A web agency weblog

Just wanted to let you know that I have just updated our discussion forums to the latest vBulletin version. There is a lot of customizing to do yet.

I had a dream, it’s not a joke, I really dreamed this two nighs ago:

” What if I asked all the people whose work I admire to tell us about what inspire them and how they get from idea to design?, better yet: What if they post those ideas at my blog?! “

Well, let’s try, worst thing that could happen is that nobody participates.

I think it is fair, for my readers and for the (hopefully) guests to come that I begin telling you how I do it. I don’t intend to compare myself with so many good designers, I just want to share.

First steps

I try to understand what I will create, what are the site owner expectations?, what are his audience interests and needs?, what are their products or services?

I have to find a theme for the web site, sometimes it is clear, for example: In creating a basketball team site the theme is just “basketball", but what happens when we are talking about a consultancy or some other business, let’s say something more abstract as human resources?. Well, in that case I have to go to some other sources.

Pictures and nature

Sometimes I just get a picture, a good one and try to get a theme from it, a color palette, abstract shapes, whatever can trigger imagination and be converted to something usable in Photoshop. I really like using my own pictures, wherever I am I try to carry my camera with me, experiment with it, taking pictures of everything, you don’t know when you will taking a really great picture.

I had read about using nature as an inspiration and you know what?, it really works! Go to the zoo and look at any animal or flower, everything in nature has a good combination of colors, nature is the perfect designer and you can get great ideas from it. If you don’t have the time look at the Discovery channel or go to the park.

Look all around you

Try looking at everything with a designer mind: Your car, other cars, a house, your clothes, your watch, anything! You can get an idea from every simple object, keep you mind alert for any detail.

Forget about it!

As Al Pacino told to Johnny Depp in Brasco: Forget about it. Sometimes you need to stop thinking about design, just go for a walk, watch TV, take a shower (this one has worked for me many times, not only with design but with business ideas, writing issues, etc), play some music, do anything !, but forget about design. Your mind will relax and your subsconscious could be a better designer than you.

Look great designers portfolios

Visit your favorite designer web site, read magazines, watch TV ads. Learn from the pros. Don’t copy, get inspiration, it is different.

Feeling lucky?

This may not sound too “professional” but sometimes it works: I just randomly play with different filters and effects in Photoshop or Illustrator until getting something that looks nice. Sounds familiar?, well, don’t forget to look, with a very critical mind, at what you get some hours or days later, if you still think your creation looks good then congratulations!, you were lucky!

I am not a great designer, I will try very hard to be one.

Now for the difficult part of my dream: I will invite the people who inspire my every day work to comment on this post and share with us how they create their magic. I will do my best to contact them and hope they can participate. They are, in no particular order:

• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Douglas Bowman
• Todd Dominey
• Dan Cederholm
• Dan Rubin
• Dave Shea
• Cameron Moll
• Ryan Sims
• Shaun Inman

I hope you can help me making this dream come true.

Every weblog, news site or regularly updated web site is talking about feeds, syndication, XML and RSS. I will try to explain these terms and how they can help us. You will also learn how to subscribe to a feed using a feeds reader.

A feed is like an envelope containing information to be distributed in an easy way. For example this weblog feed contains summaries of the last articles posted. In a news site the feed could contain latest news.

RSS is the technology (one of the available technologies, another one is Atom) which allows these feeds to be delivered. Both, RSS and Atom, are based on XML.

Syndication is the process by which people get the content from the feeds. Actually, visitors don’t get the feeds by themselves, they use specialized software known as feeds readers or aggregators. When you read “Syndicate this content” is like: “Hey, you can have this content delivered to you as a feed in a very easy and fast way".

Why should you care about all this?

Let’s see a practical example:

Every morning you get online, visit your five favorite blogs to see if there are new posts which you may be interested in reading, then go to a couple of news sites, see what is happening in the world and finally visit your favorite band site to see when their next tour will begin.

We are talking of loading at least seven or eight web sites on your browser, looking for the relevant content and waiting for all the text and images on each site to download.

