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The new Publicis & Hal Riney site is beautiful, innovative and simple in its language and design. The menu is hidden in an awesome graphic of a plume of red dye that floats in the center of the browser, video is used throughout the site and the copy is kept to a minimum. All good ingredients for a great site, but it still lacks the most important ingredient of all: functionality.

True, the option of webcam navigation is a nice touch. It says a lot about the company—they’re not your typical agency and they have the tools to implement cutting edge functionality. Unfortunately, to get what you really want from the site, you’re going to have to dig pretty deep. The awkward in-and-out transitions of the “liquid” menu is often confusing and abrupt. In the mouse-controlled mode, the menu items themselves are hidden until you hover over them. Each page takes more than a few seconds to load, which doesn’t necessarily cater to our impatient society. In short, extensive amount of time HR & P spends branding themselves on their site takes away from their foundation—the great work that they do. This should be their focus. After all, this is what prospective clients will judge them on.

Always choose function over form.

Sure, it’s great to have a beautiful site, but beauty comes in all forms (I love her for her personality!). Seriously though. Look at craigslist.org. Horrible, ugly, basic html that is oh-so-functional and oh-so-easy to use. Beautiful. On the agency side of things, a great example of choosing function over form is Modernista!’s redesign of their site. Well, that’s if you can even call it a redesign. Check it out. Open another window and type www.modernista.com in the address bar. You’ll arrive at their “homepage,” which, as you can see, is actually just their wikipedia page with a hovering “Modernista!” logo, menubar and message to the viewer reading “Do not be alarmed. You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web. The menu on the left is our homepage. Everything behind it is beyond our control.”

They use existing Web 2.0 social networks to share their company info and share their work. Click on “work” and you’ll find that all their print pieces are on a flickr page and all of their broadcast is on YouTube. Click “news” and you’re brought to “Google News” with search term “Modernista!” already entered in the search field. Click on “contact” and you have the choice of speaking with them via Skype or AIM, or you can click their address to bring to up a Google map pinpointing the agency.

What’s so great and beautiful about this? Modernista! is approaching their market instead of the other way around. They’re engaging rather than interrupting. The site employs technology that people already know how to use, which says a lot as far as the agency’s ability to evolve with the market goes. Most importantly, you get very easily get the information you came to get when you visit their site.

If I am sitting in a chair in Portland, Oregon, traveling at zero MPH for 8 hours a day, five days a week, how long will it take me to get to South by Southwest Interactive in Austin? Yes, you guessed it, I’m not going—maybe I’ll get there next year. One small consolation is that SXSW does a pretty good job of getting podcasts up on sxsw.com. While it is far inferior to being there (and picking from a mindboggling array of events), at least I can listen from afar at the comfort of my desk and get an idea of what the power players in the industry are talking about.

Yesterday I listened to “The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007,” which was pretty entertaining, especially considering the viral marketing ideas that fly around most advertising agencies, including ours. Having crazy ideas is a healthy thing, but in these cases the agencies went through with them and failed miserably. When you’re in this field you have to be willing to laugh about things like that because you can imagine them happening to someone you know.

I’m excited to listen to “Video Production for the Web & Mobile Devices” as well as other panels with names like “Creating Findable Rich Media Content,” “Quit Your Day Job and Vlog” and about a dozen others. Keep an eye on the list as it continues to grow as the festival progresses.

It’s also worth noting that similar podcasts are online from last year. Of particular interest is “Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present and Future Battlefields” and “Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer.” These are great for multitasking because you can just have them running in the background without being too distracted.

A friend recently showed me a local site called “Urban Edibles” that bills itself as “a community database of wild food sources in Portland, OR.” It’s a fantastic combination of ideology and technical functionality where you can easily find free fruit, vegetables, herbs, berries and so on. The site is equally geared towards people looking for food and those posting sources of edibles, making it easy to submit and search, either by category or location. The authors have taken care not to encourage people to abuse the information and you will find warning notes all over the site like “The status of this source is unknown. Ask before you pick!”

Currently the database is not extensive, it is in the process of being built, but it is clearly a fun project for those involved. Urban Edibles employs a variety of technologies including a very active wiki with recipes, resources and information on identifying plants, and discovering what is in season. Perhaps most impressive is the “Browse by Category” section which uses some nice Ajax and javascript animation effects (using the Prototype Library), and then ties into a link to Google Maps.

This is not the sort of website that will see huge traffic but will likely see some repeat visitors who completely fall in love with it. Sites like this make me glad to be a Web developer in Portland, Oregon. There are great ideas everywhere with folks willing to make them real.

KGW ran a story on Urban Edibles as well:

Rock band names should be somehow cryptically reflective of real life. This is the first part of a short series of descriptive band names for a systems administrator at Respond2 New Media.

Back when I was a kid in grade school we had a custodian we called “Archie.” First impressions of Archie were always a little weird. He’d rarely look straight at us unless we weren’t looking at him, and we never could tell if he had really wide hips, or if he was just carrying a lot of keys in his huge pockets. He was always moving.

He was an incredibly good janitor. All 1,000 of us kids spent our time messing up the school, which was a central, shared resource. He cheerfully spent his time fixing and cleaning it. He’d take care of toxic spills of sodium hydroxide in Mr. King’s science room, he’d know what to do with extremely long boogers proudly placed on the bathroom mirrors, and he even had a magic can of stuff that would take care of the permanent pen scribbles on the chalkboard. Whenever it got really bad, we called Archie, who would show up with a smile of love for us kids, any pride evidently discarded in the bottom of one of those big pockets. Five minutes later he’d be gone, and so would the problem.

