Web Design

There have been many recent additions to the Content Management System (CMS) family in the past few years. In this article, I would like to state some of the pros and cons of the ones that I use the most: Drupal, Wordpress, and Code Igniter. Named in order by personal preference, each of these systems provide different features that can make your website building experience pleasant. None the less, there are some features that may give you a headache that you probably can do without.

Drupal

Personally, Drupal is the lesser of the 3. Not that it’s lacking any major factor that I would like, but simply because it is too complex for its purpose. It is built for with the aim of ease of usage for the developer, but ends up being a lot more than needed. Drupal does have many modules that are creative and useful for focusing on social media networking and a large network of dedicated users who provide help and assistance for other users. The hardest thing to do in Drupal is styling which forces the developer then to focus more on the design rather than the functionality. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very useful system for someone who never intends to touch the site’s files or make any changes to a downloaded theme. I would recommend Drupal to anyone who’s computer programming skill level is beginner.

Wordpress

This may be the easiest “CMS” system to manipulate in terms of having a fully usable admin panel, the ability to add other users and the flexibility to edit site files and style sheets from the web browser. What Wordpress does do, is limit the users to a single content type of ‘post’. This is not good for advanced developers who prefer to have dynamic websites with numerous types of content most likely with different fieldnames and types in the database. However, just like Drupal, Wordpress has Support forum and a big user network of other developers that can answer any questions. This is very useful for ANYONE who wants to have a website up and running in 5 minutes. I prefer Wordpress over Drupal simply because Drupal is a nightmare for developers who need to do some advanced styling.

Code Igniter

Code Igniter, to me, is the best option for ALL developers, beginners or advanced. Some may ask why… It doesn’t provide any admin interface nor does it automatically create any of your database tables unless you tell it to, who why would I recommend it to everyone? Because it helps the developer to actually learn what is happening in the background so that they could handle any issues that come up. It provides functions that make the coding more centralized, similar to the Wordpress and Drupal backend, which the developer can use as needed and just like the other two systems, Code Igniter has a support forum for helping developers. Code igniter has useful features such as the ability to cache pages as they are loaded (user specified), easy URL redirection and it even allows you to create your website in such a manner, that if you decided to change servers, the move would be a snap.

Each one of these systems has their own trait and provides developers with a starting point to be more creative. My personal favorite is Code Igniter for corporate or personal websites so give it a spin and let me know what you think.

Imagine the Vice President of Client Services of an ad agency walking into an office and finding a man in ripped jeans, sandals, and a Ghostbusters t-shirt on the phone with one of the clients.

“What are you doing?” she might ask.

“I’m talking to a client about the best marketing strategy for their product,” the man replies.

“But Jim, you’re not on our business team. You’re a network administrator,” she says.

“I know, but I took a business class in high school. Also, my son has a small business selling lemonade on the sidewalk, so you could say I have some experience as well.”

Sound ridiculous? Well, it is. But this is what creative professionals have to deal with on an almost weekly basis. Consider some of the comments we’ve heard throughout the years:

“My secretary drew up a design for our new Web site in Microsoft Paint. Could you show that to your design team?”

“Let’s make all of the headers into images. I know that violates accessibility standards and borders on discrimination, but I really like that font.”

“Maybe we could put bright red text on a bright yellow background. You know, the hot dog palette.”

We’re taught in grade school that everyone is creative, and we’re taught later in life that creativity is present in everyone, lying dormant in some but waiting to be awakened gloriously and applied brilliantly. And, to some degree, this is true. But, in reality, some people are more creative than others. Part of this has to do with the way some people think, but part of this also has to do with experience. Writers who read and write often are almost always better than writers who don’t, and the same holds just as true in other applications of creativity as well.

On top of that, creativity is only half of what goes into conceiving a great Web site. There are also things like readability, accessibility, usability, color psychology, cross-browser differences, file sizes, and server technology, to name a few. For instance, did you know that reading text over a yellow background is extremely hard on the eyes and, over time, can lead to vision loss? Did you know that designing Web sites that are accessible to those with visual disabilities isn’t just a nice idea—it’s the law? These are things Web designers grapple with every day.

