A Welsh View

The Evolution of Websites

A comparison of old versions of websites such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple. [via]

Orange Launches Stunning Flash Website

Mobile phone provider Orange has launched a new Flash website as part of their new 'Unlimited' campaign. They gave me access to the site a couple of days before launch so that I could play around with it and it's very impressive. I'm not a huge fan of Flash websites except when they are done really well and the Orange website falls into that category.

The never-ending website (literally! I tried scrolling to the bottom of the page but as soon as you reach it it continues to grow) has so many different things to see and do that it takes a few visits to see everything. There are games such as an 'Etch-A-Sketch', an ice cream maker and a music maker plus a language tutor.

As I have never created anything in Flash I have no idea how long something like this took to produce but I'm guessing a long time. Go and check it out for yourself. And if you are in the UK, there's a competition running until January where Orange are randomly giving away wind up chargers for mobile phones. They sent me one and it comes with every connector imaginable so you can be sure that you'll be able to use it with your phone.

Related: Smashing Magazine - 65 Excellent Flash Designs

Image To HTML Converter

This online converter will convert images into HTML using tables. Each pixel in the image is represented by a 1x1 table cell. Pretty pointless but still interesting.

What Do We Really Know About Google PageRank?

The consistently brilliant Smashing Magazine has a very detailed article chock full of links about Google's PageRank.

Web 2.0 Button Generator

Quickly make your own web 2.0 button with MyCoolButton. See also: web 2.0 stripe generator [via]

Smashing Magazine's Best Of April 2007

Smashing Magazine's best of April 2007 has a ton of useful information for web developers.

Iconfinder

Iconfinder.net is a handy tool for searching for icons.

Typesetter

Typesetter is a great tool for web designers. The feature-packed tool allows you to compare three different fonts and allows you to either compare standard fonts or fonts that are installed on your system. [via]

12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them

A guide to 12 different breeds of clients and how to deal with them. I'm slowly coming across these different breeds at Ozum. My favourite clients so far are the ones that have someone else's money to spend and don't question the price. [via]

What The Font?!

What The Font is a great free site for finding out the name of a font. I had to use it last week whilst trying to work out a font for a client. I spent a couple of hours trawling through various font sites including Identifont which tries to determine the font you want by asking a couple of dozen questions. I was almost ready to give up when I found What The Font.

You simply post an image of the font and wait for someone to identify it. It took an hour for someone to correctly identify the font! And judging by the other submissions on the site there is a good chance of having your font identified.

The Times Redesign Looks Awful

The Times newspaper today launched a major redesign of its website and it looks like it has been built using something like Tripod rather using the "world's leading web designers" as Anne Spackman, editor in chief of Times Online claims (source).

OK, maybe that's a bit harsh but it is really bad. As you can see from the screenshot above the majority of text is not rendering properly and that's probably down to styles not loading correctly (server problems were mentioned here). It would be a little unfair to criticise the site too much based on those problems but there are still problems with the redesign that are probably not attributable to stylesheets not loading.

For example, if you click on the News tab on the tabbed navigation, it does not display any news (screenshot). Incidentally, this is the view I get when I visit the site using Firefox. If I visit the site in IE7, I don't even see the tabbed navigation bar (screenshot). The same also happens when you click on a news story (screenshot).

Many pages on the site are not working such as the feedback, contact us and online registration pages and I couldn't vote on the poll about the use of lime green. The 'Where am I?' breadcrumbs seem to only work on certain pages

You can view an interview with the team who redesigned the site here and whom seem to love the lime green that they have added to the site. That's not a colour I would have chosen for a site like The Times.

I'm hoping that these problems get ironed out quickly as the site is a great source of news.

Update: According to Design Week, the redesign cost £10m! The article doesn't mention the price but old headline that appears on Google News shows price as does the article's URL.

In the comments on a Guardian article, Tom Whitwell, Online Comment Editor for Timesonline, said this...

There are about 400,000 pages on the site, and this morning, they all changed simultaneously, which meant that every search engine spider came to visit us. Along with the extra traffic from promoting the site in the paper, we're getting about five times normal traffic. Obviously our plans for coping with that traffic weren't effective...

