read” button too much. That tells me something.
Now listen, I’m a young, very inexperienced blogger. My blog’s just not that popular. Sure, I’ve had the site for about 2 years now, but that doesn’t really mean anything – time hasn’t exactly equaled success. For the most part, I’m fine with it – I have a lot of fun with it regardless of the user base. In those times I get a little disheartened, the string of failures and eventually successes of President Abraham Lincoln keeps me going.
But I digress. The point is, I do this because I love it. I like the internet, technology, web, programming, cool logo’s and good design. I like to write about it. I like to make it look (somewhat) good. I like to learn everyday by messing up and restarting. Most importantly, I like to share knowledge and good information with people. Isn’t that the whole point of a blog?
The fact of the matter is that a lot of bloggers get successful and their quality not only starts to diminish, it gets forgotten in Twitter follower numbers, FeedBurner stats, etc. Great weekly content, electronic reviews, and tech tips gets replaced by bi-monthly video game screenshots, detailed analysis of recent grocery store trips, and poorly asked, open-ended questions for followers to answer. Purge your reader of this crap!
And I’m sick of it. As bloggers, our charge should be to enrich the content on the web. Make it better, pass along information, and form a community with those likeminded. Don’t have time to post as much as you did before? That’s fine! Take your time – write, revise, and pick apart your work so that when you do post, it will be good quality content.
You should be proud of every post on your blog. Form a personality – be funny, be quirky, be grouchy. Make the blog your own – but keep up the quality. Always post as if you’re trying to win over readers (because you are) – not as if you have them trapped.
For the past few months, a good friend (and past guest blogger) and I have been working on something called “Joupes”. We have reached a fairly stable and working version, and we think it’s time to release it for testing. Now, I have played this release over and over in my head, each fantasy involving a large room filled with web and social media experts, a sexy shirt microphone, bottles of the finest water, and a large screen projector to display the project.
Alas, that’s not going to happen – yet. For the time being, I’ll have to settle for this blog. So, without further ado, we are pleased to announce the beta release of Joupes. Applause welcome.
Fantastic – another brightly colored logo, a weird name, and no explanation at all. Here goes.
What are Joupes?
Basically, Joupes are goals. You can have short term goals or you can have long term goals – but they are all Joupes. Joupes.com brings both long term and short term tasks to a simple, one page site – organizing by type and date due.
Ok, awesome – but why do I care?
The fact of the matter is, you might not care. But you should. Studies show that people who have written life goals are up to 10 times more successful financially than those that don’t. We’ve taken this idea of written goals and applied it to short term tasks (or “to-do’s”) as well. Hopefully, the combination of seeing your life goals staring you in the face, as well as being able to check off daily tasks, will help you be more productive.
I’m busy, I can’t log into a website everyday to manage to-do’s!
This is where Joupes gets neat. With SMS (text-messaging) reminders, your tasks come to you! That’s right – when you add a task to your Joupes list, you can set reminders to receive text messages before a task is due!
Hopefully that answers a few questions about the nature of Joupes. Throughout the next few weeks, we will be sending out beta invitations to select individuals for testing. If you’d like to be considered for an invite, sign up here. Obviously, as it’s in beta mode, we’ve got lots of works to do. We have so many different ideas and added features from the site, it can get a little difficult to keep the simplicity. There is surely more to come, and I hope you’ll stick around to see it.
As you may well know, good content is the key to successful web logging. Got that? Ok, now it’s time to make it readable. After all, what’s great content if it’s hidden beneath not-so-transparent layers of garbage?
One of the distinguishing factors between good and great blogs is the readability factor. Here are some tips I’ve come up with to help push your site to that next level.
Adding a little extra space between your letters is one of the easiest things to do – and it’s one of the best ways to make your posts more readable. Too often, sites leave the default spacing on letters. This, combined with smaller font sizes and serif fonts, leaves readers squinting to make out the difference between “rn” and “m”.
Along the same lines (ha! how appropriate) as letter spacing, line spacing allows you to open up your content and let it breathe. This adds just a touch of whitespace in your actual post, which can make your page feel cleaner.
Nothing is worse than going to a blog where the author has neglected to break up content into paragraphs. Nothing. This is why newspapers have columns filled with blocks of text – often spread across multiple pages. Here’s a secret – people don’t want to read a lot, but they will keep reading if “a lot” is split up into more manageable chunks. I mean, seriously – you know what I’m talking about, right? Blogs where authors ramble on about nothing in particular, while not once hitting the “enter” key? Blogs that go on and on and on and on and on about personal stories, detailing every single bad thing that happened to them, using run on sentences, improper grahmerr and lots and lots exclamation marks!!! Honestly, relationships are tough, but that doesn’t mean that I need to go to your page and read about them. I don’t have time to spend reading your life story, about how he dumped you and you cried, then you dumped him and he cried. I honestly don’t even care that you both then later dumped each other and cried together – I have things to do.