Now, I’m not saying that designers should run wild and do whatever they want. I fully realize that the only reason we have the jobs we do is because of clients and that our whole job is to meet our clients’ needs—and trust me when I say that creative types need some constraints to actually get any work done. All I’m trying to say is that we’ve worked hard to develop an expertise in our area. We cater to client needs, but sometimes the clients don’t fully understand the issues involved in their needs.

Oftentimes, creative teams are handed tasks that have been determined by earlier conversations between client service representatives and clients. While this works, projects could potentially be much more effective if experts from the creative team were present for the discussion of the client’s needs and the actual formation of their solutions. (Please note that this is something that PlattForm actually does. I’m not trying to call out anyone in our company.)

So step one to making the creative types and the business types play nice together: play to each of their strengths. Let the business people be the experts in the business side of things and let the creative people be the experts in the creative side of things, and integrate both types into decision-making processes with clients. Next article: putting constraints on creativity without hampering it.

Here are some of the latest design trends in the graphic design industry (backed by a little research and my own biased opinions).

Dark grey is the new brown (which was, until recently, the new black).
For a while, black was the dirty, grungy, cutting-edge color to use—and I’m not just talking about black text. Black backgrounds usually meant “cool site” (or at least, “I’m trying to look like a cool site”). As the market got saturated with cool sites with black backgrounds, brown and earthy, natural tones started taking over as the edgy, grungy colors. They were dirtier, more organic.

Now, dark grey (and, by proxy, a little bit of black) is creeping into the market, with some of the more trendy sites choosing a less-harsh-than-black shade of grey as their main design element. The result is a background that makes colors and white pop as much as black did, but isn’t as harsh to look at.

Orange is out. Pink is in.
Orange used to be the quintessential high-tech color. (I think before that, it was bright green.) It’s been that way since the turn of the millennium. Orange is finally on its way out, after years of market saturation. That isn’t to say that it’s completely gone, though—it’s still being used sparingly, but not to denote forward-thinking philosophies.

Pink began to take on a less-feminine denotation a few years back, with some t-shirts half-jokingly suggesting that pink is actually the new black. Well, the t-shirts were wrong—pink is the new orange. Bold shades of pink, magenta, and fuchsia are showing up in newer designs more and more, and usually in a cutting-edge, artistic context.

Primaries are in, too.
Bold, primary colors—specifically, blue and red—have been getting a lot of use lately too, and not for patriotic reasons. Red has been used in combination with black for some time, but it’s now seeing widespread use with all sorts of other colors.

Yellow is sneaking onto the scene too, but has yet to see widespread use. Yellow has been shown to be the most eye-catching color, but also the most agitating color and the hardest for the eye to take in. So I don’t think we’ll see very many overwhelmingly-yellow designs (or, at least, I hope we don’t); but I think we’ll start seeing more of it in logos and ads, at the very least.

Whitespace is good.
This is more prevalent in Web design than traditional graphic design (where white space has always been more prevalent), but we’re seeing more and more whitespace surrounding elements. Gaps between elements are getting bigger, and more and more sites are adopting the very eye-catching concept of surrounding a bold element with a lot of whitespace.

In the last couple of years, even the space between lines of text has been slowly increasing, going up from the standard 1.25 em to somewhere around 1.5 em to aid in readability. (This is equivalent to the 1.5 line-spacing in Microsoft Word, for reference.)

Part of this could have to do with the realization that online users will now scroll down a page, whereas twelve years ago, they wouldn’t. The freedom to take up more space has allowed for greater readability and aesthetic design than previously thought possible.

The swoosh needs to go.
Seriously, someone needs to shoot that swoosh. The market is saturated. The once dynamic shape has lost its flair. And yet, corporations still choose to make it a part of their logos. Word on the street is that a major credit card company will soon be changing their logo to incorporate the swoosh . That’s the equivalent of playing the Macarena in your car commercial in the year 2008.

I can’t say that the swoosh is out; only that it needs to be. Don’t worry if a logo you’ve had for years has a swoosh—brand recognition trumps swoosh saturation any day—but please don’t request to have your logo re-designed to incorporate the swoosh.

Serif logos are dying off.
More and more logos are being updated to sans-serif fonts, and I’m not talking about the tech- and art-related companies—brands like Excedrin, the LPGA, Business Week magazine, and Reader’s Digest are making the plunge. Now, this is by no means a new phenomenon—sans-serif fonts have been more modern-looking ever since they came about—but older, more traditional companies are starting to give in to the trend.

