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September 09, 2006 | Greg Ness: Is This The New Symbol For A Bright Idea?

If this article is any indication, maybe we will need to change the symbol of a bright idea from a traditional bulb to one like this. The compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL) has undergone a metamorphosis over several years and it looks like it is finally ready for prime time. If Charles Fishman can write a glowing, 4000-word story on a light bulb, you know there must be something to it. This bulb can save America a lot of energy so please go buy some! By the way, I have no financial connection to this product whatsoever.

July 26, 2006 | Greg Ness: Making Old Money Look Like New Money

A bunch of people have been having fun making old corporate America look like hip new Web 2.0 startups (via John Battelle’s Searchblog).

June 30, 2006 | Greg Ness: Starting Over

When is it time to quit adding on to your website, and instead think about starting over. A Caryl Felicetta post at revenews takes on that question. Here are her three answers:

1. The obvious: branding changes.
2. You’ve outgrown it.
3. It’s OLD!

So often the temptation is to save some money by simply leaving things the way they are. However, you can’t make an old, out-dated shirt look good by buying some new slacks. And, you can’t turn a small sedan into a 3/4-ton pickup.

June 29, 2006 | Greg Ness: How To Improve Your Website In One Easy Lesson

If you are looking for a way to increase the effectiveness of your website, I have one piece of advice: rich media. Rich media is an industry term for video, audio and animated Web content—all things that add motion, sound and excitement to the message (more here). Rich media was a deterrent to Web visits when most sites were accessed through dial-up accounts, but now that fast broadband access is soaring, there is no reason to be boring anymore.

May 30, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Making the Easy Things Hard

Steve Ballmer has announced again that Windows next generation operating system Vista might be delayed past the January 2007 date set the last time he announced it was behind schedule. At the rate Vista keeps getting delayed, we’ll all be driving hover cars, running Mac OS XX before the install of the Vista update. Part of the delay, I’m sure, is that Microsoft hopes to make Vista as easy to use as the Mac OS, which as you know people that love it just can’t stop talking about how easy it is to use.

April 18, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Every Page is Your Homepage

Seth Godin chimes in with his take on how the homepage is no longer the spot you should focus so much attention. Rather, like I’ve mentioned before, every page of your site should be thought of as its own homepage. As more people adopt RSS as their main source of information, the point of entry into Web sites will quickly shift from the homepage to the exact page they’re reading in their feed reader. Google and the other search engines also don’t care about your homepage, they send people straight to the content that they’ve searched for.

It’s no longer an organic web filled with organisms or even a molecular one. It’s atomic. Each page on its own, each RSS drip its own entity.

March 15, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Wufoo: Making My Job Easier

Creating nice looking forms for Web sites and intranet applications is always tough with more involved beyond the visual structure. A new site called Wufoo is going to help make parts of the form creation process a lot easier. The site is still in beta so while you can use it to create a very nice looking form you can’t do anything with your creation yet. Even if you have no reason to make a form I’d suggest giving the demo a try to see how nice a Web application can be to use. Web apps don’t need to be clunky, some are just built that way but not Wufoo. They’ve used a combination of Flash and Ajax to make it work and have a nice user-friendly design so even a novice can put together a good looking form.

March 07, 2006 | Greg Ness: Stock Photos: Crutch or Godsend

Before the Web, photos in advertising were usually part of the conceptual development process. Back then, if an art director envisioned a photo in an ad concept, a comp was prepared to show the client how the final ad might appear. If the concept was approved, photographers were hired to help transform the concept into reality.

Prior to the Internet, there were many stock photo houses with thousands of images published in large proprietary printed catalogs. If, through an onerous page-by-page search, you did happen to find a photo that was appropriate for your ad, the royalties could run many thousands of dollars depending on the photo, the photographer, the ad’s total media exposure, and the duration of the ad campaign. Most of the time it was just easier to take the photo than find one in a catalog and try to negotiate a price.

Now, too often it seems, you see examples of ad development that appear to be initiated by finding an interesting photo first, and then building an ad concept around it. This is backward thinking. It is difficult to portray a unique brand image for your company using someone else’s picture album. Why has this happened?

February 23, 2006 | Phil Leitch: DesignDemo: Showcasing Web2.0 Design Trends and Best Practices

DesignDemo is a new site that “will feature online demo movies of working interaction design, UI elements, and trends and best practices in web 2.0 user experience”. If you want to check out fifteen different ways to use AJAX on your login system, this is the place to visit. There are plenty of other sites that showcase great design but you’re usually left clicking through to the sites to view any functionality. DesignDemo takes the design gallery idea one step further and includes demo movies that show the features in use.

If you didn’t catch enough new Web design practices in last week’s Design Trends in 2006 post, click on over to DesignDemo and you’ll have more than you’ll know what to do with as most of the sites demoed don’t shy away from using them. DesignDemo is the second web2.0 tracking site from ideacodes in San Francisco, the first being Emily Chang’s wonderful eHub that takes a larger overview of the next generation Web.

February 16, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Web Design Trends for 2006

Web Design From Scratch has assembled a wonderful collection of current trends in Web design along with short commentary and samples of each trend. A lot of what is on the list are design concepts that have been used on blogs and designer’s sites over the past couple of years. I’m excited that some of these design techniques are beginning to show up on more and more mainstream sites and hope the trend of going simple continues to catch on.

The seven trends that Web Design From Scratch highlight:

February 15, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Tiny Videogames and Your Web Site

Guimp, the world’s smallest Web site, has a collection of classic videogames reduced to 18 pixels by 18 pixels. Amazingly, games like Pong, Pac Man and Breakout hold up pretty well and are still fun even when reduced to their absolute minimum. Could you have as much fun playing an 18x18pixel version of Grand Theft Auto as you can playing miniature Pong? The main thing these tiny games illustrate is that as much thought went into the gameplay as the graphics. Unlike today, where so much effort goes into creating the most realistic graphics the hardware is capable of that we end up with a bunch of amazing looking games that all play the same or offer nothing new that hasn’t been played before.

February 10, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Homepage vs. Product Page

Should you spend more time designing your homepage or does your product page deserve extra time spent perfecting it? Most people are going to answer the homepage without giving it any thought, why would you do it any other way. A new article from A List Apart suggests designing what Derek Powazek calls the atomic element first and the homepage afterward.