I like being left handed, it means I might have a gene that makes me left handed, but they aren’t sure about that yet. I also notice quite a bit when other people around me are left handed. It makes me feel special. I’m an oddity (I’m sure most people would agree with that). Being left handed also makes me adept at using my right hand better then right handed folks can use their left hand. Some call this ambidextrous, but truly, I am not. I’m not equally dexterous on both sides of my body which is why I’m more mixed handed. I can’t throw things with my left arm and I play baseball (as well as most sports) with my right arm. I am also right footed and right eyed. There are few things that I can only do well with my left arm/hand.

What I don’t like is when people don’t consider the left handed folks when designing things.

Spurring on this rant was a recent discussion on a well known and widely read interaction design mailing list. The discussion was around mouse clicks on a web app/site. More to the point they were talking about the use of contextual menus being accessed via a “right click”. I’m sure you might be thinking this is a little nit-picky and perhaps it is. However the problem persists, people do not think out side their own means. They tend to think of what they can do and not what others do or can’t do. For crying out loud these guys design interfaces and interactions. What happens if they design something strictly for their means not considering how others may use it and someone dies?

Taking this a little further, there has been research on the effects of left handed people using right handed mice. It can cause some issues with posture. Which makes you wonder if ~10% of the worlds population is cared about by the other 90%. It seems that the 80/20 rule shouldn’t apply for handedness. But alas it does and designers, business people and right handed folks don’t see the value in accommodating the southpaws of this world.

We might be an edge case in some people’s minds but wouldn’t people with disabilities considered edge cases? It basically the same thing, people with psychical disabilities could have a hard time doing things that people without disabilities do with ease. People who are left hand dominate could have difficulties with things that are designed for the right handed world.

Equality for all? No. Not until the right handed world stops being selfish.

Yup. I’m going.

And for $20 who wouldn’t? That’s a steal. For 12 speakers in one day. Oh hell yes. And I think I get a t-shirt out of it.

A year or so ago I was reading something about making good impressions with resumes. While it was aimed at fresh college graduates it did have some good pointers for anyone who wants to be a professional. The one point that that still sticks in my mind was their comments about email addresses. They suggested getting a email address based on your name rather then partyperson247@example.com.

Hi. I’m the marketing Director for a Fortune 500 company. IM me at “shavedkitty2008” – Ryan Brunsvold

While that is an extreme example of this I still know quite a few professionals that use screen names and email addresses that aren’t of the professional nature you want to be known for. Now don’t get me wrong I’ve had my share of strange screen names and email addresses in the past, but I realized that if I want to be taken seriously then I need to act accordingly. Nearly all my screen names/email/accounts are some variation on Andrew Jaswa. This not only makes it easy for me to remember but it also helps others know who I am. By making my account names some variation on my real name I’ve opened the door for more communication, both good and bad. People now know that idiot posting is me and not some teen age boy with nothing better to do.

Numbers in your user name might be an easy way to get that “loverboy” account name, but it doesn’t look professional. I blame AOL for this. If you have a common name, such as “John Smith”, I would try everything possible to get something that is close to it. User you middle name if you have to.

If you use some fleeting interest you had at the time in your screen name, you have to realize that you might not like that thing later and change your screen name. Who likes changing established screen names? Not I.

If you are a public figure or have professional aspirations then you need to have a good public face and the start of that is to have a good name you are known by online. Make your online identity universal and always relevant to you. But please, please don’t use “shavedkitty2008” (Ryan already has dibs on it).

A little background to set up the scene: I work at a university, we have a rather large system that is built on MOSS. Which in of itself isn’t a major problem but still proves to be an interesting challenge.

One of those challenges is to create a development environment that is available anonymously (not logged in) to the developers only on the local network. Pretty common in the Apache world and should be fairly easy to setup on the MOSS system (or so I thought). Well it turns out that it’s not overly easy, and currently can’t be done so that it is limited to the local network. Something with how they have the firewalls setup or something.