Serif fonts will never disappear—they’ve proven to be more readable in print, and even on screen at larger sizes—but they just don’t have the modern look that sans-serif fonts provide. Brands or companies wishing to update the look of their companies’ logos usually start there.

If you’ve worked on the Web at all, you’ve probably heard about JavaScript. JavaScript is a scaled-down programming language based on Java and streamlined for the Web. But in a sea of Web programming languages, does JavaScript really stand out? Actually, yes. JavaScript does something that none of the other major languages can do.

The big difference between JavaScript and other Web programming languages is that JavaScript is a client-side Web language, meaning that it runs after it loads on the user’s computer rather than on the server before it gets sent to the user. PHP, Visual Basic (ASP or ASP.NET), and C# (ASP.NET) are server-side languages, meaning the code is run on the server before the web page is even sent to the user. Because it runs after the page is loaded, JavaScript allows us to make changes to a page without reloading it—making JavaScript the key element to interactive web pages.

Still not a believer? Go to a web page with a lot of images and then paste this into your address bar and press enter:

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName(”img”); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+”px”; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+”px”}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5); void(0);

It’s magic! If you don’t understand all that stuff I said above about a client-side programming language, I’ll tell you that JavaScript is magic and those who can write it are powerful wizards.

The truly sad news is that some JavaScript wizards can use their powers for evil rather than good. You know those alert boxes that make you click OK before you can continue? That’s JavaScript. Pop-ups and pop-unders? Re-sizing your browser window? Rick Astley? All JavaScript. For this reason, some people disable JavaScript entirely in their browsers. The last global estimate was that somewhere around 6% of Internet users have JavaScript disabled.

But JavaScript can do useful things too. JavaScript can make changes to an HTML form so that you don’t have to load three pages just to fill out a single form. JavaScript also gives web designers a way to make links in a web page that will send you back to whatever page you came from, send the page to a printer, or add a web page to your favorites list automatically. Dynamic Drive has some crazy JavaScripts for menus, calendars, text scrollers, and tons of other things. Also, check out this page to see the true power of JavaScript.

So before you discount JavaScript as a means of cheap tricks and cyber hi-jinks, remember that it has many valid (and valuable) uses! JavaScript is a designer’s friend, and it allows us to make the Web a more dynamic place. So here’s to you, JavaScript! May you live long and grow in features, and may we find ways to block your more annoying uses.

Here at PlattForm, it’s not all about innovation. It’s now about Ninjavation. (Not a real word… yet.) A while back, we started a Ninjavation Committee to come up with new ideas and ways for us to get leads for our schools. The idea caught on so much that we soon broke our entire Interactive department up into multiple Ninjavation Committees. We’re allowing the teams to come up with projects to carry out. Teams are given budgets to carry out their plans, and each team contains a good cross-section of employees that should be sufficient to get a project done.

One of our Ninjavation teams has convinced I.T. to set up another web server and give web space to PlattForm employees, essentially enabling them to be Internet entrepreneurs. We’re coupling this with an eight-week crash course on the technical aspects of web design (taught by yours truly). We’ll organize later classes on the aesthetic issues of design, SEO, marketing, programming, and more. We’ve got a bright and talented bunch over here, so the potential is exciting.

Another idea was to craft a career aptitude test. The user would fill out a somewhat lengthy survey (long enough to give really good results, anyway) and we would give him or her a score sheet at the end with aptitudes for career areas. At the end, though, the user would have the option entering a zip code and finding schools that offer programs in their areas of aptitude. At PlattForm, we really see what we do (connecting students with schools) as helping people. Creating a tool like that is just a natural extension of that ideal.

One team had the idea to connect students who sign up for information from schools with information on student loans (from an external site). Another wanted to start on an education portal in Spanish that would reach a new audience. Ideas are flying around, and we have self-sufficient little cells of people backing each one of them.

None of these ideas are guaranteed to be carried through to fruition; but the ideas are there, and we do have people working on them. Exciting things should be coming from PlattForm, and it’s all thanks to Ninjavation. Let us know if you have any ideas, and we’ll see what we can do about implementing them!