See what I mean? I hope I’ve taught you a lesson, and that you’ll never commit this atrocity against a poor, unsuspecting reader.
I’m not a great writer. I’ll be the first to admit that. My old English and Rhetoric teacher, J.P. Stephens will be the second and my old British Literature teacher will be the third. Either way, most of the time I am able to use somewhat decent grammar.
Using decent grammar isn’t difficult. Basically, it goes something like this. If you’re unsure whether or not to use caps on something other than a proper name or the first letter of a sentence – DON’T DO IT. If you aren’t sure whether to add a fifth exclamation mark to your sentence – don’t do it!!!!! If you’re tempted to use some sort of abbreviation in your writing – omg, please don’t do it.
Never ever make the text size in your link hover class bigger than a normal link. When someone hovers over a link on your site, be it text or an image, nothing on the page should move up or down.
Great hover effects make the user mouse over your link again, just to see it. Nobody will admit they do this, but they do. Hover effects should add to the flow and balance of your page, just like your content, images, and colors.
This is by far the area in which I struggle the most. Pick something and stay with it. Readers want consistency (unless it’s consistently bad), and well designed, easy to read posts will keep them coming back.
If you’re serious about blogging (and even if you aren’t), chances are you have an RSS feed, which means that not everyone is reading your blog on your website. Different readers can render content differently, so it’s important to keep in mind how some of the more popular RSS readers may format your posts.
And that’s it for now. Now, keep in mind, I am by no means in a position to give instruction to bloggers, as I am not successful by any stretch of the imagination. However, from observation and personal experience, these have been some of the most helpful and effective ways to make your posts more readable.
Big Prize. If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, there’s a good chance you’re somewhat familiar with the name. Whether you check the fan page every hour, are constantly confused by the odd little sayings your friends write on their wall, or your Twitter homepage is sprinkled with #moonfruit tweets – you’ve seen the name.
In less than two weeks, and with over 140,000 fans at last check, Big Prize is taking over – by giving stuff away! The people at Big Prize seem to understand something very basic to human nature – we like free stuff. Want to attract a lot of people? Give them really expensive things…for free.
Now, as with every “free giveaway” program, Big Prize has raised plenty of skepticism, especially after the consecutive winnings of Ben Scott. Ben was one of the people I got to talk with, and he has a very interesting story about Big Prize. Ben actually won 4 different prizes – 3 t-shirts and an iPod Touch. While a lot of people posted some pretty rude things about him, he won it all fair and square, simply tweeting responses when he received Twitter SMS updates. That’s not good enough for some people, and Ben gave up 2 of his shirts to calm the storm of people essentially angry over the fact that they didn’t win.
To be fair to those truly wary, I was also a tad hesitant at first. However, after doing a little reading, tweeting, Facebook stalking (and discovering that it’s sponsored by Startlike), I was (and am) sold. So how can someone just give away iPhones, MacBooks and golf clubs? The answer is pretty straight forward, and involves something my mom has hounded me about for years – budgeting.
As with any company, Startlike has a marketing budget. This is how they can give away awesome little freebies that we all love so much like t-shirts and koozies (honestly, what is it about free shirts that makes us salivate?). It’s also how they can afford to chuck out more iPhones than self-taken mirror shots on an middle schoolers Facebook. Which do you think is more effective – banner ads, pens, and rubber key chains or TaylorMade drivers, iPhones, and MacBooks?
As Michael Scott (Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. in Scranton, PA) has taught us, this is what’s called a “win-win-win”. Big Prize experiences an exponential growth of fans (hopefully attracting partners), Startlike gets more attention, and all the fans and Twitter followers get the opportunity to win stuff. Viral marketing at its finest, in my opinion. Traffic, fans, and interest grows through Facebook “word-of-mouth”, with minimal-to-no direct advertising.
Ok, so all that’s fine and dandy – but why do you care? As the end consumer, you just want to know that you aren’t getting scammed. That’s where I come in. Over the past few days, I’ve been gathering interviews from a few people who have been Big Prize winners. Everyone I talked to was happy to answer my questions – I guess free iPhones tend to put people in a good mood.
Now, as Facebook is geared towards sharing information with friends, most people I talked with found Big Prize through the wall posts of friends or direct referrals. Michelle Cramer, however, saw something about it on her Startlike homepage. A few days ago, I wrote a post about how much I enjoy my own Startlike homepage, and it’s neat to see a winner who uses it on a regular basis.
