Really great article on the correct proceedures for using hyperlinks. Well worth the read.
Navigating the Winding Roads of Hyperlink Usability
Hyperlinks are like most things in life – there’s a right way to use them and a wrong way. The choices we make in their visual treatment, content, user experience, and accessibility affect the success of your overall site.
Think about it another way. You’re driving down the road a little too slowly (especially to the people behind you) trying to find Main Street, a very common road. What subtle changes would help or hinder your success?
This week we trialled using ModX for a client website, and my first impression is definately hyped.
This CMS offers all the things that I have wanted out of other packages I have tried. We have been using Joomla for many sites recently, and I seem to spend a greater portion of my day head in hands as I run into limitations with the CMS model that Joomla uses.
The first problem with Joomla is user access control. By default, Joomla offers only “Guest”, “Registered” or “Administrator” (and some others that I won’t go into here). When it comes to a site with different requirements relating to user management, Joomla does not cut the mustard. There are small hacks that you can use (ie modifying the Joomla core source code) but when you then try to integrate another product (aMember in this case) things FALL APART.
ModX offers a much simpler and flexible use of users and groups, and at this early stage, I am very excited about it.
There is a great forum thread on the ModX website that has people listing the reasons they moved from Joomla to ModX – check this out
Templating the MODx CMS is very simple, and give a lot more flexibilty than using Joomla. Joomla has a lot of it’s formatting hard coded into the source, and unless you want to present your information in the way Joomla anticipates you do, it can be a dull chore to hack things into submission. MODx works simply and effectively. I’m sure I will rave on later about this.
All customers want a content managed website. “I want to be able to update the content myself!” they say. They want to be able to change the colour of the text, the font size, drop in tables and cut and paste content from their Microsoft Word document.
This is bad news. Good news that they want to add content to their site – but bad news that you know that all those hours of hard work perfecting the CSS is going to be for naught once they get their hands on a WYSIWYG content editor.
Quite often you will hand the site over so that the client can familiarise themselves with the tools you have set up for them. After a few days of playing, they get back to you telling you that the site has broken. You go to the testing URL to have a look and voila, they have copied the content from the old site (including the hodge podge of tables used to lay out the content) and it has blown out your lovely tableless layout.
Or you get a call because they can’t get the text to look the same – lo and behold, there are dirty tags all through the content they have added, negating the CSS you have spent so long matching to the corporate style guide you were told was so important.
So you decide to give them Textile, a simple to use, lovely text editing system that takes the “huh?” out of producing nice code. You tell them that they can do their headings, paragraphs, links and quotes with just a few characters. You tell them where to go if they need clarification.
Clients do not like this. They want their CMS editor to look and behave just like Microsoft Word. Bah.
So back goes the WYSIWYG. And very quickly, they are intermittantly using Comic Sans and Times New Roman when the style guide calls for Arial. They are using line breaks instead of paragraphs. They are doing blocks of text in different colours, then complaining that the site looks “rediculous”.
Sigh.
At Pixelframe, where I work two days a week, we have just won a large contact for a site with a range of requirements. These have mainly to do with membership functionality, but there is also a shopping cart component and some events management involved.
The question has arisen: do we risk coding the whole thing from scratch, which would give us a fantastic custom-built CMS membership system at the end of the project, but may take quite a while as I can only work on it two days a week, or; do we take an existing number of products and attempt to klodge them together?
We have decided on the second option and have begun talent-scouting for appropriate scripts. However the end result will be nowhere near as elegant as it could have been.
I really wanted to try to rock this in Rails, as my first real life project in the Ruby language. However doing a realworld application first up is probably not a good idea.
In other news, I have consolidated hosting for Butter Beats and so all of the sites are back online. I have also had my hair cut.
If you look to your right you can see a whole bunch of little thumbnails that are served from my Flickr account. Thanks must go to Jon Hicks for showing me how to do it.
I thought I would share a solution to an error I kept getting when reconfiguring MySql.
Each time I would run the configuration manager, I would get an error:
could not start the service MySQL. Error: 0
This was super annoying, and as a result I stopped doing my Rails tutorial.
Then I found the answer: one has to delete three files, all located in the mysql/data directory:
*ib_logfile0
*ib_logfile1
*ibdata1
Deleting these files means that the Windows config wizard recreates them and the server starts without a hitch.
I also then restarted Windows after I reconfigured MySql just to make sure.