Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 11, 2008 – 3:05 pm
Paul Vereijken, Next Web Journalism & Media editor
The Financial Times just launched the first stage of their redesigned website. The homepage is coloured pinkish just like the newspaper itself and the website is made much more simpler. Other parts of the website aren’t redesigned yet, but that will be done in the future, writes British newspaper The Guardian. But is it just me or does the renewed website really looks and feels kinda like a blog?
Redesigned FT.com
I hope you like that post!
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Written on October 22, 2008 – 4:15 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
I used to teach HTML. My favorite part of the workshop was always explaining tables. They seemed so incredibly difficult until you understood their logic. Then it would all become clear. Loved the look on peoples faces when they (hand coded) their first complex Table Layout.
Then CSS came and suddenly Tables were out of fashion. CSS and “Float:Left” ruined my life. I used to be the “King of Tables”! Now I’m nobody, an outcast, a ‘Table’ guy. Other designers laugh behind my back.
Not anymore!
Digital Web Magazine has an excellent in depth article about CSS TAbles support titled “Everything you know about CSS is wrong“:
“When released, Internet Explorer 8 will support many new values for the CSS display property, including the table-related values: table, table-row, and table-cell—and it’s the last major browser to come on board with this support. This event will mark the end of complex CSS layout techniques, and will be the final nail in the coffin of using HTML tables for layout. Finally, producing table-like grid layouts using CSS will be quick and easy.”
Oh yeah, I’m back!
Written on October 5, 2008 – 9:07 pm
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Following on from Patrick’s wish for a specific tool to edit the theme of Wordpress blogs, I want to introduce a company that I would love to use and have been drooling over but can’t because it is PC only and I am strictly a Mac man. However, they do solve a very real problem that I am constantly grappling with, they make money, and they could make a ton more if they designed a Wordpress plug in that solved Patrick’s problem and pain.
To edit a website’s design is currently a real hassle, as a developer you have to constantly fath about in a sort of trial and error mode, adjusting one color or parameter at a time. Of course once you change one, that changes everything so you often end up going around in circles for hours until you no longer know whether you’re coming or going (in my case it’s mostly the latter).
Styling is a very time consuming task which generally causes many arguments and frustrations between developers as they try to attain a unique, fresh and interesting look for their projects. With a product like Stylizer this pain is alleviated and the cream works in minutes. One can control the styles in a live fashion seeing how they change the overall look while simply turning knobs and watching the changes take place before your eyes.
As a nuts and bolts developer I personally struggle tremendously with creating a fresh clean look for my own projects. Only after attempting to create graphics yourself do you really gain respect for graphic designers. Earlier in my design carrier I have been constantly disappointed with graphic designers thinking they overcharge, are slow, produce substandard work, etc. In many cases it is often true and one area where I struggled to find a outstanding professional artist. Though I did eventually it is clear to me they are few and far between.
What is now also clear to me is how frustrating and difficult this task really is, I am certainly in the market and will pay good money for an elegant solution to this personal pain, hint, hint, Stylizer Mac version please!!! It is also a little odd that there is not a Mac version of this software (unless there is by someone else and I dont know of it?) given all graphic designers I have ever worked with only ever used Macs.
So if your in the same boat, struggling with creating a shit hot look and feel for your own sites and you use PCs, give Stylizer a shot and let me know if this software is really as good as it looks! Do also do let me know if there something out there similar for the hardened Mac users.
P.S. This article was written by a human not a machine and following on from last weeks huge outcry about the automatic article generating software, we at The Next Web have pledged never to use such software, but the question remains! are the top blogs actually using it? As many sources I have spoken to still think they are :).
Written on September 17, 2008 – 8:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“If there is one problem that plagues all web applications, it’s the problem of getting people to sign-up.” If a Web 2.0 Expo NYC seminar is introduced with such a sentence, a blogger should know its place. Maybe he thinks other things are more interesting, like hanging around with start-ups. But when he reads about a problem the whole entrepreneurial part of his readership faces, he knows what to do. Go to the seminar, listen to user interface designer Joshua Porter how to fix it, and write about it on your blog.
It’s not (all) about filling in forms
Porter kicked off with discussing some sign-up forms and shared some lessons on how to improve them. Like explaining why people should fill in specific text-fields and resisting the temptation of gaining info that’s only relevant for advertisers. He also addressed a problem you might recognize: the captcha’s which keep becoming increasingly difficult. Porter: “In a few months, it will be a square box with just colors and you’ll have to make the letters up”.
