So the inevitable has happened - Google have built their first browser, set to take on Microsoft and leave Internet Explorer as a distant memory.News of today’s launch was ‘leaked’ to Google Blog-oscoped (the blog by Philipp Lenssen - which is currently down, probably due to having been visited just a bit over the last 24 hours!) via a 28 page comic book style introduction.

Google say they “hit “send” a bit early” and so have now made the comic available to one and all here.

According to The Times Online, Google Chrome will “feature a new format for tabs, the ability to view web pages as thumbnails and better features on the address bar.”

Well I for one will be having a play shortly, and will let you know my vote…

Update 11.51am Tuesday 2nd September 2008

Phew -  whoever said that comic was 28 pages long was wrong - it’s over 30 and there is some serious stuff in there! Basically Google have completely rewritten web browsers as we know them! With each tab having it’s own controls and being quite independent. This gives advantages such as each being able to do it’s own thing at one, and if one crashes the others aren’t effected. They’ve also worked on V8 - to enable fast and efficient use of Javascript in web based applications.

Anywho - Google Chrome is going to be made available any minute now… or at any point during today anyway… just watch this space…

Wednesday 3rd Septemner 2008

Well I waited and waited yesterday until I had to go out - but I now this morning have Google Chrome running on my pc. And so far so good!It’s identifying my most commonly visited pages so that when I open a new tab I can just pick one of them if I wish. I can even slide each tab around to reorder them if I want. One of Google’s major claims is that the browser makes much better use of available memory - so time will tell on that one.

News reports (on TV last night and across the web) are saying this is Google challenging Microsoft. I think it’s more likely to be a challenge to Firefox - which is a shame, seeings they’ve worked well together for a while now (and I can already see Firefox 3 features in Chrome). I recently got a new PC (and am not finding vista as bad as I thought I might!) and it came with Google Desktop installed. So are Microsoft going to keep that allegiance with Google now? Apparently Google were always worried that Microsoft might bring out their own search engine and drive their users straight to it through IE and away from Google.

Whilst Jo Public seem to have an amazing dependence on Google (I am shocked by the amount of web users who believe the Google search box is the only way to access any website), they are also scared of ‘downloading’ anything. Or don’t see a change as necessary. We can see this from the number of existing IE6 users. I’ve got a laptop with IE6 on it that we keep for testing - but even I have to be careful not to accept the IE7 update that Microsoft keep offering. And yet, somehow, so many people do still resist it! So I’m really not sure what will win out - the Google brand, or the lazy and cautious public.

Also - does anyone actually  believe that Google ‘accidentally’ sent that email early?! The Google exec on the news last night, sheepishly explaining their school-boy error (”well we are only 10 years old, so we are a school boy”) did little to sway my thoughts about a pr stunt. 

Meanwhile, what will become of Firefox? The developers favourite. Whilst I’m sat here trying out Chrome (and also - I really don’t like the name!) I do feel pangs of guilt about my former favourite shortcut sitting unused on my desktop - my computer’s hardly ever on without Firefox being open. I feel Firefox - perhaps along with Safari a while ago - set the tone that IE wasn’t up to the job in todays world (in many cases). So I hope they continue to prosper and Google doesn’t take their recent world record title (most downloads in one day) away from them too soon!

I have 2 clients at the moment who both have .com domains registered with budget - and in one instance, extremely well known - hosting companies / domain registrars. All each of them need is that .com redirected to their website that is running on the .co.uk.

I do not believe how difficult that is proving to be!

The first company don’t respond to emails, and if you ring either say a) they’ll call you back in 10 minutes, never to be heard from again, or b) they’ll do it right away and 2 days later still haven’t.
The 2nd - and well known, search-engine-topping - company are sending my client (and myself) round and round in circles by a) telling her she can access her domain control panel through her old account but then not having the domain listed there, and b) telling her via a support ticket she will be emailed the correct login details, just to be emailed a message saying ‘please log in here… we look forward to your business!’ without a username or password in sight. And when I just rang them I was informed ‘we are a budget hosting company and so we don’t offer telephone support’. Well if you don’t, you should make up for it in other ways!

