Blog January 2008

I used to think of web apps like WordPress, FeedBurner and Flickr as tools for the uninitiated, the non-programmers, people who want a quick and easy website and a quiet life. I didn’t for a second begrudge the fact that fewer “techies” were contributing to the Web; my reasoning was that, by using these apps and linking to them on your site rather than developing the functionality yourself, you were sacrificing control.

And that’s still true. You can’t tailor Flickr to render your slideshow as you might want it - what if you don’t want cross-fading? What if you hate Flash? Blogger templates might be fiddly and WordPress is written in a language you might not be familiar with. But the question is: why does all that matter? Why does everything need to fit so nicely?

Do people look at sites that embrace these apps - sites like carsonified.com or jonbounds.co.uk who are both developed by developers incidentally - and think “well they obviously don’t know what they’re doing: they can’t even host their own videos!” or do they think “oh great, I love Twitter; let’s see what this guy’s up to”. I think the latter. Developers may still think the former, but they no longer hold all the keys.

In France, where the weather is good and people can stay up late, their houses are used only as a base: somewhere to lay your head til the next day when you can think about knocking off work and popping out for a baguette. So does a house you only use as a base need a TV and DVD player in every room or an en-suite in the master bedroom? Why throw so much mud at the wall if you’re never around to see it stick, because you’re off enjoying your city?

The Web works in a similar way. If you’ve got so many profiles in so many places - a site for your blog, a page for your photos, somewhere to put your videos - surely all you need a website for is to tie these things together? Yes maybe you want to muse on your particular subject for a few pages, or you’re implementing some cool functionality that doesn’t exist anywhere else, but do you need to write your own video player when there’s a perfectly good one at YouTube? Do you even need to organise setting up your POP3 email accounts when Gmail now gives you email at your own domain?

I’m really only talking about sites for people, not companies. I don’t think this way of working will affect the likes of amazon.co.uk or anything like that, but it’s a great way to go if you’re a one (or even 10) man outfit.

Think it over, and embrace the change!

The venerable BBC are trialling a new design for their gargantuan website. At the moment it’s confined strictly to the homepage, but it looks as though this is to be the new preferred layout for the entire site.

Aswell as ditching the 750 pixel wide, left-aligned layout that has come to be known as the ‘BBC style’, they are also making a strong push towards valid HTML, something that is surprisingly not a feature of the current site. The new design now has the site centred on-screen and stretching to 960 pixels in width with a 10 pixel gutter, thereby reflecting the majority resolution of 1024x768 (the display setting that is most common, especially for PCs).

It also makes use of some fancy new AJAX, with each block of content being customisable: allowing the user to move blocks around, expand or collapse them or add in extra blocks. What’s great to see is that this has all been achieved in full compliance with the W3C’s HTML standards. Also most of the functionality (bar the movement of blocks) is available to users who don’t have Javascript enabled on their browsers. The page is fully CSS-driven and should work well in text-only browsers.

I’m quite looking forward to seeing this new, non-stuffy layout go live across the entire site, but I think we could be waiting a considerable time for that to happen. Good work so far though!