And yes, we've got those pages where the css has failed and you get all the content spread out in diagonal lines.

I've been moderating some of the comments on the site, and some people seem to think that's our redesign. We're not that avant garde. Once you hit reload, it goes away, and once the servers are healthier, it should go completely.

"Why The Swat Team Raided My House!"

An account from a student who altered just one line of text on his school's website and ended up having a SWAT team raiding his house.

Google Plagiarises Yahoo!

Do these look similar to you?

The first screenshot is of Yahoo!'s IE7 download page. The second screenshot is Google's IE7 download page. Yahoo!'s came first.

Google has not only copied the structure of the page, they have also copied the majority of the text. Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny identified Google's plagiarism and within hours, Google had changed the page to look like this.

Google's Matt Cutts posted a piece on his blog but rather than simply holding his hands up and admitting what they had done, he turned it around and blamed Yahoo! for the times that they had copied Google! Sure, Yahoo! had copied how text ads appeared but there are only so many ways you can display a piece of text. Google had copied an entire page.

Are You Mobi Ready

A great tool for developers that lets you know if you site is suitable for mobile devices. As AWV is full of large images it would cost a fortune to load the site on your mobile phone (approx. 5 Euros if you live in Europe) and as such gets the lowest score possible. However, I do have a mobile site that can be found by typing http://winksite.com/ozum/awv into your mobile browser.

Related: Top 10 Mobile Websites

The Greeking Machine

As a web developer I always use 'lorem ipsum' text to fill a page to test what it would look like but it can be confusing for clients and one user of a site we were developing asked why the site was full of Welsh.

The Greeking Machine can not only generate lorem ipsum but also generates marketing speak, techno babble, pseudo German and hillbilly. I think it would probably be best to stick to lorem ipsum rather than filling a page with hillbilly like this...

Plumb fart up, rodeo fiddle, soap skinned gritts round-up drunk rustle, commencin' bacon, kinfolk darn. Drinkin' eatin' greasy mud tools kinfolk panhandle how squalor.

[via]

AWV Goes Mobile

Using WINKsite, which I came across recently, I've created a mobile version of AWV. It's straightforward to setup your own WINKsite and besides using the blog's RSS feed to display posts, you can also add extra features such as surveys, forums and chat rooms.

If you want to visit the mobile version on your phone, go to winksite.com/ozum/awv or go to winksite.com and enter the site code 16863. For those without Internet access on their phone, here's what the site looks like...

What Is The 1% Rule?

"It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it."

This is based on statistics from sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia in which the vast majority of people consume the information on a site with just a tiny minority of people creating the content.

Whilst I'm a content creator (or perhaps content regurgitator), I too am guilty of going to sites and simply consuming content rather than contributing.

Protolize

Protolize aims to creat the ultimate collection of web-tools for web designers and developers. So far there's not a lot there but hopefully it will grow. [via]

The 11 Mile Wide Page

At 11 miles wide, this has to be the widest webpage on the Internet. [via]

5 Steps to Building Better Websites

Project83's 5 step guide to becoming a better web designer.

See also: 50 ways to becoming a better designer.

What Search Engine Spiders See

Type in a site's URL here and see how search engine spiders view the site. [via]

Levels Of HTML Knowledge

456BereaStreet discusses the levels of HTML knowledge. I'm probably somewhere between Level 4 and 5 but as someone points out in the comments, there's a huge gulf between those two levels. The article is based on the CSS Levels of Knowledge

Accessibility Colour Wheel

Helpful tool for web designers that shows what colour blind people will see based on the colours you choose for your website. [via]

Font's, And Lots Of 'Em

9,800 free fonts for you to download. The site has a handy preview facility to make choosing the correct font easier. [via]

Related: Create your own font online.

About URL

About URL is a handy site for web developers. It offers links to information about your site, validators, search engine information and browser compatibility. I hope they expand this to include the other services that I use when developing sites. [via]

CSS Hacks For IE7

Handy CSS hacks for IE7. Also, test IE7 without installing it. Very handy when you want to test sites in both IE 6 and 7.

