Parallax scrolling website interfaces have been popping up all over the place recently. I didn’t want to miss out on the fun, so I have put together a parallax scrolling demo built using jQuery and CSS.
Robert Hoekman, Jr is a user experience designer and consultant who is best known for his books about interface design, Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment. His self-published book Big Deal: On Being Famous to Almost No One tackles a far more personal subject. In Big Deal Hoekman, Jr recounts his rise to the top of the web design field, and describes how his craving for professional notoriety eventually devastated his personal friendships, marriage, and sense of self worth.
The form of celebrity Hoekman Jr discusses in Big Deal has been dubbed “micro-fame”:
My name is Robert Hoekman, Jr, and in certain rooms, under certain circumstances, at certain moments, surrounded by certain people, and when all these very certain things come together, I am a big fucking deal.
In other words, Hoekman, Jr might be unknown to the general public, but within the web design industry he is a bona fide rock star.
This morning I’ve been following the hilarious (and cringe inducing) web design OG Twitter meme started by Jeff Croft (if you’re wondering, OG stands for Original Gangster). Here are a few of my favourites:
If you created a website that had “Works best with Netscape Navigator” you may be a #design_og
@_j12
If you remember Adobe PageMill, you may be a web design OG. #design_og
@meyerweb
If you’ve ever said that your “site looks better in Netscape Navigator” you may just be a web design OG! #design_og
@hudsonperalta
If you remember cleaning up bad Word-to-HTML markup by hand in a text editor, you might be a web design OG #design_og
@DataG
If u ever designed an interactive CD-ROM you’re a #design_og
@daveixd
The very first article I wrote on this blog, back in July 2006, was titled Goodbye hacks. Hello conditional comments. In that post I discussed how conditional comments could be used to feed different stylesheets to older version of Internet Explorer, smoothing differences between browser rendering engines without resorting to CSS hacks.
Conditional comments have provided a great stopgap measure while we wait for obsolete versions of IE to fall into disuse, but as the market share of IE6 and IE7 has dwindled I’ve found myself relying on them less and less. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I resorted to a separate stylesheet to make an old browser behave.
I’ve written in the past about how it is just as important to turn down the wrong clients as it is to work with the right ones, but even when a client ticks all the right boxes they might still spell trouble. Here are a few problematic clients to watch out for:
The Carrot Dangler will tempt you with promises of lucrative work in the future if you agree to take on their first project at a generous discount. Like the carrot that coaxes a donkey to pull its cart, this client hopes that the lure of more work will secure your loyalty, and make you receptive to the idea of lowering your fee.
It goes without saying that the dangling carrot will always remain just out of your reach, as elusive as the proverbial pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. If you do have an opportunity to work with this client in the future they will almost certainly plead poverty again, then dangle another carrot in front of you.
When confronted with a Carrot Dangler remind yourself that if they don’t have the money to pay you fairly now, they probably won’t in the future either. Don’t let the carrot tempt you into putting yourself at a financial disadvantage.
For a long time page count has been used as a unit of measurement in web design and development. Clients will often phrase a pricing enquiry by asking “how much would it cost for a (x) page website?”, and when quoting on a project it can be tempting to measure the required effort in these terms. Some web developers go a step further by assigning a fixed value to a page, and sell page-based website packages to their clients: a 5 page website for $800, a 10 page site for $1,500 and so forth. This approach is shortsighted for several reasons.
Remember when websites came with disclaimers listing their minimum viewing requirements, and shooed away anyone who didn’t make the grade? “This website is best viewed in Netscape Navigator” visitors would be advised, or “View this site in Internet Explorer at 800×600 resolution”. Those were the bad old days, and I would like to believe that as a community we have learned our lesson and moved on, embracing graceful degradation and progressive enhancement as alternatives to the “my way or the highway” mentality.
This morning I visited a website that caused me to wonder if we’ve come so far after all. I was looking forward to experiencing the site’s typography, which I’d been informed was exemplary, and was surprised when my browser served up fallback system fonts rather than the embedded web fonts I was expecting. A warning message in the masthead informed me that if the fonts looked “kind of weird” I should switch to Chrome or Safari.
In the final article of the series I will talk about configuring a local Apache webserver to integrate smoothly with your development working copy, and how to deploy a version controlled website to a live webserver.
In the second article of the series I will give specific detail about establishing a Subversion workflow.
In this three part series of articles I will explain my approach to using Subversion, the open-source version control software, for web development.
For a long time I steered clear of version control, dismissing it as too complex, or something that was only useful for large development teams. I took Subversion for a test drive, but didn’t really “get it”, and decided version control wasn’t for me.
I changed my tune earlier this year when I was employed to work on a project that was already under version control. I had no choice but to get up to speed with Subversion, and once I got the hang of it I was excited to discover that version control streamlined my entire workflow. I now use Subversion for all of my web projects and consider it an integral part of my development process.