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:
Continue Reading »

I’ve add an RSS feed link in my main navigation, and tweaked my Google Analytics a bit.

I’ve recently been victim to a number of software roll outs that were being managed by other people. Each of these experiences brought a single question to mind…What are they thinking? Either they stopped teaching best practices at the university, or I have had the distinct pleasure of witnessing projects that followed some unique system of development designed to screw everything up. In either case these recent experiences have compelled me to elaborate on what I feel are the cardinal rules for software/web development practices. Continue Reading »

Companies need to check to see if there’s already a solution before solving problems. The new wheel is Tabblo, a slick web based technology for internet users to print blogs, images on flickr, and other web sites. Whoo-hoo now I can print web pages… Hmmm I don’t remember not being able to print web pages before. Well here’s the story. Continue Reading »

This article started off as a simple premise, I would use the experience I had gained while at InsWeb to write an article describing the ins and outs of trying to push a site to the top of Google’s organic search engine rankings. This of course was to be an example based on pushing the InsWeb site to the top of the charts, but now that I no longer work there this presents a bit of a challenge. So I switched angles and thought, why not work towards pushing my own site to the top of the rankings, or at least as far as I could… So here goes. Continue Reading »