Is there some sort of horrible “I’m following the most people” stalker contest I don’t know about?

This makes me wonder, at what number of follows does Twitter move from a relatively containable “keeping track of friends/colleagues/big shots” experience to a “glancing into people’s windows at night while driving at 60mph” event? I think I understand the voyeuristic draw involved, but getting a different sentence from thirty different people in less than a minute is something like trying to read falling scraps of paper in the aftermath of a library explosion. Any meaning derived from stitching them together is self delusion at best.

Sadly, I don’t gain a few hundred pounds of muscle and turn green. I just make growly noises and squint my eyes.

I’m reliably informed that it’s not that intimidating.

What is the source of this pathetic geek rage? Web designs that are one page proofs of a pretty homepage, accompanied by a summary by clients to the effect of “Make the rest of the site look like the homepage.”

Why does this drive me insane? Because this rarely (in fact, never) works, and I find myself going back and altering (and re-altering) the carefully crafted markup and CSS that was made for the aforementioned homepage so that the core functionality of their website actually fits inside the design. Usually the “design”, as a result, turns out to resemble the homepage less and less with each pass, until what is left is typically some sort of chimeric mismatched beast.

I’m sure there’s plenty of smart methodologies to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but it occurs to me just often enough that I feel the need to rant about it here.

Look, as Jeffrey Zeldman said in one of those insightful tweets that I’m always hoping to witness (instead of the less insightful tweets about the contents of a man’s lunch): “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”

I think that’s one of the most useful/relevant things I’ve seen written about web design in months. Based on the responses at his blog, I don’t think I’m alone.

I’m going to add an addendum to this. Barring some exceptions in the “wrapping paper” category, a pretty homepage is not a website. Nor should the homepage be the focus of the design. Creating a design by starting with the homepage, handing it to the developers to cut, and then later heavily modifying said design to actually accomodate the core features of the site wastes time, money, and patience.

Let’s think about it for a moment. Are your customers coming to your website to check out a nifty banner? Are they there to look at a really wicked paragraph of “about me” text? Are they there to see an embedded flash movie of the ocean?

In case you’re not following along, the answer is no. (Except maybe for the ocean movie, depending on the purpose of your site.) They are there to shop at your store, read your blog, play your game, read the news, share their life story, or fulfill whatever function it is that your website serves in their life.

Now, granted, some pages (like blogs about adorable critters) combine the homepage and the core function of the site. In the case of the linked blog, it’s all about displaying cute animals, and they’re doing that from page one. But even in that case, the homepage is following the function of the site, rather than the design following an arbitrarily pretty (and potentially pointless) homepage.

Look, take a page from Daniel Burka, who at the WDN 2008 conference talked about taking the inspiration for the design of a site from the core function the site serves. He’s done it with a little site you may have heard about (Digg, do I even need to link this page?), and I dare say it’s worked well for them.

Seriously, next time you have a pretty proof of your website’s homepage all decked out with bells and flowers, do me a favor and use it to wrap your daughter’s next birthday present. Then, after you’re done affixing the bow, go back to the drawing board, figure out where the tasty flavor of your site lives, and design that first. I think you’ll find that the site (and your budget) will do better as a result.

When it comes to web developers, it seems to be pretty much hate. Granted, I’m on that page, as I’ve spent more than a few hours of a client’s budget trying to get IE7 (let alone IE6) render a site properly. Or even close to properly. I’d say almost half of my posts so far at my Mindfly blog are a testament to this fact.

But there is a point where people get rabid. I explore that theme in this week’s comic.

I understand that crucifying Dean Hachamovitch (the dev team’s general manager and author of this heavily hated/loved IEBlog entry - and no, I can’t pronounce it) might be going a bit too far. For that matter, displaying Jeffrey Zeldman in a Pontius Pilate role might be taking metaphors to excess. But I can’t help but feel that when it comes to browsers, we’re so full of rhetoric that any actual message, be it pro or con, usually gets lost in the rabid barking. Ultimately, they’re not evil zealots, nor saints. They’re just guys making code. It just happens to be code for the most widely used browser on the web… which probably means they need more coffee breaks than most of us to stay calm.

In case it needs to be said, I’m not encouraging anyone being hung up on a cross. That’d be bad form.

For the record, “Hachamovitch” looks like a beast to pronounce. Good thing I only have to type it in a comic, not say it.

I thought I’d update everyone since you’re all clearly waiting with baited breath.

At the moment, the only notable (sorry Konqueror) browser to support both is Webkit (Safari). Firefox supports border-radius, but neither IE or Opera support either. Granted, Opera’s percentage of the browser population doesn’t make its feature set a deal breaker, but it’s simply impossible to put these solutions into play when IE’s massive user-base can’t see them.

*sigh*

I’d be less melancholy about it if Internet Explorer 8 was going to bring at least one of these with it. But no, that would be too nice.

