Archive for June, 2008

We’ve been looking at what makes a good Web Application design good. We’ll continue that thought with Mint.com the financial account managing software.

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Web applications are the commodity to deal in on the internet these days but what makes them successful isn’t always their function, often times design plays a huge role. Today I’m taking a look at five apps that exemplify various aspects of great Web App design.

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Web applications are a growing trend in cloud computing but what makes the most popular applications, popular? I believe the answer lies in good design.

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One critical factor many new start-ups forget is that half of creating a successful web app is making sure that its well designed and easy to use. In this part of our series we’ll continue looking at well designed web applications….

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Web applications are all the rage these days as cloud computing becomes the standard way of doing things. Whether it’s Facebook apps, Web clients, Flash, Adobe Air Apps or anything else that’s becoming ubiquitous, a huge part of the development of these applications is design and what you an learn from the design of quality web applications is priceless. In this series of posts, I’ll spotlight five well known web applications and share the design aspects that I think make each unique.

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I’ll go out on a limb and say Wordpress is one of the finest software applications to come out this millennium. Its put the power of the press and the ability to reach thousands (or millions) of people in the hands of the people live never before. People from every walks of life can create powerful websites without needing to know a shred of code and it’s all open source. That said, for people who want to dig deeper and learn a little bit more about how to create their own themes, the process can be incredibly daunting. In took me ten posts just to cover the subject a few months back on this post. What Wordpress truly needs is a WYSIWYG editor to really empower people to get creative with their blogs!

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Snipplr.com is like del.icio.us for people who write a lot of code. Whether you develop for Ruby or Django, hack WordPress or MovableType, or if you just write XHTML, you probably keep a “Code Diary” full of useful tricks, hacks and hints that you’ve used in past projects. Snipplr exists to let you share that code with other developers just like yourself. It’s become indispensable to my work flow since I found it!

Although I love design and web development, there are some days when I hit something akin to the writer’s wall. There really are days when I would rather bang my head against the wall than try to conjure up something new an exciting for a new client. I wrote about some places that I find inspirational a few weeks back at Smashing but that’s just me getting wanderlust. So where can you get inspiration when you’re fresh out of ideas and kind of sick of being creative?

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From time to time, Google hosts live chats with webmasters attended by some of their key developers. If anything, this is a great venue to ask that nagging question in your head. The first time this was held was in March 2008, and you can read the details of the successful launch at SEOroundtable.com. As a consequence, a follow up was held earlier this month and an MP3 of the discussions is available here, as well as a transcript of the chat session.
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Extensible Hypertext Markup (XML) has changed the web as we knew it and helped to make websites rich, well designed and fast loading. It’s become an integral part of Web 2.0 that won’t be going away any time soon. So what’s next for CSS? Mozilla and the Opera Software company give us some clues as to what features from the new CSS3 markup that may be incorporated into the next generation of web browsers. Here are some highlights…

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