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A new look on webdesign
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Loading ...I’ve recently started to look at what are the most important factor in designing and realizing a successful website. When you are searching online there are a lot of people claiming different things. From quality content to a huge amount of inbound links.
But is there such a thing as a magical factor making a website a success?
When looking at success stories and failures I do believe that lack of planning and dedication can ruin a website, but can the opposite create a guaranteed hit. When not taking in consideration the search engines is it possible to create a website that will attract people. Or better yet get people so interested they will spent some time every week on your website.
Some of the self claimed SEO gurus believe that developing a unique website is key to getting success. But is this actually true. I mean both Live Search Engine and Google are pretty successful, yet they are hardly unique. What do they offer that Yahoo or Ask don’t. Same holds true for Wikipedia. Why are people attracted to it when Britanica is a perfectly good working online encyclopedia.
Some others would claim that design is important in becoming successful online, but if that is true then how on earth did Google ever become popular. In design it’s far from user friendly. You can spent hours looking for simple features like activating a language filter to only display results in French.
So if it’s not uniqueness nor design then what is it that gives some website the edge on others. Is it still possible to create a new website that becomes successful or are we all doomed to fail.
Yeah it should still be possible to create a successful website, but I do believe it will require a lot more dedication then you may be willing to spent. There is just way to much junk on the web. People have started to filter it out by only watching a website for a few seconds before deciding to leave.
What do I think is important for creating a success.
- Don’t be afraid to fail, changes are you will the first few times
- Never think that graphics will make up for lack of information or entertainment
- Make sure that you know who you are trying to reach and how they will use your website. Always adjust the websites navigation and layout to fit their needs!
- Don’t overdo it! You don’t want to overwhelm you visitor. Some websites can use hourly updates, but most don’t.
- Don’t think you write in a way that your visitors will understand, make sure you do! Approach your public and ask them if they like what you do.
Will following this list make sure you have a success. No it won’t. Like I said before making a successful website takes time and dedication. And even if you do everything by the book there is no guarantee that people will like it.
My last advice, just try and have fun doing so. If you don’t have fun in writing content or designing your website then your visitors will notice. If you get to stressed out by constantly updating your website then take a holiday, a tequila or whatever calms you down.
How software development environments are making us lazy!
I have been convinced! The newest generations of programming languages and development environments (like Visual Studio, Netbeans) are making the developer lazy and stupid. The environments are taking so many tasks away and slowly remove the intelligence from the programmer.
Let’s back my bold claim up with some facts and evidence. The new Visual Studio has improved a lot, including the options to create get and set functions or auto complete. Nothing wrong with that. It speeds up production, but if you are to comfortable with it you may get in trouble. The autocomplete in C++ for example is far from perfect, and is very comfortable in recommending wrong code.
A good example of this is an object that is a pointer, but then again Visual Studio will accept the dot notation during auto complete. So code that should have been class->someFunction() becomes class.someFunction()
Not a big deal you may think, but the message returned by the compiler is somewhat vague and if you don’t know much about the working of C++ you will not find the bug easily.
A few years back Microsoft introduced .Net to make programming and creating programs easier and safer. Well safer for them anyway!
Why am I so against .Net, well easy it makes you dumb. Don’t get me wrong I believe that .Net increases production speed. But it’s build to hide what actually happens. No more pointers, no more clues as to how the OS communicates to the application, unless you are willing to override almost every class in the .Net foundation.
A year ago or so Joel Coehoorn wrote about how Visual Basic made him somewhat laze this way. Charles Petzold wrote an article as to how Visual Studio rots the mind. No their also are a lot of people that disagree, just read the reaction on Charles Petzold’s article.
As to whether I agree with time, well to some extend. I do believe that newer language like VB.Net and C# take a lot of direct knowledge about the OS your working with away. You no longer have to know how and why you get keypresses or an event that notifies you of a mouse click. Nor do you need to know the basics of IPC.
Now I’m inclined to agree with the opposition that developing time has decreased. But if you are missing click events in .Net and you don’t know about the windows messaging system could you solve it? I seriously doubt it!
Newsletters: What works and what not
I personally am receiving a lot of newsletters, some of which I actually want to receive and some of which I don’t. But what makes a newsletter a good PR tool. When does a newsletter attract attention. Or even more important when does it provide positive attention.
When receiving an e-mail what do you do. Going to open it straight away? Perhaps you look who sent it or what the title is. Most of these things you will do without knowing it. Next time you receive an e-mail think about what made you open it.
