Why SOPA is bad and why I care
You have probably heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the tragic consequences on the internet as we know it. If you haven't SOPA and it's sister bill PIPA (Protect IP Act) are bills on the U.S. House and Senate floors that will allow major corporations like MPAA, CBS, EMI to take down a website for no more than a infringing link. This bill (SOPA) could possibly ruin social networking as we currently know it and prevent new startup companies from flourishing on the web.
An example of why this bad
Why is this so hurtful for online business you may ask? Say that you wanted to start a business selling tee-shirts to kids and you have a feedback form or a comment section on your website (which is standard in most wordpress websites). Now say that on one your tee-shirts you have a slogan that is similar to a popular movie quote, though you changed it enough to dodge copyright issues. Soon your visitors view your shirt and they just have to comment on how well it's done. All of a sudden though, one of you visitors posts the original movie quote and link to a parody version of quote in your comments section. If SOPA/PIPA passes, the next day you would get a court summons by the movie distributor because of that one movie quote and link in your comments section was not filtered quickly enough, and your business as you know it is gone because of that one comment.
A glimmer of hope
Though the effects of SOPA/PIPA is tragic the online response has been overwhelming and has even caused some supporters to renounce there support, including GoDaddy who in one day lost 21,000 domain names due to there support of SOPA among other problems. Also the White House administration responded against SOPA and PIPA stating:
Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.
I agree with the White House saying that SOPA/PIPA is bad. At it's core though, there needs to be a way to stop piracy (particularly international piracy) while not interfering with the average activities of daily Americans.
What can we do?
Right now the best thing is ether sign a petition or contact your representative and/or senator and let them know that SOPA/PIPA should be stopped.
Wireframing
In creating this new design I actually took a risk and wireframed the entire site before mocking it up. Some people are very much against wireframing, instead they only mock up a web page in code. While others love to wireframe their website for unity and clarity before actually coding or designing anything.
So what is ‘wireframing’ and does Photoshop count as wireframing?
According to Wikipedia the definition of wireframing is:
A website wireframe... is a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages.
My definition is anything that is created to show the interface of each page the site before the coding. What I mean by this is that Photoshop (unless using tons of layer comps, or multiple documents) is not really designed to layout every page of a website, instead it allows you to create just one general design. Fireworks on the other hand though allows you to use the pages pane to layout changes to ever page.
So to the point, should or shouldn’t I use a wireframe?
It is really up to you, personally I am for it, but as i have learned over the years is each designer has his own set of tools and opinions on each one of those tools. Personally I would highly recommend using a wireframe tool for your site but in the end it is really up to you.
Merge all windows in Safari
Okay, so who there hates a million different web-browser windows cluttering up their desktop? Certainly not me, that is why I found a great workflow based on a trick I learned in a Screencasts Online video. It starts by noticing that under the “Window” menu there is an option for “Merge All Windows” this option turns all the browser windows into one big window with many little tabs. This is option great but the problem still remains that if you are on a 20” monitor or dual screen setup it can be a hassle to go up to the top of the main screen and click this little option every-time so how about a time saving shortcut?
It’s very easy to create this small shortcut. Just go to the System Preferences (the icon with all the gears), click “Keyboard and Mouse”, then click the tab “Keyboard Shortcuts”. Next click on the plus symbol under the shortcut list, and a dialog box should appear. Chose “Other...” (the very bottom option on the list) an open dialog box appears go to your “Applications” folder, find Safari and than click add. Next under “Menu Title” enter “Merge All Windows” (it must be typed exactly that way for for this trick to work) than for the Keyboard Shortcut type any combination of key (like mine is command + option + m) and presto your shortcut should appear next to “Merge All Windows” under the “Window” menu. Now the next time you want to merge your window you have a simple keyboard shortcut that should save you loads of time and space.
Maybe standards don’t matter after all…
If you are like me you have met or are a web standards zealt and will say or will tell you in a nutshell it is not worth building a website unless you have validated it 10 times plus adhere to the W3C and meet it's strictest guidelines
. Ok that maybe this is a little over the top, but none the less you have probably heard something like this said by someone or told somebody this by yourself. One day looking at a site called Modern Life is Rubbish
I noticed an article that was titled web standards don't matter as much as you think
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This lead me into thinking about all the website redesigns I have done lately and how much I (or maybe you might have) have stressed over W3C's approval of the website. Yes if you can pull it off it can be a very strong and convincing selling point to a technical client or a under designer because it shows your attention to details and people with special needs (screen readers, high contrast screens etc). Although because we don't live in a perfect world and not every browser out there (most noticeably Microsoft Internet Explorer) follows W3's example of compatibility to the word, which forces many designers into dilemmas that more times than not cause the website to have invalid code. One thing this article says though is that unless you have a very technical audience (which most of us do not) more likely than not that they are not going to care about validation, just that the text is readable and good. Just food for thought.
Pure Edit
Ever since Wordpress came out I have always wondered why there are so many different CMS’s out there? Well, if you have ever tried to mold an existing website in to Wordpress you will understand with me why the are more than one out there, Wordpress is just not that flexible. Many developer’s have tried to fix this problems by making the “content hooks” easier to work with by doing things like making the editable div tag a class with a certain name in it, or creating simple %pathto('content')% tags. While these are okay and a little easier for “code-phobic” designers to work with, they still requires you to fix the code on the actual page.
PureEdit is an innovative CMS that only touches your MySQL and that’s it. Using tables and field tags (such as "body_txt") it will read the abbreviation of the field suffix and will create an form in it’s backend for say a client to use while again remaining it’s “hands-off” self. Very useful I think, how about swinging by pureedit.com and giving it a try?