We always urge our clients to come to us when we have a problem or a query, and not be embarrassed or self-conscious to pick up the phone and just have something explained/looked into.

2 weeks ago I lost hours and hours trying to get a .co.nz redirected, with the New Zealand registrars eventually claiming it couldn’t be done because my client didn’t have a dedicated IP address! Each response though had a different answer, addressing different issues! If companies would just read support questions properly they’d probably half their work load and double their customer satisfaction!

So - don’t go with a company who don’t offer customer support, and don’t think that the cheapest option is always the best! In the case of hosting it’s often cheaper for a reason - that reason being no one to help you when you hit a problem.

Probably the most commonly requested requirement for a website is the ability for the client to add and edit pages. It sounds such a simple requirement, but in reality it’s really tricky to get the balance right between functionality, flexibility and the level of technical skills required.

There are literally hundreds, probably thousands of CMS platforms out there. Some are very generic such as Drupal and Joomla, and can be molded into practically any kind of site.

Both Drupal and Joomla are open source applications, built by an army of mostly unpaid contributors who continuously update the codebase, adding new features and extra functionality. These applications are great in many ways, but personally, from a coding point of view I find them far too generic and bloated for most situations. While they do provide pretty much everything under the sun in terms of functionality, they include this at the sacrifice of usability. In some ways they are almost too clever for their own good and can be taken straight out of the box and setup by anyone with enough patience to learn how everything works.

There are other content management systems out there which are more job specific, and in some ways I think this approach makes them actually more usable. We’ve created several websites based around the Wordpress blogging platform. I love Wordpress, it’s a highly supported package and you can have a new blog up in a matter of minutes. This blog you are reading right now is powered by Wordpress. Plugins are freely available and themes applied quickly and easily giving you a brand new website in no time at all. I actually prefer using Wordpress as a platform for certain types of websites as it just about gets the balance right between functionality and usability, but even then I don’t think it’s perfect.

As a web developer who builds websites for a living it’s very difficult to put myself in the place of the average small business owner. Unlike us they live and work in the ‘real world’. Logging into and updating a website is something that needs to be so simple, quick and intuitive that forgetting how to do it just isn’t a question, because it’s so obvious.

My hunt for the perfect CMS has led me down many paths over the years, but perhaps inevitably it’s my love of coding and building applications that has resulted in the development of our own solution, SimpleCMS.

SimpleCMS Unique Selling Points (USPs)

• Admin can view the website they want to update rather than having to use a separate admin interface.
• Updating pages is as easy as clicking an ‘edit’ button whilst viewing the page in question.
• Add pages is as easy as selecting ‘add page’, selecting if it’s a top level or sub page, giving it a title and entering the content.
• No restriction on the page type or content. Your page can be anything you like, it’s up to you. You aren’t restricted by any particular format or content type. Although all default styles are controlled by the globally defined style sheet.
• Pages instantly appear in the menu for the rest of the world to see. There’s nothing complicated or confusing to worry about.

SimpleCMS Is Ideal for

• Small business brochure or content websites that follow a basic page/sub page format, and need to be quick and easy to update.

SimpleCMS Isn’t

• In any way confusing or complicated to use
• Going to be the perfect solution for more complicated websites, ecommerce stores or social networking websites.

I think if you try to make a piece of software all things to all people it will inevitably end up being overly complicated and confusing and there’s just no need. If you keep it simple, quick and easy you can take the pain out of updating a website.

If you’re interested in having a play with SimpleCMS take a look at the demo website and have a play. I’m sure you’ll find it really quick and easy to update the pages. Don’t worry if you mess up the site by editing and deleting pages. It will reset itself every hour on the hour, so go for it, just don’t write anything rude please! Anyone found spamming will be hunted down, so play nice please.