It annoys me that out of the various improvements CSS3 is supposed to bring to the table that these two are so far away from implementation. The amount of presentation-only markup (the great enemy that CSS is meant to fight) that would be eliminated is immense.

That’s alright. I don’t mind putting three to five elements on a page where I should only need one.

I’m going to go get some warm milk and cry myself to sleep.

1. Even people following links from a place like meyerweb.com (thanks for visiting!) may still be using the dread bile beast of Redmond (Internet Explorer 6 for those not following along).

2. They probably want to be able to see/use the site like everyone else.

I needed to bite the bullet and get that particular “browser” (if you can call it that) to render the site functionally, since this page is crawling with PNGs. Unfortunately, after a couple of hours of tinkering around with Dean Edwards’ IE7, things hadn’t improved much. I got the transparency I needed, but a lot of unusual bugs crept into the header (clipped elements, missing buttons, unusable navigation, etc).

So since I’m expected to work on client sites at work and I was out of time, I made a quick fix (using conditional comments and a ie6-specific stylesheet as I describe here) and for the moment the IE6 version of the site has GIFs. Ugly-edged GIFs. I could clean them up, but I think I’m going to take a page out of Andy Clarke’s book and just do a completely different look for visitors with IE6, like he does with Stuff and Nonsense.

I suppose a design that was nothing more than a giant mother nagging you to upgrade your browser wouldn’t quite be appropriate.

It is tremendously faster. I can’t get over how quickly it loads by comparison to version 2. Also, the interface is looking pretty slick. There’s bound to be a number of feature upgrades and functionality that I haven’t even noticed yet, but everything just feels like it’s working more smoothly.

Good work, Mozilla.

Initially my inaugural venture into the world of a web design webcomic was going to provide a gentle mockery of Opera’s failure thus far to produce a developer add-on in the vein of Firebug. Then, of course, they dropped the Dragonfly bomb. Robbed of my thunder, I’ve moved to something both more ridiculous and risque.

Which is to say, Andy Clarke’s underpants.

Well, it’s not precisely about underpants. I’ve recently fallen to the web developer trap that is Twitter, and like some voyeur into the world of the notable I’ve started following the twits (tweets?) of luminaries such as Clarke, Zeldman, and David Shea, among others. Buying into the premise of Twitter as a micro-blogging tool, I’d hoped to see the insights their bright minds would produce about this whole web design thingy.

I’ve definitely seen some insights, but at 140 characters or less, it seems Twitter is more adept at detailing what someone’s had for lunch, absurd overheard remarks, or links to Flickr photos. (Incidentally,  the whole blending of Twitter and Flickr and other such apps ties nicely into Zeldman’s topic of the vanishing personal site that I’ve been meaning to weigh into. File that under ‘Topic for Later’.)

So I’ve felt less like an enthusiastic pupil and more like a peeping Tom. Has this stopped me?

… No. No it hasn’t.

What I didn’t expect to see, and am fascinated by, is the sort of weaving tales that a group of Twitter feeds create when a bunch of users are discussing the same topic or are at the same convention. In particular, An Event Apart New Orleans 2008 was an event that I didn’t have the pleasure to go to, but did have the pleasure to experience indirectly through the various tweets of the designers present. It was even more enhanced by the various Flickr photostreams linked to by the participants, showing smiling pictures of famous designers, hazy pictures of jazz bars, or neon-lit photos of rainy Bourbon Street.

For a guy who was struggling with misbehaving forms on a chilly spring workday, it was a delightful diversion to refresh my follows every now and then via Twitteroo and see what was going on.

What was forming were stories. One that caught me the most was what I’ve dubbed the “Ballad of Andy’s Bag”, a gripping tale that starts here with his touchdown in New Orleans, and then shows the breakdown of a man’s mind as he’s robbed of his luggage for almost two days before being finally reunited here.

I decided this little tale could use some immortalization, and perhaps a disturbing implication of stalking, thus I’ve formed the monster that is this comic. I’m not sure if it was entirely wise for me to launch things off with a sketch of web design’s British folk hero in his knickers, but sometimes these things just write themselves.

Although it’s my intent to continue to provide comic forays into the web design world (probably on a weekly basis), it’s not my plan to show mostly nude designers regularly (I don’t think the world is ready for Jeffrey Zeldman displayed as such).

Please feel free to enjoy

What made me drop FF3 last time was the lack of add-on support thus far. But I’m running betas of both FireFTP and Firebug, which are practically impossible for me to function without these days.

I did just notice that the spell checker doesn’t seem to be doing its job. At least not in the blog editor. Hmmm. Oh, wait, now it kicked in. Very slowly.

I’ll see if I can tolerate this for a couple days, or if I’ll be regressing back to Firefox 2 until 3 goes out of beta.