From some experience with newsletters I know that most people will automatically delete any e-mail that does not look important or that’s from a sender they don’t know. So when writing a newsletter these are the first things to be aware of:
- Can the reader see the e-mail is from my website
- Does the title describe the content as well as raise the level of trust
Notice how this is only about the title and the sender. It’s important to raise interest in the content of the e-mail by just using the title and sender’s address. But that’s not all, if only it were.
Just like with any online content is king. But what does that actually mean! A lot of people will have different opinions, but mine is as follows:
- The content of the e-mail is written for me,
Which means that if you are writing for a general public don’t include difficult words specific to your niche. But the same is true for the opposite. Writing for you niche then use these specific words as it will raise people’s trust in your expertise. - Not to flashy,
I know that I hate e-mails that look as if they were meant to be webpages. I think Clickz is a great example of how not to do it. They write for marketing people, but are just copying their webpages into the e-mail. Mind you if you are writing for a movie or music website you will automatically use more graphics and HTML in your newsletter then someone writing for a automobile website. Just try and balance it. - Don’t use online styles or pictures,
Not everyone reads their e-mail whilst connected to the internet. So don’t use images in the e-mail that are not embedded in the e-mail, or your readers may never see them. Same holds true for the stylesheet, don’t link but embed.
I personally always try to take these pointers in mind when writing for a e-mail or a website for that matter. It would be a shame if you ended up on blacklists just because people report your e-mail as spam!
Building on existing code or creating your own
When developing software you often face the same problem. Do I re-use already exisisting code or do I create new code. I have been working in this niche for a while know and I’m still faced with making this decision every know and then.
So how to make the choice, when to pick which option. To be completely honest I don’t quite know. Most times I just toss a coin, not the best way to decide (I know this).
Let me explain why I often build my own classes and code. I’m a fanaticle C++ programmer and I’m often faced with the problem that I could use either the standard library or write my own classes. Recently I choose that I would write everything I needed from scratch. And here are the reasons for my choice:
- More control over what is included in the code and what is not
This may not seem to important, but I happen to know that the string object included in the standard library is far from perfect. The same is true for the vector or array class. So I decided it was time to rewrite them to fit my needs. - Gaining intemite knowledge about the working of the program
I personally believe it’s important to know why a program reacts the way it does. And in C++ especially. I’ve often had problems with the standard library that resulted in corrupted memory. Debugging didn’t help anything as I didn’t understand the code. - Building up your skill set
I know that this point will be the reason not to do it in most companies, but creating your own ‘core’ libraries will help you increase your programming skills. The reasons why companies dislike this is because it takes way to much time.
As you might have noticed I’m kinda biased towards developing as much as possible yourself. But don’t get me wrong it is with its downsides. It takes a huge amount of time to develop your own ‘core’ library. Which makes it expensive. So for managers it’s important to weigh any possible gain, like the three points I made, against the time and money needed to do so.
Top 5 software development myths
I just love hearing management speak about software and software development. Especially when they are discussing things they know nothing about, because they never actually were involved in developing software.
So I think it will be nice to post a list of myths I believe are out there about software development.
- Deadlines guarantee that software is completed on time
I believe this is the biggest myth of them all. Making deadlines does not guarantee that software will be done in time. Making a decent development and integration plan and then putting milestones on the various phases will! - More developers mean faster development
When a project is nearing a deadline a lot of managers will assign more developers to the project. Does this mean the amount of work left will be done quicker. Well no, too many developers will start slowing eachother down. Work will be done twice and developers will start waiting on work of other developers. Sometimes the overhead of adding more developers just isn’t worth it. - You don’t need developers when designing software
This one is a bit less common, but still. You can’t design software or try and put together a list of requirements without an actual software engineer (architect) at the table. If you don’t you won’t know if the requirements are feasible or even possible. - Every project is alike
Most managers believe that every software project is the same. You design, implement and integrate. But that just isn’t true. Sure all of these phases are identical for every project, but its what’s in the phases that matters. How will you implement, design or integrate and not the actual performing of the tasks. - Developers will work faster when put under presure
I love this one, and managers will use it on ocasion. Developers will work faster under presure, they will start working longer days and sometimes even weekends. But it’s the end result that matters. Sure you can get them to work faster, but will it improve software stability or security. I don’t think so, faster typers make more mistakes. Mistakes can cost money to fix. You do the math.