If you have any suggestions send them this way.

Bookmarks are very handy for remembering sites you like, but wouldn’t it be really neat to let your users create a proper icon on their desktop that links directly through to your website? Or even a link in the Quick Launch bar right next to the start button. Using Gears this is now totally possible as this tutorial now explains.

I’d be very interested to hear how you get on with this, what you think of Gears - both the idea and the actual reality of what Google has developed, and if you can think of any other alternative approaches for doing the same thing.

Has Firefox Set the Guinness Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period? That was the aim for the latest release of their ever popular browser; Firefox 3. Millions of people logged into the official site to grab a copy of the browser, infact according to the Download Day website the final number was more than 8 million. Which is pretty impressive. The total as of writing this is closer to 16 million with users from all over the globe. It just goes to show the importance of the browser as a serious contender to IE’s Internet Explorer and how important it is that people make their websites support it.

The latest figures suggest that the browser market still belongs to IE, but there’s a sizeable shift towards Firefox, clearly helped a huge amount by the massive amounts of money Google are able to pour into the small team of developers behind it. At the moment it’s certainly the browser of choice for many of the tech savy geeks behind much of what we see and use on the Internet, and the geeks choice of today is often the average users choice of tomorrow. That’s what happened with Google.

So the bottom line is; make sure your website works in Firefox! If it doesn’t, why not!? Do something to fix it now and if you can’t get your friendly web developer to fix it for you.

View the download live counter here.

We’ve touched on mobile web development in the past couple of posts. It’s an exciting new area which offers a huge potential for growth as more people get online with their mobile phones. Well rather than just talk about it, we thought we’d give it a go, and Pricecheck.at is the result.

Imagine the scenario…

You’re on your way back from work when you happen to walk past a window with a big sign that says, ‘Sale today only! Nintendo Wii Console just £190!’. The shop is closing in 20 minutes so you don’t have chance to get home and check the latest prices available online. Luckily you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, so you quickly call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Nintendo Wii Console’, and with the single click of a button you get a list of prices for the Nintendo Wii, and where it’s available online. It’s a good job you did too, as it turns out that you can in fact get a brand new console online from game.co.uk for just £179.99.

You are in PC World and you want to buy a brand new digital camera. You’d checked prices on the Internet before you left, but the sales assistant recommends a model you hadn’t considered. You think it seems perfect, but you don’t want to buy it from the first place you find, and would rather check the price available online first. The problem is PC World is about 10 miles from your house, so going home first is a bit of a mission, especially with the price of petrol these days. So you call up pricecheck.at, enter ‘Canon IXUS 75 Digital Camera’ and click ‘Check Price’. You’re then presented with 12 different prices for where the same model is available online. As it happens the price available from PC World is the same as the cheapest price available elsewhere, in this case either Curry’s or Amazon Marketplace, all three offering the camera for £129.99. But had you been in Jessops this service would have been invaluable, as they list the camera for £159. So you would have saved yourself £30 + a lot of trouble finding out.

People have been benefiting from price comparision services on their PC’s for years, with sites such as Kelkoo and Pricerunner becoming incredibly popular, but the Pricecheck.at service packages up all this functionality and makes it available to users on their mobile phones when they are actually out and about shopping in the real world as a last check to do before buying anything in a shop.

Another great example of when the Pricecheck service could really come into it’s own is in the huge market of mobile phones themselves!

A friend of mine just got stung when he mistakenly signed up for an 18 month mobile phone contract which it turned out he didn’t want. Despite taking the phone back to the shop just 3 hours after he bought it, they wouldn’t let him get out of his contract and he was completely committed to paying off the 18 months contract! There is apparently NO cooling off period when buying a mobile phone in store which I was very surprised about… However this makes a service like Pricecheck.at incredibly useful.