But then Porter quickly switched to the REAL problem. As it’s not about the simplicity of signing up, because - Porter quoted the inventor of the mouse - “if ease of use were the only requirement, we would all be riding tricycles.”.
Are people motivated enough to care?
The real problem is best explained as a hurdle between “interested” and “signing up”. Porter: “You need to convince people your start-up is worth their time, energy, and change of their behavior”. That requires another way of thinking. Porter addressed an article by John T. Goodville, which states that people tend to overvalue the software they’re currently using, software makers tend to overvalue the software they offer. “Why would I use a better calendar tool if I’m already happy with iCal?”, Porter said. People tend to love stuff they already own more.
Three types of visitors
Therefore, start-ups should adopt another mindset, namely the good old “what’s in it for the customer”. If you want people to sign up, design your page for three different visitor types:
- I know I want to sign-up - You don’t have to convince these visitors anymore, so focus on usability
- I want to make sure this is for me - Offer these visitors a very simple explanation of your tool
- I’m skeptical - Watch out for this one, he or she will need more and deeper information
Strategies to design the perfect sign-up page
Porter continued with elaborating on three strategies that will help you to design the best sign-up page possible.
1. Immediate engagement!
Show visitors the experience before they sign up. Fine examples of this are Geni and Netvibes. Signing up on Geni equals filling in the first branch of your family tree and when visiting Netvibes for the first time, you can immediately start building your start page. Want to save it for later? Sign up please.
2. Provide levels of description
To address the needs of the tree different types of visitors, build a start page that contains different levels of information. Like Freshbooks did on their “almost perfect” welcoming page.
- Short description
- Bam! Sign up instantly
- A somehwat more elaborate description
- Dig in even deeper
3. Leverage social influence
Show your first-time visitors that other people love you. So put up some testimonials and press reviews and, when possible, show a graph of user activity. If it works for other people, the service might also work for themselves.
Basecamp has around 90 testimonials on their site, some of which are depicted on the frontpage. Porter: “After reading the fifteenth testimonial it’s really hard to get away with not being positive about it”.
Jaiku shows a cool graph of their users all around the world. When you visit this page for the first time, you instantly get an idea of how active the community is:
Twitter has a cool way of showing press reviews. They depict them as if they were written as tweets:
Do it Dr. Phil style
The inspiration for Porter’s presentation came from his book Designing for the Social Web. So you might want to buy that if you liked this post.
Written on July 29, 2008 – 1:42 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Rss is still getting more important for many bloggers, as co-blogger Boris update our blog for RSS last May:
“Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that.”
Since the updates, subscribers on thenextweb have been increasing tremendously! (subscribe here if you haven’t done allready) Here at TheNextWeb office we have been trying out different programs to read the feeds of other sites, and today I found one on Techcrunch with a new time saving approach:
Open source program Apprise allows users to not only read, but also share news directly from your RSS reader. The project is developed by Christian Cantrell, an Adobe Employee and editor on WatchReport.
The reader is based on Adobe Air, users can simply add and aggregate feeds. Its not world changing, but I believe this is the first RSS reader that can share your articles this easy.
(more…)
Written on June 26, 2008 – 12:33 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After six months of happy blogging and welcoming you and 3499 other RSS readers, we think it’s about time to professionalize the design of The Next Web Blog. We can’t do that alone though, as we need your opinion. To be exact: we need you to inspire us, as you’re the ones we’re blogging for.
That’s why we came up with this challenge: we would like to ask you to use our logo to create something that will inspire us while designing the new lay-out. There are virtually no limits, as long as the file extension is .jpg, .png or .gif. It doesn’t even have to be static. It can be a drawing, wallpaper, or icon set.
The designer who manages to take our breath away - or something close to it - will receive the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard. Yes, you read that right. Adobe is a really generous company and we’re delighted that they wanted to sponsor this competition. So thanks to these guys, the winner will receive programs like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat 9 Professional, and more.
Put your Next Web Blog creation on Flickr or another image hosting service and link to it in the comments of this post. Take your time, as the design competition is closing on August 1st 2008.
The jury consist of The Next Web Blog co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Adobe Marketing Project Manager Bert Hagendoorn, and undersigned. Our judgments will be based on originality - we want an out-of-the-box spirit - and the link with the actual subject of our blog: European start-up news and the future of the web.