Our routine morning browsing could take from half an hour to much more if you find something worth reading, in a worst case scenario you won’t find anything today and just lost half an hour opening and closing browser windows.

Using content syndication you could just subscribe to the web sites you like and get summaries of updated content from one place. If you want to read something you are just a click away, you don’t have to lose time going to each site.

Currently I am subscribed to more than thirty different feeds and use only five or ten minutes a day to see what is new. Of course, if you find something interesting, I always do, you could spend a lot of time reading.

How do I subscribe and use feeds?

First you have to get a feeds reader. These two are the ones I am currently using:

NewsDesk: Free, Windows based, requires .NET framework installed.

Bloglines: A web based free service. You can see all your subscribed feeds from one single web page. It offers interesting options for blog owners. For example, our weblog showcases some of my bloglines subscriptions.

After you have selected your feeds reader, and read its instructions, browse to a site offering a feed.

Many sites show their feeds as a link with acronyms such as XML, RSS 2.0 or Atom, others prefer to use an orange box with the letters XML in white. Our weblog uses these simple words for its feed link: “Syndicate this site’s content".

If you click on the feed link with your mouse you will be taken to an XML document. Copy the url from your browser address bar and paste it in your feeds reader software. That was easy!, now you are subscribed to a feed.

Optionally, at least in Interner Explorer for Windows, you can right click the feed link and choose “Copy shortcut", then paste it to your feeds reader, this way you don’t have to open the XML document.

Now you can stop wasting your time looking for information and start wasting it just reading.

Today my beautiful Beatriz was visiting Barbie’s web site, she is already having better control over the mouse, I mean Beatriz, not Barbie.

It’s great to have such a lovely person working side by side with dad, she has a ten years advantage over me, I started playing with my first computer at 12, we did not have Internet then (at least not as we know it today), I did not even had a modem!, when I got my first modem (I remember, it was an Everex 920, 1200 bauds) I got into BBS’s and …. , but that is a whole different story that I will tell you at another time.

The fact is, my 2 years and 9 months old daughter is going to be the most valuable partner at Ventanazul and I am happy about that.

I will keep writing about her discoveries and soon will help her get her own blog online, WordPress based of course.

Excuse me for using Stephen King’s excellent book title, it was the first idea I got when starting a post about writing and blogging.

I have always wanted to be a writer, who doesn’t?. I have read Mr. King’s book and, of course, the classical Elements of Style, which King himself recommends.

I also read a lot, at least 3 books a month (currently Speaker for the death by Orson Scott Card), and a lot of online content in a daily basis.

But I still feel something lacking, perhaps is that I am not used to writing?

This weblog is a great exercise for writing often, it is also a way of thinking aloud and sharing my ideas and expectations with others. Blogging is really like a therapy, a therapy for those of us who can’t live in parties (because we don’t want and we don’t need them), for those of us who like to think just because is fun.

I have just finished an article about writing a good weblog, let’s see how my writing goes.

I have made some changes to the weblog: The articles text got bigger and changed color (more contrast with the links), I also used left alignment, being justified seemed too boring for the readers.

The right block headings are using a different color and our friendly bullet.

XML feeds now have their own section and I have included a link which will point to an article about RSS and XML which I am preparing.

Comments?

Last weekend I rented two movies: Last Samurai and Cold Mountain, I would like to share my comments about them. Let’s start with Last Samurai.

We all know what to expect from a Tom Cruise’s movie, lots of shots of his face, this time he is bearded and with long hair, great for the ladies in the audience. Last samurai is full of cliches: Cruise is an alcoholic soldier who fought at the civil war and has a not so decent job helping to sell Winchester guns, he is hired to train japanese soldiers fighting a group of rebel samurais and transform himself in a good man.

Cruise is captured by the samurais in the battle, amazing point number one: Why they did not kill him at the battle field?, oh yeah, my girl said: “The samurai chief has realized that Cruise has some special in him, he fights as a tiger", of course! that’s what the director wanted us to think!, they even shot a tiger flag in slow motion!.