A quick search on Pricecheck.at for the ‘Sony ericsson K850i on the O2 Network’ reveals an incredible 163 prices, with mobiles.co.uk being the cheapest at just £15! Now presumably this is a contract arrangement, but still it gives you a good indication of what’s available online, and may just stop you signing up to a cast iron instore contract, when you can get it cheaper online.

These are just a few of the scenarios that sprung to mind, but I’m sure there are plenty of other situations where being able to access a price comparision service, while on the move, could prove to be immensely useful.

Pricecheck.at also offers a mobile friendly web directory, which is a list of sites that are particularly aimed at working well on mobile devices. You’d be surprised how much on the Internet simply isn’t accessible from a mobile device. You can also browse the site for products and prices.

The site is currently just a basic service, but if it proves popular we plan to expand and improve the browsing and shopping service to make it more user friendly and useful for mobile shoppers. It’s a tricky balancing act between attractive design, and accessibility on as wide a range of platforms as possible.

I’d welcome any feedback or comments about the site and the ethos behind it. Also if you have an Internet enabled mobile phone, let me know how Pricecheck.at looks on your phone.

There are a few basic things to consider when building a site that’s mobile friendly. It’s all pretty common sense when you think about it, and infact I’ve found most of these rules simply apply as good ‘general’ rules anyway. I.e. Use of good quality well-formed code, css based design and semantic markup. But there are also a few extra tips you can use to make the user experience that little bit better for the mobile user.

Use the Correct Character Encoding

It’s important to tell your browser what character encoding your content will be in. This appears on the first line of each XHTML Basic page for example
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>

UTF-8 is a good choice as it includes quite a wide range of characters.
ISO-8859 is another commonly used character set

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?>

You can also include this as a meta tag
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />

Doctype

The document type (doctype) tells the browser how the page needs to be rendered, including the rules and how strictly to follow these rules.
Here is an example of a doctype declaration for XHTML Strict
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>

Use Well-formed Code

All the code your write should be well-formed and valid code. Depending on the rules you choose to follow and how strictly these rules are applied, as defined in your doc type declaration above. XHTML has the following requirements.

• All elements should be closed. I.e. <br /> <p>Blah text</p>
• All elements must be properly nested. I.e. <p><strong>Title</strong></p>
• The alt attribute must be used for all images. I.e. <img src=”blah.jpg” alt=”My Image” />
• Text should appear within a block level element and not directly in the body. I.e. <body><p>My paragraph</p></body>
• Inline elements should always nest with block level elements. Inline elements include the span tag for example, which should therefore be nested within a block level element such as <p> or <div> tags.
• All attributes should appear within double quotes. I.e. <img src=”blah.jpg” alt=”My Image” />
• All elements and attributes should use lowercase. Just keeps things looking neat if nothing else!

Avoid using tables for layout - CSS based design

CSS evangelists have been harking on about this for years now. But when developing for a mobile device, where the page size is all important, makes this even more relevant. Most professional web designers have been coding 100% CSS layouts for a while now, so this shouldn’t come as much of a shock.

Use accesskeys in the Primary Navigation

This is about the first rule which I think most traditional web designers making sites for a computer would perhaps not consider. But using accesskeys could make navigation on a mobile device considerably easier.

<li><a href=”home.html” accesskey=”1″>Home</a></li>

This links the “1″ key on the mobile device to the Home link.

Use Ordered Lists for Navigation

Again something most professional web designers using CSS layouts will be quite confident with.

Link Phone Numbers

One of the benefits of the Mobile Web is that its users primarily view it on their phone, so allowing the user to quickly and easily make phone calls is a pretty cool idea.
<a href=”tel:+12065450210″>+1 206 545-0210</a>
Like any hyperlink, any text could appear between the <a> element to initiate a call. However, the recommendation is to display the phone number.