In order for the developers to work we needed anonymous access turned on so that we could test our code as how the rest of the world would see it. Now this really isn’t an issue because only people who are working on the server know the URL. Google doesn’t know about it, Joe Plumber doesn’t know about it and you anonymous person doesn’t know about it. However the server admin thought that Google would index it right away, and was confused about it because another development environment was already being indexed by Google (another story for another time). After I reassured him that: 1. Google wouldn’t index unless it knew about it, 2. We can make sure that Google won’t index it, and 3. I couldn’t work unless anonymous access was turned on. After going back and forth a little, he decided that he wouldn’t turn it on unless he got approval from him supervisor (out for the day) or from my supervisor (also out for the day).

What it comes down to it a lack of knowledge on his part and a lack of respect for my position. I’m pretty much an expert in SEO and things related to search engines. I can tell you I knew next to nothing about Windows servers and IIS, which is why I trust the people who hold those positions to do their jobs and hope that they also realize what I do and trust me to do my job to the best of my ability.

I’m going to take a look at this from the stance of building and designing websites for people (rather then robots), since that is what Google has always said.

So before I ramble on…

1. Create unique, accurate page titles

   No problem here. It only makes sense to have unique, accurate page titles. Would you want a page title to say “Fish Market” when the page was really about coffee? I didn’t think so. As for the uniqueness of a title make sure you don’t have two pages with the same title. With the page title you are telling your users where they are with a quick glance.

2. Make use of the “description” meta tag

   Well fancy that. Google telling us to use one of the meta tags. I know some people that are going to be a little upset about this one. Google makes it pretty clear how this helps users. They (sometimes) take the description meta tag and use it in the search results. Helpful? Maybe… Though it is another place to give a little bit more information about the page/site.

3. Improve the structure of your URLs

   Google says to make your URLs make sense. That is to make your URLs have human readable words in them so that people can understand where they are. Not much to say here…

4. Make your site easier to navigate

   Hrmm they suggest adding sitemaps and Sitemaps to your site to make it easy. That is one way of doing it, though having a good navigation on all your pages would seem like a better choice for your users. They do start to talk about that a little bit seem to rely on Sitemaps a little too much I think.

5. Offer quality content and services

   Well Duh… “Users know good content when they see it…” I beg to differ. There are some places that users would not know good content if it walked up and slapped them in the face. But they did hit this one right on the head. Good content/services will bring users back.

6. Write better anchor text

   Yup. No more “click here“. But alas people still do it.

7. Use heading tags appropriately

   I think this section should really be about writing good markup. It would go far if Google started saying that good clean HTML meant something to them. Using markup how it was meant to be used should always be done.

8. Optimize your use of images

   Ahh Google I love you. You used “alt” attribute and not “alt” tag. Good for you. Remember kids use your attributes wisely. Not only will they help people who can’t see images figure out what is they but they will also save lives!

9. Make effective use of robots.txt

   Robots.txt is for robots and not users. There’s no other way to put it. Though in a round about way users use Google to to find your site and if you have a directory hidden then the users won’t see it in the search results. Err umm… yea I say we start a standard called humans.txt for use by humans… yea… that’s it.

10. Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links

    Again rel=”nofollow” is for robots. Unless you want to look at the source code of a site most people won’t even know its there. Also in this section they mention using CAPTCHAs for spam… NO! Damnit Google I thought you were better then that. W3C has been saying since 2005 (or longer) that CAPTCHAs are in-accessible. Bad Google bad bad bad…

11. Promote your website in the right ways

    Not much to say here other then: Google can you give us examples of the wrong ways to promote our sites? I mean are there any?

12. Make use of free webmaster tools, Take advantage of web analytics services, Helpful resources for webmasters

    “Oh hey there, I’m Google, I hope you enjoyed this guide of mine. I’m going to sell my products to you under the guise of an SEO guide. I make a lot of products that you should use. So I’m going to put ALL my links at the end of this SEO Guide so that you’ll click on them. YAY!” said Google over enthusiastically.

Well kids that’s pretty much it. I hoped you enjoyed my “review” of Google’s SEO Guide.

Dear Media Temple,

You’re trendy. You’re sleak and sometimes even sexy. And on the rare occasion your support is actually helpful. However for the past 2 weeks your support has sucked ass. Now I don’t mean just a little here and there. I mean big time. I even posted on Get Satisfaction because I wasn’t getting satisfaction with the service I was PAYING for, service that you claim is “Unrivaled”. You want “Unrivaled” support? Go check out USAA or Zappos.com. USAA has gotten some great awards under it’s belt. While Zappos has a rabid fan base of loyal customers. And when I say rabid I really mean it.

