There is an awful lot of clutter on the web. There ought to be a fine for littering in cyberspace. You’ve seen the kind of junk I’m talking about here and there: content that is there for the sole benefit of search engines, such as white keyword text on a white background, people who spam in blog comments, and even the harmless pages of nonsense that grows like weeds on each of our websites.

In June I tightened ship on my own website. I’ve implemented some new security on the blog software, notably reCAPTCHA, a captcha project by Carnegie Mellon University. Captchas use images containing distorted text that you have to re-type into a form field. The reCAPTCHA project uses portions of scanned/OCR’d books that failed to be recognized easily by computers to test users. Once the text is verified to be read by a human, it helps add books to electronic libraries. So using this method not only foils spammers, but helps with online literature projects.

I’m also working on editing down my website. I am guilty of using my ability to create web pages so easily as an opportunity to be too wordy. Some websites don’t have enough information, and you leave disappointed that you couldn’t find what you needed to know. Others are too wordy: “Welcome to (this website). We’re so glad you came… have a seat. Would you like some tea while you’re waiting for real content? The bathroom is down the hall.” I’m guilty as charged, in a court of my own self-examination.

I altered the navigation on the site, so it should hopefully make more sense to someone at least passingly familiar with websites. I started out with really obscure labels for the links, now I’m back down to the basics. Practice what I preach: I’m always telling my clients what should be on their homepage, how their navigation should be labeled. I have finally followed my own advice.

As a new service, I’m helping clients with their website “talk” — a website needs to be the executive summary of a longer proposition. The longer proposition can be there, behind the scenes, and you can bring on the content in layers that are carefully crafted to build detail into the subject. However, people don’t need to be hit over the head with a heavy sales pitch, proposal, or autobiography from the get-go.

Tightening up the wording, reducing babble, using bullet lists for main points, taking advantage of proper linking, and proper keyword integration.

People don’t have time to sit through a long reading: they came with something in mind, even if it was just to learn more about you, and then they’re going to go on to the next thing in their life. I’m working on other ways to increase website traffic to my client’s site other than the stinking, lying, cheating ways that some search engine optimization businesses have taken up. It’s a definite art, and it’s easier to do on content that you didn’t write yourself, so for me it’s slow going between projects, and for clients, hopefully it won’t be as slow and inconsistent.

Some of my new philosophies about optimization of websites were covered in my second workshop at the QED Business Edge conference yesterday: “Who’s your website for?” It went over well. More about it later.

Because I’m expanding my business into content development and website planning, I’m starting to subcontract some design work out so I can make room for adding new services to my business. To see what this looks like, see the Rhthym and Rhyme Childcare and Simply FlawlessFaces websites.

Liberate Your Website (part 1)

I’ve come to realize that people aren’t “getting it” when I tell them that my websites are “easy to edit” so I’ve created a movie (6 minutes 10 seconds) to demo it.

It isn’t one of those build-your-website applications you always see on the web — those force you to do all the dirty work and BOY can you break the website, create some hideous Frankenstein-monster website contraption that frightens away clients.

No, that’s not at all what this is.

You can’t really break the website when you use this application. Maybe you can make some poor content design choices, such as making all your content text bold, or italic, so that you have no means left with which to emphasize a word. Maybe you can type in all caps, make everything on the page a headline, etc. But you aren’t playing with the design, only the content, of your website, and changing styles and colors is not an accident.

So, take a look at the demo and see how this is a simple CONTENT management system, and don’t frighten your clients away anymore! In the demo movie — which is only 6 minutes! — I play with several real live websites, so you can see how easy it is to edit your own content. In 6 minutes I could hardly explain to a web designer what I want them to change on a website; I’d rather do it through the Easy-to-Edit system. That’s why all my websites are using this system: in spite of being a web designer, I want to have a quick and easy way to add and edit website content on my sites.

Preamble: I have decided I don’t like Gallery2 as my portfolio application. I’m going to be working on moving back to PmWiki for my portfolio in the future — so my latest work is not in my portfolio.

