I’ve got a few slick scripts that I thought I would share with the world.

These are simple scripts for toggling buttons, and it works without components.
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Many people now rely on the web as a source for their lifestyles; research, maps, gossip, movie rentals, shopping. Now that this tool is so heavily used I thought it would be good to think about where it started, and where it is today from a design perspective. In the early days websites were pretty horrible to look at, lots of blinking, flashing things, dancing hamsters, BIG FONTS, red text on black backgrounds etc… (I could go on, but I know some of you are already getting nauseous. Thankfully most of the world wide web has moved past designs like these:
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Getting back to design and development topics I thought it would be valuable to offer my insight on this product. Being a courseware developer over the last 11 years or so, I’ve worked with a lot of tools. For most courses developing in either HTML, or Flash or a combination of both is my preferred method. It offers a vast amount of control and creativity. These methods do require a higher level of skill in web development, animation, and scripting but the results are well worth the cost. On the other hand Adobe Captivate offers some flexibility and a relatively easy learning curve for developers, and instructional designers and can result in a very professional result. Here’s my take the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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Here it is, my site design is fractured and disjointed. I admit it. I added the blog capability, and started a gallery portion, and then never integrated everything together. Shame on me. So now that I have a lull in the storm of projects that were on my plate I am going to start working on tying everything together.

I’m still debating the gallery though…Maybe someone has a suggestion. I could use the gallery I started to set up. Or Flickr, which I already use. Or build something in Flash. Or… See it’s a problem too many choices.

Lastly I’m excited because I get to ride in Santa Cruz tomorrow! I’m planning on hitting the hills going towards the summit of Highway 9. It’s a mixed blessing, as I haven’t done much climbing in the last few years so this may be a very painful day in, and out, of the saddle.

I was browsing through some sports coverage and ran across this link. It’s an amazing (read: bad) site that ignores all the standard rules of engagement in web design and development. Continue Reading »

It’s amazing to me that sites that rely on Flash for their main navigation have not taken the steps to eliminate the “Click to activate and use this control” messages from their sites. If you haven’t seen this message before you must be avoiding flash sites. To recap: Eolas has a patent dispute with Microsoft, forcing them to make activeX controls require users to click the “control” before they can interact with it. Annoying to say the least. If you want to read more go here. Needless to say this article was inspired because of the staggering number of sites I’ve run across in the last month that have not incorporated the JavaScript solutions that are available. Here are the favorites:

• Adobe’s Solution
• SWFobject Solution
• UFO Solution

If you own, or manage a site that uses Flash as a navigation element, fix this, please. Better yet…use CSS navigation instead. As much as I like Flash, does it have to be used for everything?