Readability Test

Improve your site's readability with this readability test. It calculates all the common reading algorithm tests such as
Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid. [via]

Google Sitemaps

I've just been playing around with the recently revamped Google Sitemaps and have been looking at the search stats for the site. Not only can you see searches from desktops but also from mobile devices. Here's the top 20 searches...

1. mobile phone porn
2. donkey sex
3. gmail pop
4. ogrish
5. charlotte church topless
6. mobile phone porn sites
7. view porn stars
8. ajaxwrite
9. seekeyra
10. 12yo sex
11. menupages
12. postman pat video
13. very very hot sex
14. thai sex
15. free 8yo nude pic
16. typepad
17. free mobile phone porn
18. naked students
19. lindsey lohan bikini
20. biggest boobs

It looks like the research that showed that the mobile phone is the device of choice for those seeking out porn on the web is true.

The Web Design Trend Obituary & Death Clock

PingMag predicts when Web2.0 style trends will die.

CSS Love Child

Mix up the designs of two different sites. Either pick from the sites in the list or add your own. [via]

8 Web Design Warm Fuzzy Feelings

Ping Mag's 8 Web Design Warm Fuzzy Feelings. A couple of favourites...

4. When your site works in internet explorer without you trying.

8. When the client says “this is great, this is exactly what we wanted” and you agree.

[via]

The Top 10 Best Designed Blogs

Elliot Back presents the 10 best designed blogs. I remember seeing the no. 4, Joshua Ink, a while back and thinking how really well designed it was. [via]

EveryStockPhoto

EveryStockPhoto is a new stock photo site that contains over 220,000 creative commons photos.

75 Helpful Web Design Resources

75 helpful web design resources sorted into categories such as web standards, CSS, typography, colour tools and stock photography.

CSS Naked Day

Today marks the first annual CSS Naked Day. The idea behind this event is to "promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure."

Microsoft's Web Site Circa 1994

How things have changed. Read more about Microsoft on the Web.

12 Ways to Irritate Your Visitors

I don't think I do any of the things listed except maybe for number 5.

Web Developer Firefox Extensions

Firefox extensions that all web developers should install.

Designing A Good Logo

A guide on how to design a good logo. This should come in handy when we finally decide on a name for our new company. [via]

Longest Page on the Internet

At 56.94 ft (and growing), this is probably the longest page on the Internet. [via]

Web Users Judge Sites In The Blink Of An Eye

According to research undertaken by Carleton University in Ottawa, users visiting a site will decide in 50ms whether or not they like the look of the site.

Intel's New Logo

Intel has unveiled it's new logo and has scrapped the lowered 'e' which has been a part of its logo for the past 37 years. Also, the 'Intel Inside' tagline has been replaced with 'Leap Ahead'. Read more.

MSN Beta's Crappy Redesign

Microsoft seems to have let a two-year-old loose on their beta MSN site. The site looks awful in IE and unusable in Firefox. I realise that the address is used for display beta sites but when that site is accessible to the public you should at least make it look presentable. Google Blogoscoped has a screenshot of it in Firefox incase it disappears soon.

Web Badges

A collection of web badges/buttons for your web page. [via]

Well Designed Site

This site turned up on my referers last night and it has to be one of the best looking sites I have seen in a very long time.

Don't Click It

I came across Don'tClick.It last week but at the time it was down due to bandwidth problems but it's not back up. The site has been designed so that no buttons need to be clicked rendering the mouse buttons useless. Whilst it looks good and is a good idea I found it so difficult resisting clicking my mouse button. [via]

GUIStuff

GUIStuff offers you many free tools to create a great-looking website. [via]

May 1st Reboot

May 1st Reboot is an intiative to try and get many different international web sites to relaunce their sites with a new design simultaneously on May 1st. Unfortunately, if like me this is the first you have heard of the May 1st Reboot, there's not much time to knock up a new design.

CSS Designline

Designline is an "animated GIF of every step of the contruction of a new CSS-based blog design". [via]

Related: The CSS Playground [via]