I re-created the Business Exchange Network’s website in December, 2006. The old site may still be available. This is a template rather than custom design, however I custom programmed several features for the site, then donated the instructions on how to do it for other sites back at the application project site. This site incorporates a calendar, member business directory, and each member has a profile page that acts as a mini-website for them. Since a few people in the group don’t have websites, this gives them a real place on the web to call home until they decide whether they want a website.

I helped out at KwicTax, LLC - programming a form on the site, adding required fields, and generally making the form and subsequent information revealed after filling out the form behave properly.

An ongoing client is up to her usual beautiful designs - Apryl of Silverflux Design has been outsourcing programming and general geekery and software installations to Eclectic Tech. This week we finished working on the Serendipity bead store website in Canada. My handiwork is the calendar and newsletter subscription integration.

In-progress Sites

Almost completed: Beth Ward of Jaidens Jewels has requested a website redesign and shopping cart. This work is in progress and if you’d like to see it before it’s finished, feel free to email me.

Almost completed: Chris Zino of Zino Technical Services in Bayville, NY has requested a website design and wiki application — he’s absolutely thrilled to be using a wiki and is already creating pages on the site, and I haven’t even gotten around to training him yet! At the time of the writing, we’re still hashing out the logo for his business, and once the logo is decided we may well be changing the colors on the site, but the site is up, works, he’s in business, and his contact info is there if anyone needs home audio installations, networking installation or repair, computer service, or a dozen other techie services on Long Island (Nassau & Suffolk Counties), he’s your guy!

New Client: I’m under contract for the redesign and reworking of Orange Environment’s website. I’ve started working, but there’s nothing to show yet. Orange Environment is a non-profit that has been working to save the open spaces of Orange County, NY for 25 years. This is their 25th Anniversary website overhaul, and this year they’ll be holding an Earth Day celebration on April 21st. Location(s) TBA. If you see my company name at the bottom of the site, then I’ve made progress enough to go live on my work. Until then, if you want to see the development site-in-progress, feel free to email me.

New Client: My newest client is Middletown Community Health Center (MCHC) who has requested a modernization and more features for their website. Again, if my company name is not at the bottom of the page, you’re looking at their old site. Ask me for a URL for their development site-in-progress. As of the time of writing, I haven’t gotten that far yet but work should begin shortly.

Here’s the deal.

I need a shopping cart for a client. I have basic functionality the shopping cart MUST have. Not necessarily because the client demanded them but because I’m forming a hairbrained notion that these are some type of milestone or rite of passage for shopping carts.

1) coupons & discounts — there’s nothing like putting a coupon with your ad or on an invoice. Even better, giving out coupon codes in your newsletters. Make sure they’re paying attention! Many carts don’t seem to have this. The granddaddy of shopping carts in the open-source world requires being broken TWICE to have coupons (”easy discounts” and “easy coupons” must be added to oscommerce aka OSC to get coupons). Bonus points for coupon support out-of-the-box.

QuickCart & Viart Free have coupons out-of-the-box according to shopping-cart-reviews.com.

2) a template system with under 50 files. OSC fails this test, requiring nearly EVERY file to be changed to consistently alter the HTML appearance features of the website. ZenCart has 95 template files not counting those for the admin panel. Viart Free has 115 template files.

Winner: QuickCart (loaded version) comes in at under 38 — note “page.tpl” is the “main page” of the site. Other template pages MAY NOT NEED TO BE ALTERED! I haven’t figured that out conclusively. But they’re not using something standardized like Smarty so you need some PHP savvy to plow through them.

3) separation — real separation — of logic and design. ZenCart is OK on this one. OSC fails miserably. Viart Free comes out on top — using Smarty templating! WOOT! However note the loss on #2, coming in at 95 template files. Shame on them! Smarty is much MUCH smarter than that!

Viart Free, as I mentioned, uses Smarty, and has a standard “header” “footer”. In spite of 115 files, using Smarty would probably make it a pleasure. I’m upset that there’s no standard “right-sidebar” type formats, but that can easily be added to header/footer files so I’m happy enough.