Sadly keeping your customers informed or even replying to support requests doesn’t seem to be on the top of your list. You claim that “In many ways you could say our main product is customer support. It’s what we work on the hardest. 90% of our staff is in some way dedicated to this process.” (source) I find this rather hard to believe as I have had a support ticket open since the Oct 15. It is now the 19th. And mind you this isn’t the first incident. I had another ticket open on Oct. 8th and wasn’t closed until the 13th. Quick turn around time there guys.

I’ve hosted with you for over a year now. I always thought you guys were pretty cool. Hosting the An Event Apart after parties. Being pretty cool to hang out with. But really taking 5 days to button up a ticket? That’s just shit. Before I even got a decent reply I had to post on Get Satisfaction. Way to take a pro-active approach to fixing client issues before I had no where else but to the public. I know how PR works. It seems you guys do also, because you were quick to give me 3 months credit on my account. But you pushed me a bit too far and gave me no recourse.

After that was settled, TWO DAYS later I once again had an issue. I hoped that I would get a quick reply seeing as how I was told my experience “is not the norm”. But alas… It appears that shitty service is the norm at Media Temple.

It really makes me wonder what other problems Media Temple has, since their “main product is customer support”.

I’m done with you. I’ve already moved my websites over to a server at Dreamhost.com. It was a pain in my ass to do that. I feel like billing you guys the 20 hours it took to complete. But I’d be happy just to get my money back.

I will never suggest, to anyone who asks about web hosting, that you guys are the way to go. I would though suggest if you want to feel like crap and get crappy customer support, that you guys are the best!

I feel dirty dealing with you,

Andrew Jaswa

The reason

A while ago I got the idea to do some research on font and their usage across the internet. I was trying to figure out what font or typefaces people use and why. To me this is rather interesting because if you have any background in design or typography you’ll know that type conveys meaning and emotion. Would this not be true about the web? Could the typeface of a site convey something about the author or the message they are trying to get across? Maybe something they were feeling when they had it designed? Or maybe there is a corporate style guide that the designer had to follow when building the site? Or maybe that style guide was made with the idea of conveying emotion?

Whew… that’s a lot of questions I have. I’m not got to even try to answer them because, frankly, I can’t. I don’t know what was going through the designers heads. What I can do is survey websites and present the results.

The start

My initial survey was completed in early 2008 with about 100 sites. The sites I first selected were gleaned from the Alexa top 100 sites for the month of January 2008. Since I am from the US, speak English and am interested in western typefaces, I was only interested in English sites. It would be rather hard for me try to figure out different character sets other then Western/Latin. The rest of the sites I pulled were from sites I visit often.

This gave me a wide range of websites from categories of news and social network to retail and design. I figure that 100 sites or so of the whole internet would a fair sample to kick things off. Also I need some very highly and low trafficked sites to get a better idea of how people use type on the web.

The process

I began by going into the CSS and pulling out the *, html and body selectors and seeing what those were set to. In a lot of cases one of those three selectors set the font for the entire site. Great! Job done! Well… sort of. Some sites didn’t have one of those selectors setting the font. So I had to dig some more. Some sites had it set on the p selector, some just had IDs and classes. I ended up going through lots of CSS, some of it nicely organized and some of it downright disgusting.

As anyone who has been working with CSS and browsers for a bit, you would know that for the best results you want to set more then one font in your CSS declarations. So seeing something like this was far from uncommon:
font-family:Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;
I collected all the font information I could because who knows it could be useful at some point. Most of the font stats in this post and in the survey are based on the first font.

The odd bits

While going through the sites I noticed was that some sites would use one type for headings and another type for body text and yet another for their footer. In the case of Coudal Partners out of Chicago, they use Gill Sans for their H1, Times for the rest of their headings and Verdana for most of everything else. Now this puts me in a tight spot. All three faces are in the site, but I can’t then lump a site into a category or group. It got me thinking about what people “would/should/could” be reading the most.

