So when you go to www.mikemodano.com, you see a nice enough site, but I am not impressed with animated GIFs or Flash animation.  These days I quickly resort to viewing the source to see just how astute the designer or design agency is.  So in this case, what do I find?  Obtrusive javascript and a tables-based design.  Yikes!  Maybe I, myself, need a reality check, but I thought we were past this kind of implementation approach.  Its just too easy to build it the right way with web standards these days.

So I had to go explore which firm put this site together.  Clicking the link at the bottom of the page takes me to Nform Interative which contains an all Flash home page with a logo that is clipped in Firefox and a page entitled “temp_home_page”.  What’s more, there’s no pages to describe the agency.  Needless to say, its completely SEO-unfriendly.  Wow!  And they got the Mike Modano gig?!

This is all relevant to me because I am embarking on a freelance career where I do contract programming and website development.  I do all this with the latest trends in technology and web standards.  So, test-driven development, CSS-based designs and lean standards-compliant markup are staples of anything I would do.  But it highlights to me that we still have a long way to go because people are still building old school sites and clients are still paying for them.

Hopefully, I can articulate why my approach is better and start winning some of these clients.  Doing so will offer them bigger bang for the buck and position them better for the future.  Its too late for Mike’s site, though.

Consider taking the Google or Yahoo approach whereby your sites are “properties” and are named at the subdomain level.  For example, http://maps.google.com or http://local.yahoo.com.  Taking their examples, you can see that their primary domain name has nothing to do with either of their properties.  So basically, you simplify your problem down to finding one good domain name.  Thereafter, you can use any subdomain name that you want.

With most of the good domain names taken, this may be your best option.  I’m not sure why we aren’t seeing more of this.  Given how easy it is to put up a website these days, its likely that people will start to have multiple websites and this would be a perfect strategy.  However, you may have to Think Two Products Ahead and have thought about the brand behind your properties.

I had this thought many months ago and searched for a domain name to use.  Even finding one was difficult, but I was able to do it — I’m sure you can too.  The domain name that I chose is neatoidea.com (nothing there yet), which has a sort of quirky retro feel and could be used for any of my properties.  So now I can create http://.neatoidea.com and I’m all set.

Of course, you will have to decide whether you want coordinated accounts for your properties or whether they each stand on their own, so a little planning is in order.

Here’s hoping this is a helpful, if not neato idea for you…

But sometimes you don’t have to read books or blog posts to recognize an obvious improvement in a site.

Someone I know (I promise its not me), recently took an online defensive driving course over the web. Such courses provide video or written content that you must pay attention to and then they quiz you to ensure that you’ve comprehended the material. To get credit for the course, you must be able to pass the quizzes.

Needless to say, the quiz interface design is critical since the quiz enables you to ultimately accomplish your goal of completing the course. However, this particular person was confused by the quiz question data entry. The answers were standard radio buttons, but the submit button was a non-standard image with a label that wasn’t intuitive. As such, the button wasn’t pressed and the alotted time for the question expired.

Now granted, this is not an egregious design failure. Once you miss one question, you figure it out quite readily on the next question. And if you are web savvy, you probably aren’t caught by this problem at all. But a more considered design might have done a couple of things to ensure users got off to a good start. First, if users are likely to be on the low end of web savvy, then use standard user interface controls (e.g. use the ugly gray button). Additionally, incorporate a test quiz into the flow to ensure that the user works through any usage issues. This enables them to work the kinks out while the stakes aren’t quite so high. Lastly, these days screencasts are all the rage. A brief video tour would demonstrate how to take the quiz and complete any other required tasks.