QuickCart also seems to have real separation of logic vs design, so it’s the 2nd runner up for not using a standard templating system like Smarty.

4) real-world examples that show off the system’s flexibility for customization & style.

This is a tough cookie because people are generally lazy. I looked 3 times at http://www.mals-e.com/home.php because it had some of the better shopping cart examples I’d seen. Custom buttons, horizontal instead of vertical cart display, entirely different layouts. Turns out this is a free hosted service, you don’t install the software, you do have to muck around in your website’s HTML, but it’s really a service that handles the customer’s orders off your site. It allows a lot of flexibility, and he’s hoping you make so many sales that you want the advanced site features, which are not make-or-break deals. I don’t see coupon/discount code entry, so Mal’s service fails #1, but it wins on 2 & 3. How much more separate from the logic can you be?

Viart has an odd quantity feature that involves a drop-down, but that’s probably fixable. It requires clicking a JavaScript pop-up to confirm putting something into your shopping basket, which is awkward. These are awkward, but livable issues, but all the sites I looked at had these issues so no one bothered fixing them.

QuickCart — they don’t have that many sites in English, and they have SO MANY in other languages, I needed to narrow the playing field. So of the English sites, I saw minor promising variants in the cart design itself — something near impossible to do in OSC — as well as at least one site where the overall design was beautifully done very differently from the others. The cart behaved the way I would want a cart to behave. At least one site had web sites up for sale, with a number of options for ordering, which is something I may be doing myself.

5) No restrictions.

Viart Free fails here. Limited to 50 products. It requires a Zend optimizer installation. But it does install on GoDaddy. However, this is not terribly expensive to upgrade at $119, if you go over 10 categories/50 products.

In any case, the winner system from looking at the websites is Mal’s service — but if I eliminate the one host I bumped into during my search for something better, QuickCart did better than Viart.

The winning system today: QuickCart. Several hundred shops are listed, though some are spammers or the domains are now invalid. One problem is that I’ve not seen very strongly customized category views, and that’s an area I’ll need to customize. If you expect to have a very small cart, don’t forget to check out Viart Free. Notable mention for money: SquirrelCart — at about $70 it looks like a good bang for the buck — but I can’t say how it does amongst all the criteria mentioned here, since I couldn’t evaluate it.

Note that many carts were eliminated from the contest for a variety of reasons. #1 price. #2 bad reviews out of the starting box (such as VirtueMart/Joomla! which has been repeatedly reported as having the shittiest support forum, being overly complex, etc. If I want that shit, I’ll go back to OSC).

Ok, so next I’ll be working with QuickCart and I’ll let people know how it goes.

I have been working on a website redesign. It seems that creating a site design that is open and uncluttered does not sell my services. When creating my design, I thought I was expressing my preferences for information delivery over dazzle. And some people have responded to the design very positively, enjoying the fact that it is subdued and unpretentious.

Others, however, are uninterested in clarity and an uncluttered look. That 15 seconds (or less) that I have to capture their attention fails.

I want the audience that inherently understands that my design preference for my site does not dictate how I design sites for other people and other purposes. At the same time, I have to redevelop my own site, because it needs to be repurposed. During the initial design, I was not selling as hard as I am now, so my site was mainly informative. Now, my site must be geared towards self-promotion rather than discussion.

So, I will be rolling out a new design and perhaps some new content soon. The design is already in the works. I have decided on something fancier but with some of the same elements.

A rhetorical rant for those who would never get so far as to read my news: Why on earth would my site be a representation of what your site would look like? You have a different audience, different philosophy, different projections, different goals. Part of what I try to do while I work for you is become enmeshed with the energies of the organization I am designing to represent. I ask for intricate details about you and your goals, the history and the fabric of the entity I am working to represent, and I use those as the clay from which I sculpt the work I bring to you. The more accurately you portray yourself, your organization, and your target market, the more fitting the results should be. My site is not a cookie cutter.