Cruise is taken to the samurai’s village and kept there as a “prisioner", what a great prison!, he had a pretty japanese girl taking care of him, feeding him and even curing his alcoholism!.

Fortunately the samurai chief, I mean the “last” one, speaks english and wants to be Cruise’s friend. Our hero starts to train with the samurais and needs only one year to learn japanese and be able to kill four bad guys armed with swords, being himself unarmed. Aparently Mr. Cruise felt so excited about that scene that asked the director to repeat it in slow motion.

In the final battle we are informed that there are like 500 samurais ready to fight, the bad guys have canons and machine guys so the sword mastering won’t be enought to win this time, all the samurais die but, oh surprise, there is one survivor: Cruise.

In one of the final scenes a puppet young emperor receives Cruise advice and does not sign a treaty with the yankees, great!, we had to kill 500 samurais for that, why don’t you speak at the beginning of the movie guys?

At last Cruise returns to the samurai village to (we hope) live a long and happy live with the japanese girl and her two childred. Oh, did I mention he also killed the girl’s husband?, apparently that was not too important.

Well, I saw the film knowing what to expect, at least I wanted the fights to look real, eveything was Cruise in slow motion, Cruise here, Cruise there, well you get the idea.

My last word: Don’t see this movie, Harry Potter is much more fun.

I only hope Troy won’t be like this.

Sometimes it is very difficult to explain my customers what is designing with web standards, I found this excellent post by Andrei Herasimchuk explaining why we have to care.

It is a very interesting article and have been commented by many well known designers and authors on the net.

If you need a good list of links to know more about web standards you can check the comments at this contest by Dan Cederholm from SimpleBits. You could also win a copy of his Web Standards Solutions recently published book.

Some of our visitors may have noticed that the “Powered by Movable Type” icon has been removed from our blog. We decided to make the move to WordPress.

Actually, it wasn’t so hard as I first imagined. I had to use Textile plugin to fix some little details with spanish language characters, most of the configuration was easy.

I really liked the templates management, basically you have to change 2 files: index.php and wp-comments.php, that and a CSS rules file are the only needed modifications to transform the look and feel of your WordPress based blog. MT required handling at least 3 templates and the CSS file.

With WordPress you don’t have to rebuild after every change, this allows you to make quick and easy adjustments to your site. During my tests with MT I often used to forget rebuilding.

WordPress uses only one file to display its data: index.php , but you can use mod_rewrite to create permanent links according to your needs. This can save a lot of disk space, MT created a static file for each article.

The applications is based on PHP and uses its own template tags, which are easy to understand and modify, our home page was modified to include the last 3 posts from News, Web and Events categories.

I have not tested TrackBack yet but I am sure that with some help from the discussion forum and wiki I will be able to solve any problem that may arise, the community around WordPress is very active.

WordPress does not support, at least not in a regular installation, multiple blogs, but I have seen many posts about this in the forum. You could use another installation, the initial configuration takes no more than 2 minutes!.

There are many features to explore but I can say that Wordpress is a free and open source applications that does its job very well.

Wow, that was fast!. Just spent the last couple of hours setting up and testing WordPress, including importing my few posts from MT.

I am starting to think that moving from MT to WP will be a good choice. I have not found any thing in MT that I can not do with WP.

It’s just a matter of time.

Almost a week working on our new weblog, actually there are two of them, one for each language I use, based on Movable Type, I have realized there is a new
licensing schema for the product.

What can I do?, recreate everything using an open source product such as WordPress or pay the price?.

We are still in the 30 days trial period and thinking if it’s worth paying almost US$ 200 to get a commercial license.

Actually, MT is a great product, but if I can find a good open source alternative that fulfill our requirements I’ll have to make the change.

But it hurts to work twice!, I hope we will be able to find a good importer to move content.

Any way, I will let you know about our experiments with WordPress.

We have just finished implementing a new chat system to assist our visitors online. You can use this system from any page in our solutions section.

