We regularly research Content Management Systems, and in a recent spate of Googling I came across an article by Jeffrey Veen called “Making A Better Open Source CMS” from 2004. Sadly, most of its points are still completely relevant. Three years later and it is still hard to find a system that feels it is put together with the average user in mind (i.e. not techies). While Wordpress is not in any way perfect (what is?) or powerful enough (what is, unless custom built?) for all situations, it is relatively easy to comprehend for the user, which is why we so often recommend it.

Not the most exciting of titles, but the The Web Standards Project discusses the UK’s drive for accessibility in government websites. It is bizarre and also shocking that so many content management systems in use by government agencies, ministries and quangos seem unable to generate good clean accessible and semantic code. 

Google’s Street View, a new Google Maps feature that uses vehicle cameras to take 360 degree street-level views of major urban areas (so far only in the US), has set the Web buzzing with talk about its privacy implications. The photos are so detailed that one lady, whose cat Monty is clearly visible sitting in her living room window, contacted Google and asked for the image to be removed. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged,” said the perplexed Ms. Kalin-Casey from Oakland, CA.

Websites are making the most of the images captured too. The Wired blog has started a contest on the most interesting photos found using the new Google Tool that now includes sunbathing coeds, alleged drug deals, and the Google van itself. And the site LaudonTech.com showed an image of a man entering a pornographic bookstore in Oakland, but his face was not visible.

It does raise an interesting question: should Google be allowed to publish detailed intimate snap shots on the internet of people’s private lives? The images are taken in a public place so legally Google is doing nothing wrong - but is it right ethically? Well, we can’t answer that. But what we can do is marvel at Google’s technology.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! discusses how web communities scale. Yahoo! should know after all, as they’ve spent a fortune creating and buying a plenty of social sites. Found via Subtraction.

Browser-based WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors used in Content Management Systems (including ‘TinyMCE’ in Wordpress) rarely work as well as everyone would hope giving a false sensation of Word-style control. Take a look at this article discussing the issue and that proposes WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean).

Our latest project, the Blood Diamond Action website, has just gone live. The website publicises the issues surrounding the film Blood Diamond that stars Leonardo diCaprio amongst others. Working again with Provokateur, the site is backed by Amnesty International USA and Global Witness.

The build of the site was fine. However, our problem was determining the potential traffic to the site. The film will be launched in the US in December and the UK early next year. This will raise the profile of the issue greatly and with it the profile of the site. The potential number of visitors to the site globally could be quite large.

It’s always great to have lots of visitors to a website. But it is, of course, not as simple as that. The website is designed for broadband and includes a 9MB video download. The main Flash-based element is approximately 190k. While these are not enormous files, a large number of global visitors could cause it problems. Even if the majority of visitors don’t download the video, the required bandwidth could become very costly and a surge in visitor numbers could even bring it down.

Our solution to this was to move all the key files to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), part of Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services use infrastructure that Amazon has already set up for their own products, and are now offering to other companies. Therefore, not only are we tapping into a very reliable system that one of the largest web companies in the world is using, it is also easy to use, very cheap and you only pay for what is used. So if a large number of people visit the site or the expected visitors don’t arrive, it won’t be a problem.

Update: The website is featured in an article in today’s LA Times (16th November 2006).

October saw the Internet reach the mammoth milestone of 100 million Web sites, reported Internet services company Netcraft. “There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them,” said Netcraft’s Rich Miller.  “Within that, there are some that are busy and updated more often, and that represents the active sites which are about 47 or 48 million”.

A bit late, but to balance out the IE7 post from a few days ago - if you can (your office allows it), it would probably still be best to go with the latest version of Firefox.

Whilst researching evening activities for an upcoming birthday we came across this fabulous site for a private room karaoke bar. Although the over-use of Flash on the web is often and quite correctly criticised, the use of it on this site - coupled with interesting sound effects and bright, vibrant colours - makes for an entertaining and visually satisfying experience. Check it out at www.luckyvoice.co.uk.

If you use Internet Explorer on the PC, please download version 7 as soon as possible. Not only should the general web browsing experience be better and safer for you, it will also make web developer’s lives much easier.

Another day, another big anniversary: 10 years of the Flash plugin. When we began working with the internet even images were a controversial addition to the web browser. It was before the dot.com boom, crash, Ajax and the Web 2.0 hype. Before stylesheets, large displays and millions of colours. Clients wanted to express their brand. Designers wanted to show-off. When Flash appeared print designers were revolutionised - they could suddenly be web designers and they didn’t have to use Times New Roman. An experience visually comparable to TV was suddenly possible - and clients and designers ‘got’ TV - and everyone wanted their logos to animate like CNN idents.

The web, though, is not a simple broadcast medium, but to many people trying to understand what to do with it, that’s what it reminded them of. This led to the splash screen, unnecessary loading times, confusing interfaces on mainstream sites, etc. - all now stereotypes of Flash content mistakes.

The tool now, originally just very simple animation called Futuresplash, is now a very different beast. It is a sophisticated visual tool. It can carry video. It can create rich online and offline applications. Flex, Flash’s most recent creation tool from Adobe, is a powerful standards compliant programming tool that is a million miles from Futuresplash’s simple timeline-based animation.

Ironically, the presentation that accompanies Adobe’s history of Flash suffers from many of the stereotypical problems of Flash: tricky navigation, slow loading (see screenshot, above), unnecessary animation that gets in the way of information. I found it so frustrating I had to reload the whole thing, just to be able to navigate on to the next section. The content seems genuinely interesting - but I wish they had a simpler way of accessing it.

This is the opposite of today’s best use of Flash. Examples such as YouTube will never win a graphic design award, but it gets the job done. It blends into the web, is easy-to-use and is enormously popular (although I believe the 60% of all web traffic rumours are probably overdoing it). People, of course, love YouTube, not because it is Flash, but because it delivers them interesting/fun content. In fact, I would guess that the majority of its’ users do not even know it is Flash.

Flash has also found it’s way onto mobile phones and other devices - with apparent great success, although it hasn’t appeared natively on any phones owned by anyone I know. The advantage for Flash on a phone is not only it’s portability and consistency, but it has an opportunity to ‘claim’ the entire user-interface. This gives it a better chance than on the PC as an all encompassing application platform. On the PC it will always jostle with all the other generally consistent widgets of the host operating system user interface (Windows/Linux/OSX).

We recommend Flash regularly, but there are almost no examples wherein we would recommend using only Flash for any website. NHS Alchemy is a case in point. We wanted an exciting opening page, and in the ‘NHS People’ area we utilise it for video and photo stories (with text alternatives).

People who build the web should never get hung up on the technology, people don’t care. People should never be asked to think about whether they have Flash installed. It should never take an age to download. It should blend into their experience and not break any web conventions (like making it impossible to bookmark content). This is equally true for Ajax, Java, Shockwave, Flash or even simple HTML content. The right technology needs to be used for the right situation - and this normally means: keep it simple.

Tools from Google for people who want to improve or understand their search rankings.

Evan Williams (Blogger, Odeo) discusses the blunt tool of pageviews as a way of measuring the amount of people viewing a website. It goes to show that you should always be suspicious of those MySpace/YouTube/MSN/[insert here] web statistics that are bandied around.

It’s been a long time coming, but we have finally a way of including proper XHTML header tags in Wordpress (the blog tool du jour that we recommend for some clients). It seems such a simple addition, but it has to be hacked into the admin interface. Take a look at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/72076 for more.