Here at Respond2 New Media, we have a huge, virtual library of the work we’ve done. It’s what some people call a “versioning system.” It’s built on software called Subversion (SVN for short), and it helps us keep track of graphics, source code, server configuration and technical documentation. When we make a change to a website, we “check” the change into the SVN repository: it’s a record of everything we’ve done. It keeps a history of what changes happened, where those changes occurred and who made them. We can access this repository from anywhere on the Internet, so we can set up our sites on any machine connected to the Web. It works on Macintosh, Windows, and pretty much every flavor of UNIX and Linux.

This all sounds great, and it is. However, nothing is ever deleted from SVN. All our developers make changes to this shared resource. It’s also not perfect. It’s like living in a small, cluttered classroom with a lot of other people. This means that someone has to come along and clean it up from time to time. Sometimes somebody makes a really, really big mess and we have to come in with our magic can of stuff that will take care of the problem. So, one of the jobs we do here at Respond2 New Media is custodial work on our SVN repository. Thus, the new band name, The Janitors of Subversion.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was completely disheartened by programming with Javascript. My comfort level was limited basically to opening windows, creating rollovers and slideshows and other common tasks. But as any respectable web developer these days will tell you, a solid handle on manipulating Javascript is key to creating visual effects, usability features and user interface elements.

Like many, my relationship with the language changed drastically upon experimenting with some of the magnificent free Javascript libraries out there. Probably the three most popular libraries are jQuery (my current favorite), Mootools and Prototype (as well as the Prototype effects library Scriptaculous). These libraries simplify the use of Javascript by creating common, reusable features which are collectively written and shared in an Open Source fashion.

It’s understandable that Javascript is such a pain to learn. For those used to seeing a cause and effect relationship between what they program and see on screen, Javascript does complicate things slightly. While the language is completely logical, the Document Object Model is not the most glamorous or obvious thing in the world. What these Javascript libraries do fantastically well is hide a certain level of complexity from the programmer. While this may seem like a loss of control, you can still get in there and rewrite the Javascript library to your liking, for good or ill. Regardless, the whole situation is a very good thing.

Like many aspects of technology and design, this perceived loss of control can be a bit troubling. If you don’t write all of your code aren’t you just a second-rate hack? While that may in fact be the case, at some point you have to make peace with the existential pitfalls of working with Open Source technology, or any technology for that matter. There are numerous benefits of NOT writing new Javascript for every project, the biggest one is that it’s a big use of time. Aside from that, Javascript libraries provide a reliable set of well-documented tools that are cross-browser tested and demonstrate how to write good code, a valuable learning lesson rolled into the super-useful fun.

The fascinating thing about all of this is that Javascript really hasn’t changed a whole lot in the last 10 years. Sure, modern browsers are a lot more consistent in their interpretations of the language, but the real change is in the evolution of thinking. No longer is Javascript programming a secret art but rather a sophisticated community effort.

I have a sense that you are excited about this, so go forth and read your first tutorial. If that’s too heavy, go play with this instead.

As the college football season comes down the stretch there has been the annual talk about whether the Bowl Championship Series is a good thing for the game or not. As I listened to coaches and players talk about where they might fall in the standings I began to think how close the BCS is to search engine rankings.

Every season each team starts out with a clear slate, much like when a new website is created. Sure, there may be preconceived notions about how a team will do, but it’s really up to the team to prove itself over the first few weeks before the first BCS rankings of the year come out.

When a new website is created at a new URL, Google generally will not display that site in its search results immediately. It will wait to see what other sites link to it and what kind of updates it gets before including it in results. With sites that already exist it’s much like a team that was ranking high the previous year. They will have a high ranking right after the updated site is launched, but Google is always watching to see if the updates have changed the content and value of the site—much like a team that loses all it’s seniors to graduation.

Sites can work with partners or post on blogs to get as many incoming links as possible, but at the end of the day it really boils down to having quality content on the site that people find useful. I’d throw the “If you build it they will come” quote in here, but that’d be mixing my sports analogies.

Players and coaches across the country are talking about just winning their games and letting the rankings take care of themselves—just like building a solid website with info people want.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I did wear a different T-shirt for last Thursday’s Ducks game. That’ll teach me.

Creating and publishing a website often seems so easy. Get some pretty pictures, add a little fluff, throw it all into Microsoft FrontPage and hit publish.

In actuality, creating a corporate website correctly takes lots of planning. One step of website creation that often gets overlooked is the “discovery phase.”

During this stage, the project team leads (including the client and other project stakeholders) document the context for the project and develop a clear vision for the end result, which includes the establishment of business-level priorities and success metrics to guide the design, development and deployment efforts.

That last paragraph was a bunch of fancy buzz words that basically say “Before we build it, lets figure out what it should do.” While this seems like an obvious thing, it’s often skipped because people think it’s too obvious. However, without a clear road map websites can often end up lost in the forest. Every website developer has some story about a project that started out as an easy brochure website, and one year later was still in development as it attempted to be all things to all people.

Creating the road map is only the first step in the creation of a website. In future posts I’ll talk about other parts of the process, including making sure you stay on course.