Now you will be able to ask your questions in real time.

I really enjoy talking about design, many times I notice how some great designs use so little elements to get amazing effects.
In this article by Ryan Sims, we can read about the poster created for the sequel of Ocean’s Eleven, a film full of Hollywood celebrities, the poster does not use any face but still is a piece of really good design. Judge yourself.

We started working on our new site eleven months ago, the project had been in our to do list a very long time.

On August 2003 we had selected our new logo, which was designed by our friend Michael Grinstead at 2Square Design, on September 2003 we began designing the information architecture for the site. We wanted to have a highly usable design with intuitive navigation for an audience with many profiles, clear and concise copy, english and spanish content, and separating content from appearance to create a web standards.based web site.

During that time I read and reread many books, a great source of inspiration for the project. I will be commenting many of those books in days to come.

Actually, every little detail about our site: Navigation, copy, photography, markup, XHTML and CSS, validation and download optimization, could be used for future articles in our weblog.

Our logo was an excellent start, it was so important that now we start every new project studying logos. Font type, isotype, the wave line and color palette, all reflected Ventanazul culture.

Creating the information architecture was overwhelming at first. There were so many things we wanted to say, sections and content to create. Finally we decided on using four groups: Solutions, portfolio, support and about us. Our weblog was a last minute idea inspired by great designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Douglas Bowman. Our weblog is powered by Movable Type, a web application deserving many articles for its power and flexibility.

We had a lot of ideas and mockups for our design, as time went by we started to define the current one, we got great feedback from our friends at The Cafe, a forum where worldwide designer exchange opinions and suggestions.

We performed many usability tests to get an easier to use design and decided on using global menu based on Javascript and DOM, at some time during design we thought about using Flash, as Macromedia, but we wanted to avoid plugins. Brainjar’s DOM introduction helped us a lot to implement our own menu.

The site uses valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS2.

We have many unfinished details, our discussion forum needs some work to adapt to our new design, we are thinking on migrating from vBulletin to phpBB, which has improved a lot in last version, is entirely open source and we have worked with the phpBB developers in the past. We are working in the design of our newsletters and we hope our visitors feedback will allow us to find many other things to fix or improve.

I have always thought that a web site has a life of its own when is launched, I am sure our new site will get us great results.

Some days ago, when we launched our new web site, including a weblog for the first time, and Milton told me about explaining what a weblog is, I thought it was not necessary. After many years as an avid weblog reader, I just expected our visitors to come, read some articles and get the idea.

Then I remembered one of the main ideas behind our site development: We target a big audience, many of our visitors are not regular net users and we should be as clear as possible when writing for them.

A weblog is an Internet diary, a site where you can post articles about many subjects, sorted in chronologically descending order, the last post always featured first.

A weblog, also known as a blog, can be updated with new articles many times a day and reflects the personalities of the authors: “the bloggers".

The blogging phenomena was started almost at the web beginnings, 1994, but got stronger only some four years ago. Nowadays, there are millions of weblogs, about every imaginable subject, weblogs that have given great power to many people. Commenting on news and debating is not only restricted to news agencies or well known writers anymore.

All weblogs have links to other sites and other blogger’s articles, taking readers from one site to another on the net, this ping pong effect is responsible for blogging success and, believe me, highly addictive for those of us who enjoy reading. The myth that using external links made us lose visitors has lost strength under bloggers success. If a weblog offers me interesting links, combined with opinions and comments on an almost daily basis, is highly probable that visitors will come for more.

Our weblog will be a space for many subjects, not only related to business or technology, but also for personal interests, daily stories, dreams and ideas, I say “we” because each person in our team will participate.

At this time, our links sections includes some of my favorite blogs, I will refine my selection and include many more links later. We have not categorized our articles, yet, because we have so little at this time.

Finally, like our whole site, our weblog has spanish and english versions, I am not sure if we will publish every article in both languages, it will depend on the issues at hand and our available time.

Well, I think the weblog idea is better understood now, if not, who cares, let’s keep reading!.