Caching

“Limited bandwidth and high latency can reduce the usability of Web sites on mobile devices. Using caching information effectively can reduce the need to reload data such as style sheets, images and pages, thus improving performance and reducing cost of use. It can also prevent the reuse of content where this is not appropriate, for example content that is adapted for one device should not be re-used by different devices. Devices and network caches are both affected by caching information.

How to do it:
Set expiry times in a way that is appropriate to your application. Consider using Cache-Control: public to allow sharing of pages between devices, Cache-Control: private to allow re-use but only by the requesting device and Cache-Control: nocache to prevent caching.”
- W3C Mobile Web Initiative

Tab Order

Consider the order of elements on your page by either completely avoiding the tabindex attribute and allowing the browser to determine the logical order of elements, or by specifying the order explicitly. Either way it’s worth checking the page works as expected when tabing through links and other elements.

Labels on Forms

It’s good to use the <label> tag to link labels to form elements. I typically build forms using a definition list, as this represents in my opinion a semantically correct markup for a form which also looks perfectly ok even without any styling at all.

References

Mobile Web Developer’s Guide from dev.mobi

W3C’s Mobile Web Initative

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

I’ve been reading a fair bit lately into what many people suspect will be the ‘next big thing’ on the Internet; the final ‘coming of age’ of the mobile Internet.

There are a lot of people doing a lot of things in the mobile web world, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of a whole new world of innovation, but here are my top finds so far.

www.gypsii.com - A social networking tool which is location based. There’s a neat little introduction video which explains it all.
www.mofuse.com - Create a mobile version of your site.

Here’s one vision that I especially like, entitled The Future of Internet Search: Mobile Version, from the PetitInvention blog.

But you might ask why this has happened before. People have been talking about the mobile web for ages, but it’s not really caught on… There are a few reasons for this, but many people now believe we’re literally standing on the edge of a precipice of a new cultural revolution where access to mobile web technologies and services will literally change the way we live and organise our lives together.

Buy why now?

i) Web developers are finally embracing the use of good, high quality, semantically rich code. CSS layouts are replacing the bloating table based layouts of the late 90’s and early 00’s.

ii) Mobile phone technology is also finally catching up to the demands placed on it by the content. XHTML is becoming more widely supported in place of the older more basic mobile markup languages such as WML. The iphone is the obvious example of how people are starting to realise they will be able to access fully featured websites via their phones.

iii) It might be a small factor, but a new announcement by the European Commission to support in-flight mobile use by harmonizing the technical and licensing requirements.

iv) Mobile Internet companies are starting to offer the consumer a realistically affordable tarrifs for going online.

v) Firefox on your mobile. - Mobile Firefox prototype browser arrives for eager early adopters to play with.

So the infrastructure is there, the technology is there. The software and applications are fastly becoming available. All that remains now is the slow but inevitable adoption of all this by the average joe on their mobile handset.

If anyone would like to show us some examples of their mobile based services and applications we’d love to see them.

A websites navigation is one of the most important aspects in it’s design. Making a site easy to navigate and intuitive to the user, while at the same time interesting and original is always something to aspire to. This article by smashing magazine gives a nice little overview of some of the latest trends currently in use and a great showcase for inspiration.

How easy is it to change the entire look of your site? If your site is more than 2 years old and the slightest bit complicated I would imagine it’s pretty tricky…

The days of table based layouts are long behind us. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a surge in the use of true CSS based layouts which is fantastic news for everyone. It makes designs typically much cleaner, files sizes much smaller and sites faster to load. Best of all, with the style elements of your site clearly separated from the content and stuctural elements you’re able to change the look and feel of your site very quickly and easily.

We’re just putting the finishing touches to a great new artist website CMS (content management system) that lets artists create quick and simple websites to showcase their work. The coolest thing, (apart from the use of the legendary Thickbox to update the pages, and the lovely galleries), is the ease at which the artist can literally switch the entire look of their site if they get bored of it, by logging in and switching the skin.

Check it out http://www.artist-websites.co.uk/designs. I think the daisy one is the coolest!