Now that I know my visitors and their capabilities, it’s time to dive into what they come to my site to see and then begin to build my messaging and branding around that.
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Archive for the ‘Coding’ Category
Realign Step 2: Establishing a Voice
Realign Step 1: Finding the Audience
As promised, here is the first of a multi-part series that goes through the process of realigning my site not only to better address my target audience, but to also tackle issues that I’ve noticed or had to work around since the initial launch (over a year and a half ago). These principals could be applied to any type of site you work on, albeit corporate, personal, or otherwise. I hope the method and information you find here proves useful. (more…)
Mac Web Development on the Cheap
As you (hopefully) know, I’m a web developer by trade. Whenever possible, I try to take time to help other aspiring designers and developers get their feet wet when they make the switch to Macs. There’s a refreshing amount of excellent software for Mac that will allow you to dive headlong into web development with a minimal investment on your part. Here’s a list of what I consider the essential software that you can get for free or inexpensively, as well as a few paid alternatives.
HTML5 Video: First YouTube, Now Vimeo
After getting a lot of (offline) comments and questions about my foray in HTML5 video, it seems like the rest of the online world is also making tremendous leaps away from Flash and towards this slick new method of serving files.
What does this mean for most people? In a word, nothing… yet (ok, that was two words). The fact of the matter is that until we have full browser support for the H.264 video codec, which is currently only available in Webkit-based browsers like Google Chrome and Safari, this seamless and superior technology will never be experienced by the majority.
I don’t anticipate Internet Explorer ever fully supporting the video standard or the code to actually implement it (c’mon, 8 versions in and they’re just now figuring out how to render web pages correctly), but for this to be anything close to a victory over Flash, Firefox needs to get with the friggin program. While it’s true that Firefox does support the code to get it working, the videos need to be encoded using Theora as opposed to H.264—which, in short, requires two versions of the same file, doubling the necessary server space. You can see how this would be a problem for a company like YouTube, whose server farms are probably running at max capacity with a ridiculous 12,000 videos views per second.
So, while I personally think it’s great that those of us who opt for Webkit browsers will have an overall better user experience, not to mention that videos from both YouTube and Vimeo are now accessible to mobile platforms without the need for Flash, I would love to see this technology rolled out to the populace as a whole, which will require a massive amount of feature requests and a miracle.
HTML5 Video: Cooking With Fire
I recently had the good fortune of working on a small project that lent itself to some experimentation with newer technologies. The goal was to create a simple landing page with some light graphics, pictures, and a video. I had the option to let it live inside the existing ecosphere of the site (using PHP to include site-wide JS and CSS) or opt for a leaner, more agile output. I took the latter route as it was something I’ve done a lot of reading on and eventually wanted to do with my site for either screencasts, general portfolio work, or both. I dove headlong into HTML 5 and was pleasantly surprised by the results. I now present you with the process, the pitfalls, and other considerations.
