web design

One of the challenges of building a large Web site is getting the technical people to work with the graphic design and marketing people.  The city of Columbia, SC recently experienced this exact problem when the technical department unveiled their $107,000 web site just days before the marketing department was planning to launch their own $10,000 redesign of the site. 

I had the opportunity to speak to the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce's Information Technology Council this past Tuesday. I was very appreciative of Kurt Hamm and the rest of the group for giving me the opportunity to speak about Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.

Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing some of the point I made during my presentation.

This video is an excellent example of what can happen when we try to do too much on a page. It shows what happens when a corporate "team" tries to design a Stop Sign. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU9YeOQm3Y0 I often remind myself that the most successful Web interface on the planet is www.google.com. One text block and a button.

I am loading an online store with several hundred product images. Unfortunately, all images in the vendor's catalog CD is all in tif format. The images are huge and need to be converted to JPG. ProStores does not allow you to upload tif for product images, and now that I know how huge they are I wouldn't want to anyway. I went to download.com and found a free product that might do what I needed. I needed to convert several hundred images from tif to jpg, and I'd like to re-size them while I'm at it.

I've been coding HTML for over 12 years and today reminded me that it's never too late to learn something new. I don't know why I didn't know this but today I watched someone code an HREF adding a Target="_blank" to the tag in order to make the link pop up in a new window. It was on a SharePoint site, so I thought maybe it was a Microsoft-specific thing. No, said the person coding it. I was amazed.