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FunPass Released
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Loading ...The people at Zylom have been working on a new way for casual game lovers to play their games. In the ‘old’ days you had two choices. You could either buy a deluxe game and play it offline without any adds. Or you could play the same games online, with loss of some features and the gain of adds.
As of last Tuesday a new method of playing the casual games was introduced. Zylom released FunPass (currently only available in Dutch 
). Now you are able to subscribe to FunPass for a fixed amount per month.
Once you are a FunPass member you get to play all the Deluxe games that Zylom offers on its website. No more adds!
It’s definitely worth a try. Especially when you are one of the people that
buys a lot of casual games. And for those of you not speaking Dutch, don’t worry FunPass will be released in other languages really soon.
You get your own FunPass page with favorites and the top 10 of FunPass games (See image to the right). Along with a new and improved download page.
Choosing Between Usability And Crawlability
I’ve been experiencing a problem lately. I have started to redesign some functionality of one of my websites. Long time overdue, but that’s another issue all together. As part of this overhaul I decided to look at how to improve the user’s experience on the website.
One of the problems I’ve encountered is the fact that AJAX can make a website a lot more user friendly. An easy example is when you display a snippet of a text. If the user then clicks on the ‘read more’ link a new layer will be placed on top of the existing one with the full text in it.
I believe that this helps in usability as it makes clear what the full text belongs to, and probably more important what the context is. The big down size of this type of development is that search engines don’t like it.
Why is easy. Search engines have very poor support for JavaScript. Just imagine how this new technique using AJAX will impact the search engine rating. Huge parts of the content will be less accessible for the search engines. Which in turn could result into poorer rankings due to less content.
Faced with the choice between enhanced usability and features or pleasing the search engine I think I have to choose for the first of the two. I do believe search engines will play a big role in a websites success. But I don’t believe we developers should sacrifice features for increased rankings in search engines. Visitors should still come first!
Preparing for Internet Explorer 7
As most developers are now painfully aware of Micrsoft is about to release version 7 of Internet Explorer. The reason for it being a pain in the **s is simple. Just like any release made by Micrsoft the render engine of IE7 has chosen to render just slightly different then for IE6.0
Here are some of the pitfalls I’ve so far discovered, but seriously I’m too lazy right know to fix them.
- It appears that IE7 renders negative offsets different then its predecessor as well as any other browser
- Still manages sizes set in percentages different then Mozilla and Opera
- The improved security levels decrease usability options for websites (Less javascript or DOM execution rights)
- Plugins you wrote for enhancing the web experience won’t work
Big trouble ahead, which is part of the reason for me not to spent to much time on IE7 just yet. I know it will be released in a month or two, but that won’t stop me from ignoring it. For the time being anyway 
CSS Development, A Time Consuming Business
Every website developer wants their website to look cool. Not to mention the businesses that hire you. They want the best looking website, sometimes they even have the weirdest ways of pimping that idea (more on that later one).
From tabular to DIV oriented design
In the early years of webdevelopment you could create a website based on tabular design. Would work perfectly, but they are big and hideous to maintain. But for the last few years more and more companies have started to embrace the power, and dislike, for CSS.
You may wonder why I included the dislike factor. After all CSS is supposed to make our lives easier by reducing the clutter in the actual HTML code. I agree, CSS helps to clean up what would normally be unreadable HTML. But, here it comes, there are no standards that are actually followed by browsers.
So what does that mean for webdevelopers! Well get ready to spent hours frustrating on how to align text or pictures the same in all major browsers. Now I know that the W3 has a proposed standard, but I haven’t found a single browser yet that complies completely to the standard. Not to mention that the standard it self is kinda vague about how to calculate offsets and distances. Which means that Internet Explorer and Firefox actually have a different method for calculating offsets.
Problems with browsers rendering of HTML
Some may say that this was true in the past and that most of these issues have been resolved. And to some extend that’s absolutely true. When using fixed widths and heights most browsers tend to render the page the same. But when using percentages to set width and height all browsers react different. For example Internet Explorer won’t stretch an empty DIV if the width is set to 80%, Firefox and some other Mozzilla based browsers do support this.
That all being said I due believe that CSS is a positive development. I just wish that it gets support from all the major browser companies. It would sure make the live off a webdeveloper a lot easier.
Tracking users both online and offline
In marketing and tracking your successes in marketing it’s important to keep track of how people are introduced to your projects. Be it a website or a program you are trying to sell. Even though it’s important most are not using tracking as they could, learning everything from your userbase.
It might seem like a strange thing to do, track your users. Most would think it to be a violation of their privacy. Not knowing that it’s happening all around you. Companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo use it all the time.
But why is it so important. First off you learn about the flow on the Internet or word-of-mouth advertising. Might not seem important, but knowing how people find you is key into increasing sales. It also helps you target those sources, like when to air TV-commercials and which stations to advertise with.
When you are tracking it should not end there. You will also want to track how users are flowing through your website. Or how they are using your applications. This will help you discover potential problems, like incorrect navigation or just way to complex ones. In the end this will save, or even make, you money as you will get less complaints and increase the amount of customers.
Actually tracking customers is a whole other story though. Online it’s pretty straight forward. You assign a cookie and just log everything they do, they’ll never know it! Offline is a whole lot more difficult. You can’t sent data to your webservers unless you informed the customer in advance. And customers won’t like it when they are being monitored.
More on this and how you could implement tracking later on….