We will send the winning design to our web designers, who will give it a prominent spot on their mood boards. So you can actually influence the new lay-out of your source for European tech news.
Written on June 10, 2008 – 2:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
No, this has nothing to do with tasty fish, the name of this service refers to the process of fine tuning a design. Irish design agency Spoiltchild Design came up with a handy tool that helps you and your colleagues to address every detail in an image, without bothering to describe the spot you’re talking about. You just put a note on the desired spot and email the image to a colleague, who can also easily edit the picture as well.
This can come in particularly handy when discussing a site design. I know from my own experience that instead of sending a 3-page email, you just paste some notes on the design. One minor thing though, this experience comes from using Fleck. This Amsterdam-based service offers you the possibility to note specific places on any web page with a bookmarklet or fancy flash browser tool. A disclosure is in order here, as Fleck sponsors this blog. I think though, that for tech-savvy users, Fleck is the better tool. Yet for people who just want to add some text to an image, Finetuna is a good alternative since it’s really simple.
A bit too simple maybe, as Finetuna could use some extra features like an embed option and Twitter integration. Speaking of which, I’ve praised web development companies in the past who make Twitter mash-ups to promote their services. These companies add something to the web, while working on their PR. It’s probably the same story with Spoiltchild Design, as there are no advertisements on Finetuna, nor do visitors have to register. The consultants of Spoiltchild just needed a tool like this and then decided to make it publicly available. And before you know it, some blogger mentions their company name three times.
Written on May 20, 2008 – 1:32 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My personal blog attracts between 150 and 250 visitors a day but has more than 800 Feedburner subscribers. This is a fact that I discovered today and it might have some impact on how I blog. Most bloggers spend a lot of time optimizing for search engine and making sure their websites look good.
Here at the Next Web Blog we always look for nice illustrations to go with our posts because we know people like to look at nicely formatted posts. In general I write my posts with a preview window open next to it so I can see how the text flows around the images and what goes below and above ‘the fold’.
What I don’t do is optimize for RSS. As I have written before in a post title RSS Awareness Day: “According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it”. So why bother spending too much time on it?
Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that. One example are the images. The image I used here is scaled down a bit in html and placed on the right with a CSS class. All of that is ignored in RSS. That means that if you read this post via your RSS reader the image is huge and displayed right on top of the article.
With more and more traffic going straight to RSS it makes sense to start optimizing for it. I want a Wordpress plugin that adds a ‘preview this post’ button so I can preview it in both the browser AND in RSS readers.
Then we get to the issue of cross platform compatibility. You might have your HTML and CSS working fine in Explorer and Firefox on Window and Macintosh and Linux but how does it look in Google Reader? Or My Yahoo? And have you checked NetNewsWire on a Mac VS NewsGator on Windows?
As RSS becomes more popular this becomes an aspect of webdesign we can no longer ignore…
Written on May 19, 2008 – 2:38 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
According to research firm Parks Associates roughly one-fifth of all U.S. households are disconnected from the Internet and have never used e-mail. Apparently they called 20 million households and asked them if they had Internet Access. (Had they gone door to door that number would have been way higher as I can imagine that a high percentage of people that don’t have a phone in their houses also don’t have Internet.)
John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates is quoted:
“Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document. These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer. Many people just don’t see a reason to use computers and do not associate technology with the needs and demands of their daily lives”
There is hope though as 7 percent of the 20 million disconnected homes plan to get connected within the next 12 months.
Werner Vogels at The Next Web Conference 2008
Last Friday we had dinner with Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon, who told us how dangerous it is to ignore users who still use 800×600. One guest said “It is just too much work to design your website in such a way that it works on all resolutions. You should just ignore the older browsers and systems and make sure everything works for 98% of your users”.
Vogels replied that Amazon currently has over 80 million members, that lots of those come to the service because of its low pricing. Many Amazon customers are very price aware and that Amazon is also attractive for customers with lower incomes. If he would ignore even a few percent of his customers that would come down to millions of disappointed users.
When you are surrounded by geeks and early adopters it is easy to forget that not everybody own the latest MacBook Pro, a speedy broadband connection and a 23 inch monitor. We are very focused on what the Next Web will look like and are always looking ahead. Just remember that sometimes it pays to look back a bit too…
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
