Accomplished cartooning genius Chris Garrison has started a great new blog - Salty ‘Ham Cartooneestas, which features Birmingham Alabama area cartoonists. I’m honored to be included on the blog with some of our area’s best cartoonist. Check it out at http://saltyhamcartooneestas.blogspot.com/.
Wow it has been a heck of a long time since I updated this blog.
But things have been busy… I’ve getting ready to launch about 3 new web sites and getting fired up on a few more. I hope to be able to put some time into working on some new illustrations over the next couple of months. Just this past week I started working with Lawler Ballard Van Durand on their Smithfield.com project. I’m currently just helping with small graphic and content updates to the site. But it did give me an excuse to work on some seasonal vector illustrations this past weekend.
One thing we’ve been pretty active with lately here at UAB is academic blogging. Specifically we’ve had a couple of international trips that we’ve chronicled using a number of social networking and publishing resources. You can see two of our efforts by visiting UAB in Bangladesh and UAB in Antarctica.
These have proven to be amazing resources for promoting our programs and works. Antarctica for example was picked up by CNN and also ended up with a PBS special.
I’m going through some old bookmarks and figured I’d share a few.
Working with a local creative firm NorthSouth, I launched a new web site this week for a free 1411 service here in Birmingham called Infophone. Basically you give them a call, and rather than pay a $1.25 for an address or phone number they make you listen to a 15 second ad while they find your information. On top of that, they’ll help you find out anything you need to know (within reason). Check them out yourself by calling 205-870-1411 or visiting callinfophone.com.
I’ve been working tonight on our church’s new web site. I’m finding myself feeling fairly challenged on this project because I didn’t expect to find so many other great church sites that I’d be comparing this project against. About a week ago I joined a group on face book called Christian Web Designers. Listed in the group was a set of recommended links. One of them I posted a few days ago on this blog. However, today I visited another one of the links - Godbit Project.
Godbit is apparently a fairly popular site featuring Christian web design. So digging into it a little I clicked on a link for “featured sites”. Low and behold one of the recent sites is actually a church I grew up near(and somewhat in) - Trinity United Methodist. I was never a member, but visited Trinity every Wednesday night for Boy Scout meetings for 7 years, and regularly for other scouting and local events. I’m always amazed at the local connections you can find online without meaning to. I’ve got to give Trinity a pat on the back. It’s a great site and another great piece of inspiration for our own new church site.
Zeldman has a great post on the importance of web divisions within organizations - v.s. relying on IT or Marketing departments for web development and maintenance.
I’ll probably post more on this later just because I have my own thoughts on the matter. However, I think these posts on Zeldman are particularly interesting because he receives so many detailed responses.
Fake Steve Jobs - The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (I’m probably a little late to the party on this one. But it is funny.)
Cavemans Crib - Why are these cavemen funny?
Marketing Experiments Journal - Read about recent marketing experiments and their outcomes.
Large list of resources for web designers
iPoor - The real iPhone Killer
You know the saying “So easy a monkey can do it”? When developing a web site (especially a content managed one) I think that we often get so wrapped up in developing and configuring administrative tools for a site that we miss the point of what we are ultimately trying to accomplish - communication. I can’t help but think that if for the past 9 years I’d have had more time to focus on content - rather than making backend admin tools do something this or that way - it would have been time better spent thinking of strategy rather than functionality. And most of the time that extra functionality on the backend was to make one administrator’s job a little easier.
I’ll give the example of a web site I worked on a couple of years ago. I was looking today and realized that their newsroom is displaying all press releases as PDFs. I could beat my head on the wall for allowing that to happen. But when I think back, we ended up developing such a down-to-the-smallest-function specific content management tool that we failed to focus on the users themselves. We created a web site that is unbelievably easy to maintain. A trained monkey could enter content in to this thing and the content show up in the right place - related to the right other content. But to go in and change any of that functionality would now be an expensive nightmare (all of the original developers have moved on). And while it’s very specific in function, it’s also just as limited in flexibility.
But why did we develop a web site so that the CMS would be a no-brainer, v.s. giving the client something that didn’t EXACTLY do what they wanted but would ultimately offer more flexibility in the future for less headache and costs? I believe the latter would ultimately have been more successful, and probably would have saved some of their development budget.
I’m currently working on a redesign of our Church’s web site. In the process I’ve noticed that a lot of churches are really maturing in their use of the Internet and web site development. One great resource that I’ve come across for inspiration is a web site called churchbeauty.com. Some of these guys are really stepping out there and getting creative with their designs.
The other amazing thing is the way these churches are embracing podcasts and video sermons. Some even have live online broadcasts.
On of the main issues I have with web site content management systems is that they all “manage” content in completely different manners. Some of them require you to build out a site in a tree like structure. Others allow you to TAG content in very web 2.0 like glory. And then there are those that will allow you to build a menu structure for your site and leave your content completely independent. That way a content item can be included on multiple menus… or no menus at all.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great that we have all of these options. However we often choose one content management system to promote/distribute to multiple parties. For example, I work at a large University and we try to keep the entire university on one tool.
Our tool uses a tree like structure in most cases. However, I found a great web site this week that demonstrates the strengths of tagging and completely bucks the traditional tree like structure. There may very well be one there, but who cares. You can find what you’re looking for without it. The web site is NSIT: Computing, Networks & Phones (The University of Chicago’s IT department).
This site stuck out specifically because I’m getting ready to undertake the redevelopment of a web site with very similar content. This tag section of the site is appropriately titled “Find IT”, because well… you can.
