Cool post title right?

Most websites miss the point when it comes to displaying information that their visitors actually care about.  Recently I was searching for some dog kennel software and was amazed that only 70%ish of the companies I found failed to display a single screenshot of their product on their website. 100% failed to put a screenshot of their product on their most visited page, the homepage.  There was one thing 100% of them did though; fill entire pages with boiler plate marketing verbiage that I didn’t care about.

There is some overwhelming need to fill websites with nonsense marketing trivialities.   As soon as business types see a blank webpage with lorem ipsum in it they get all purple in the face trying to come up with as many platitudes about their product or services as they can.  ”Revolutionary”, “Optimized”, “Synergy!”, bleh.

Marketing people and graphic designers are no better.  Make some text bigger, tilt it 20 degrees, now your selling a product!  Lets spent 90% of our time making pretty things instead of giving the customer what they want to see.

Now when I think Lasers + Mirrors + Egyptians I think of a good time, or Stargate, but mainly a good time.  When I hear those three words together I want to see the lasers in action, bouncing off of something, and maybe some cool pyramids or dog headed warriors or something.   If these words described a board game I’d be all for checking out this thing in action.  Lasers bouncing off of mirrors and hitting Egyptians ( not the people of course )?  Nice!

Its to bad Khet doesn’t think the same way I do.  Instead of putting a video on their homepage of their laser, mirror, Egyptian product your instead treated with more of the boilerplate nonsense thats just so common these days.  Oh yeah, look, flashy Flash things, animated bs some graphic designer thought was the bees knees.

There is a tournament! – But thats not lasers and mirrors.
Mensa! – No mirrors and lasers.
Product box rotated in 3D space with a hover glow!  - Sigh.

Its one thing for kennel management software to be a little uncomfortable with their application, ( everybody is sick of winforms grey right? ) but its shameful for a company with such an awesome game concept to be just as afraid.  C’mon guys, show me the product, show me the lasors, make me care about what it is you do!

Sometimes I think websites that offer an interactive service or product should simply put three things on their website.  A logo, a phone number or link to purchase, and a big video of the thing in action.  Thats it, nothing more or nothing less.

Don’t be dumb like Khet and fill your websites with useless business banter and irrelevant badges or cute 3d perspective cruft.  Fill it with what people care about.  Fill it with what the hesitant strategy and board game lover wants to see.    I am not impressed with your flashy logo or animated hieroglyphics but I would be impressed watching the intricate mechanics of a game that combines chess and light reflection in action.

Bookmark shaving sounds so much better.

Amusing collection of programmer quotes:

http://www.storm-consultancy.com/blog/other/classic-programming-quotes/

My favorite:

“Saying that Java is good because it works on all platforms is like saying anal sex is good because it works on all genders”

I should use this when the group I’m working with is talking about the pros and cons of Silverlight… And by “I should” I mean “I will”.  ;)

I’m not sure why I bookmarked this one as I disagree with the authors point and the way he presents it.

http://www.makinggoodsoftware.com/2009/05/12/hdd/

Read it and make up your own mind.  This is the kind of post that advocates you assume the software your writing is going to be responsible for sending somebody to Mars and get them back safety.  Every check needs to be rechecked, every exception handled, every event and situation handled gracefully.

Most of the time we aren’t designing the auto pilot for a Boeing 747 and I think “hoping” or assuming certain things will be true is ok.  I consider software bugs a sign of progress and not necessarily a measure of quality.

Also I have the opinion that if your always expecting a user to enter A and then they start entering B and you give them a stupid error message they’re going to figure out how to get B into the system anyway.  I’d rather the software blow up in my face, get a bug report back, and learn the business or customer really needs a new feature or behavior to handle a new business need or some kind of growth.

A great reminder of how fast the internet is changing things.  Whats going to happen in another 10 years?  Can we even describe the world then?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Now the title of this link is misleading here.  There is almost no code.

The majority of the article is all about how to setup continuous integrationish like features over the top of a project.  I haven’t set up build scripts or single click deployment yet but have been meaning to give this guide a look whenever I get around to learning about this stuff.

I start out projects a little differently, get something stupid and simple working, see how that goes, and then hook up things like code analysis.  I don’t consider the bulk of knowledge within this link as “fluff”, just something you’d do later in the project rather than right away.  Thats a lot of work to produce nothing…

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Building-a-StackOverflow-inspired-Knowledge-Exchange-Build-automation-with-NAnt.aspx

#2

Lots of my bookmarks are things I meant to get around to using or learning at some point and this link is no exception.

Well, it is, as I used it, but for my purposes it just didn’t work out well.

http://davidwalsh.name/opacity-focus-jquery

This link contains a nice and quick code snippet to change focus on related elements when a user hovers over one.  It gives and effect similar to highlighting the hovered link in a navigation bar or similar.  The problem I had with it was as you were looking through the grouped elements the opacity change made text hard to read and therefore scan.  Don’t know were I’ll use this again but the effect is so elegant I want to keep this one around.

Shows of the power of jquery too.  So much glamor for so few lines of code.

Shaving the bookmark/desktop icon collection in preparation for a Windows 7 upgrade, thought I’d at least want to keep them around on the blog.  Most of these bookmarks are things I bookmarked to blog about, but never got around to it:

#1 Good collection of slides about how important a creating an appealing user experience really is.

http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/eye-candy-is-a-critical-business-requirement

Recently I was at work and somebody in management said “I just want to know how to create bad UIs faster”.  Ouch.  That goes against a lot of the points brought up in this slideshow.  My opinion is that when you create a pleasant user experience people are more likely to give a shit about your application and I’d rather have 10 enthusiastic users than 100 ambivalent ones.  ( somebody else quoted that last line better )

Users that give a shit are more likely to suggest the features they need, help with testing, and help share and promote your application to other potential customers.

I know its unprofessional to say “give a shit” instead of something like “care” but its the passion and intensity I feel when I talk about user experience makes using anything less shocking and brash very feeble sounding.

Blogging has always taken a backseat to experimenting with cool new .NET bits.  I still get the impetus to blog but whenever I have time to do anything I always have to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version for some security reason.

Wordpress’s success has always been a doubled edge sword when it comes to security.  Since its so ubiquitous its just a huge target for spammers and security violations.  I don’t blame the developers or any aspect about Wordpress for these problems, I just blame success.

Success comes with pain though, for me.

I want to blog, I have to upgrade, I want to blog, I have to upgrade, blog, upgrade.

By the time I’m done upgrading the site, 20 minute to upload and upgrade at max, my motivation is gone.  Sucks really.  I may have to migrate platforms or I’m never going to post anything.

…

So I update to 2.8.4, check wordpress.com for some information about a plugin and 2.8.5 the hardening release was released… 2 hours ago…

I can’t win.