I settled on going with what a majority of the text was set to. In the case of Coudal I settled on Verdana. Why? Because my thought was thus: If I (the user) is going to read, I’m going to read the majority of the text, so I’m going to see that face the most. In turn Verdana was used for a majority of the text in this case. I followed this same thinking for all the other sites I collected data on.

So why did Coudal use three typefaces on their site? I’m not sure but I bet it has something to do with a question I asked before: Could the typeface of a site convey something about the author or the message the are trying to get across?

The interesting bits

Some of the more interesting bits I found were the unbalanced serif to sans-serif ratio. In a sample of 112 sites 8.93% or 10 sites used serif fonts. Of the sites that used sans-serif fonts Arial came out on top with 46 sites. 35 sites had 1 primary font and 2 secondary fonts. 27 had 4 total fonts set. This one amazed me: 1 site (reference.com) had 8 total fonts set. "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Grande", Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
This blew me away. Why would anyone want to set 8 fonts?

Check out the survey

Issues

Purpose

Well formed markup (semantic markup that is) is based on the content. Content is usually based on the purpose of a site. So how would you make a baseline all different kinds of content? You might just end up with a baseline for every different type of website out there. There would be millions of baselines then. And that wouldn’t be very productive.

doctype

Different types of sites may require different doctypes. I thought about making some php functions that would switch the doctype based upon your preference. That seemed a bit more like a framework and out of the scope of this project.

The Baseline

I’ve noticed over the years that I have been creating websites in similar fashion. Websites I’ve created lately have followed a set of ideas that I’ve concocted. The basics of theses ideas start with the structure of the web page. You can usually distill web page structure down to 4 major areas: the header, navigation, the main content area and the footer. Now this doesn’t work in all cases but it should work for most. Again this is an issue with the purpose of the site or page. However most sites will have these 4 elements. In the end I settled on the basic structure of 4 major elements and the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype.

Markup Baseline

Eric Meyer on generated content (An Event Apart New Orleans 2008) from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

Why don’t I? Mainly because they present a unique set of instructions to one or many browsers but usually not to all of them at the same time. So what big deal? Right? I mean we’ve done that for years why, should we stop coding and presenting things for a particular browser?

Browser Hacks

You can do some pretty neat things with sending one set of instructions to one browser and another set to a different one. Take a look at the CSS Zen Garden design Gemination. It is presented as one design to IE and another design to the other major browsers. This uses CSS to set styles for one browser then over writes them for another browser. Now while this isn’t conditional comments, it still follows the same idea: one set of instructions is being sent to one browser and a different set for another.

Conditional Comments

Conditional comments are Microsoft’s way to target different versions of Internet Explorer. Jens Meiert presents rather strong arguments as to why conditional comments are bad. I won’t get into that side of things he does, but there is another side. This other side is what I call conditional CSS.

Conditional CSS

Do you ever run into a website that requires you to use a specific browser? I’m talking recently, not 10 years ago. Well I have… It wasn’t pretty. The web has grown up lately (in case you haven’t noticed) and browsers are getting better at rendering things. There is no longer a need for Internet Explorer or Firefox only websites.

Conditional Comments are mainly used for CSS. Browser hacks are based on the differences in the support of CSS by a specific rendering engine. A combination of conditional comments and browsers hacks is what I like to call conditional CSS (cCSS). cCSS is a way for you to deliver different instructions to different browsers. You shouldn’t ever need to do this. Browsers are now at a point where they’ve started to render things very closely the same. If you continue to use cCSS at some point in time it will begin to break sites that you’ve built in specific browsers.

Pixel perfection

One reason that people use cCSS is to make websites looks exactly the same in all the major browsers. Well they don’t need to be. I realize that this might be in contradiction from what I was just saying but hear me out. By not using cCSS you’ve ensured that your site will be more future compatible than ones with hacks. You’ve also removed the need for extra CSS that adds file weight. Think about this: do you want to download an extra CSS file for each browser only if you are using just one?

cCSS comes down to this: it’s an un-elegant way to produce websites. You should be able to build out sites with very little hacks and conditions. Be un-conditional. Take out your cCSS and start building better more standard websites.