Basically, though, I just wanted to find out if winners actually got their prizes, and if they got them quickly. My answer: a resounding double yes. Everyone I talked with had great communication with Big Prize, and they received their prizes about a week after winning.
“They were really quick about it, within a week I got it.” – Binal Patel
“They told me on June 29th or 30th I would get the gift card . . . on July 8th. I got it on July 2nd.” – Benjamen Scott
“The prize . . . arrived by postal mail the following week. No muss, no fuss.” – Eric Alderman
“I received my [prize] about a week after winning it, which in my opinion is pretty quick!” – Michelle Cramer
So, after speaking to 4 completely satisfied winners, I can safely say that yes, Big Prize is giving things away – no scams, no ploys. “No muss, no fuss.”
Now, explaining why I’m a Big Prize fan is like trying to explain to my best friend Daniel (a Celtics fan) why I’ve been a die-hard Laker for 11 years – they’re the best program in the league, backed by some terrific players (in Big Prize’s case, Startlike), and Kobe Bryant is the finest example of hard work, dedication, and fundamental perfection the NBA has to offer. Ok, so that last one didn’t really apply at all, but it’s my blog.
Show me another company that can give away thousands of dollars in free stuff, carry on great personal customer relations, generate thousands and thousands of Facebook fans in a few days, and represent themselves with a gnome. In the meantime, my computer’s broken, and I could really use a MacBook – so excuse me while I keep playing.
I love Gmail. LOVE IT. I’ts awesome. In fact, if it were a 19 year old girl, she’d be smokin’ hot and I’d ask her to dinner. Alas, it’s not, and I’m left to express my love in other ways and search for a non-Ajax based lady friend.
Gmail labels are a great way to get organized. Essentially, labels are to emails what categories are to blog posts. When an email comes in, you can add labels to it. Once a label is added, a little tag with the label name will appear next to the email on your inbox page.
Now, if this is where labels stopped, I wouldn’t be writing this – it’d be kind of useless. However, Gmail allows you to customize label foreground and background colors, so that you immediately know the label of an email. Plus it makes your inbox look cool. Still, the real beauty of labels comes when you use it with filters.
Filters are, in my opinion, the most useful feature of Gmail. Since I use my Gmail account to send and receive messages for all my other email accounts, sorting email can be time-consuming. Filters allow you to create…well…filters for your email.
First, you specify conditions. You can do this by specifying a “From” email address, a “To” address, by subject, or simply words. After that, you choose what you would like Gmail to do with these emails. This can be anything from marking them as read, archiving them, applying labels, etc. I generally choose to apply labels based on the sender. So, if eBay sends me a confirmation email, it is tagged “ebay” and assigned a yellow label in my inbox. This works for email accounts too – my university mail comes through labeled “usc”.
Now, there’s nothing particularly amazing about Gmail contacts. The magic comes with synchronization. Google Sync for the mobile phone is a great example. Contacts sync with your phone, updating email addresses and phone numbers. It’s great to have those addresses on your mobile, since you can text-to-email pictures and send mobile emails. Since you can set up multiple accounts in your main Gmail account, you end up getting a lot more contacts from all over in one place.
The idea of adding stars to emails is really quite simple, but it’s a very important feature – at least for me. I’m a big user of the “Mark as Unread” button (both in Gmail and Facebook!) but adding stars is a nice addition. If an email needs my attention for several days, or if I was emailed some important information that I need to reference later, I can simply star it. All starred emails are in a separate folder right under your inbox count on the left sidebar.
This is a feature that is currently available in Labs. You can actually also add Tasks to your Google Calendar, but more on that later. The neat thing about the Tasks feature is that, unlike lots of other to-do lists built into webmail, it’s always available but out of the way at the same time. Tasks acts a lot like Facebook chat – it stays minimized at the bottom of your window until you maximize it. From there, just click on a new line and start typing away.
Let me begin by saying that I cannot come close to providing a decent summary of this speaker. Matthew Smith (from SquaredEye) did a phenomenal job when he spoke on Saturday, as was evident by the massive amount of nods, tweets, and chatter that broke out during and after his presentation.
On a non-internet related note, Smith is a fantastic rhetorician. He is very comfortable, witty, and organized in his thoughts and presentation material, though he comes off very casual. It seemed as if everyone in the audience found him very easy to listen to, and he was able to identify with everyone in the room – whether designer or developer.
SquaredEye is all about the details. Sure, every designer is, in a way, a perfectionist. Let’s face it – whether it’s a personal or business project, chances are you won’t be able to even take a break until it’s exactly how you want it to look. I honestly believe that designers have a gift (and a curse) that other professionals don’t have – they are devoured by their desire to make something look good. Smith, however, seemed to emphasize a different sort of design detail. The not-so-obvious things take a website from decent to great. Double borders, gradiant shifts, 3D effects, etc.
In a few ways, Smith said a lot of what Jason Beaird had mentioned earlier – websites need great balance, good color management, and clarity. He talked about the importance of whitespace, de-cluttering your content, and simplicity. You need to make room for your site to breathe, letting the content flow and becoming unified with the rest of the page. Just like good beer, design is all about the nuances – the little things that are hardly noticable, yet make it so enjoyable.
Matthew said something during his presentation that really stuck with me.
“You need to stop learning web design – learn design.”
For designers, this can be a bit difficult. Admit it – there’s a sense of pride when you throw around the words “web design”. But design, be it web design, print design, or building design, is fundamental. When something looks good, people listen. If Carrie Underwood was trying to say something to me, she’d have my absolute attention. When a CD cover looks neat, we pick it up. When an Apple commercial comes on, we watch it. When the latest 460cc driver teases us from the magazine adds, we buy it. When a website looks neat, we come back.
To continue the package of ConvergeSC summaries, I’ll talk a little about Jessica Cook‘s presentation on content. To those who were in attendance, you might notice that I’m not going completely in order (I’ve skipped a few). This is for a few reasons. First, I’m not planning on recapping every speaker – some just wouldn’t make for great blog posts, and a few are just enough above my head that I don’t want to explain anything incorrectly. However, I’m planning a separate posts to recap these and list any notes I’ve taken.
That said, let’s talk about content. I think it was very fitting that Jessica stood up and presented without any visuals. Whether she meant to or not, it’s a perfect example of her topic – the power of content regardless of design. Throughout her presentation, she was very adamant in saying that great design is nothing without great content. Here are her words, which were tweeted, retweeted, and discussed for hours after the conference.
“People don’t want websites anymore. They want answers.”
Jessica advises web designers (especially companies) to seek content first. From that, designing is easier – you get a feel for your site and can see what the finished product will look like along the way. She also encourages you to include content specialists in your quote price, so as to avoid customers passing off content writing as a less important aspect that they can handle alone. Let’s face it – once the site is done, it’s your name that’s credited. Bad content can ruin a well designed site that is backed by your company name.
Ms. Cook listed 8 ways that web designers and developers can start changing the way we designs sites and influencing content.
And there you have it. Content is king. You can have a fantastic looking site, but it doesn’t do any good without great content to match. So often, designers and developers alike get lost in making sure that every little nuance of the site is perfect and pleasing to the eye, yet they miss the one aspect that’s staring them in the face on every page. This applies to everyone – from big design firms to the casual blogger. Create good content, make it look good, and use it.
Jason Beaird did a great presentation on web design for a developer’s mind. Developers, he explained, often have a very different mindset than designers. Coders have a methodology, whereas designers have a specific mentality.
Design is all about constraints. This is by far one of the best things I heard at the conference yesterday. Without constraints, there would be no point. Good web design is about pushing the envelope and discovering how to make something better within the constraints of our technology and resources.
Jason listed 5 basic aspects of web design: layout, color, texture, type and imagery.
Layout
Grids are good. They help organize your content and images. 960 pixels is a great time tested starting width for your fixed layout site. This also works well with the three-column layouts that are becoming more popular, since 960 can be easily divided evenly.
Colors
Too often, designers pick colors that, while they might be complementary, are both too bright, and result in an unbalanced site. Good colors should be picked within about 3 places between each other on the color wheel, or carefully chosen from opposing colors in the triangle.
Texture
Texture is one of the things that can take a good site to the next level. Textures should be unobtrusive, flow easily, and be consistent to the feel of the site. A great texture used in the wrong place, too much, or on a non-related site can ruin the design.
Type
Font selection is perhaps one of the most important, yet most abused, aspects when designing a site. As Beaird described in his presentation, lots of young designers are opened to a world of thousands and thousands of free fonts – and it’s dangerous. Of all these, very few are actually appropriate for an actual site. For in-site text, use only the basic ones, as older computers and browsers might not have newer fonts. If you must use a crazy font, use it in an image first and display the image on your site.
Imagery
Images make or break a website. Too often, stock photos are selected and used without a thought to the audience, feel, or purpose of the site. If you’re designing a site for a business, don’t rush straight to the picture of the girl with a handsfree headset. Use images sparingly, and use good images.
Read more and get Jason’s book.
Jason’s talk was one of my favorites from ConvergeSC – and after talking with a few others, I know I’m not alone. He left us with a charge as designers. It is our job to expand the industry. Push the envelope. Make stuff look good and have fun in the process.