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Michael Boyle's weblog

Distribution > Destination

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Avenue A | Razorfish’s Garrick Schmitt has written a great post in the Digital Design Blog that riffs on information from their Digital Outlook report: Does the Home Page Still Matter?: Why Distribution Trumps Destination Online. Most of the web folks that I know have been working on this basis for some time now, but it remains important to underline that the old “get people in through the homepage” model is broken (and likely always was, it was just harder to figure out before).

Trying to force people into a specific usage pattern is a recipe for failure – trumped only by the mistake of trying to predict where users will come from in the first place. What does this mean in practice? Many things (and the conclusions in the post are right on), but two immediate things spring to mind:

  • Deep links have to provide context within the URL itself (i.e., be readable)
  • Don’t hide content in non-machine-readable formats that people can’t link to directly (and that Google can’t grok)

Excellent mashup for Super Tuesday

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I’ve seen a lot of mashups in the past couple of years, but the Google Maps, Twitter, and Twittervision thing is one of the greatest I’ve seen. Not only does it seem to work very well – but the mix of live results and individual reactions is simply wonderful. And the presentation of the results (on the left of the screen) is a model of simple, clean, effective design. Not super-pretty, but more effective than all the bells and whistles generally seen at the Networks’ sites.

Scoble: Talking with Six Apart

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I just caught up with Scoble’s interview with Six Apart over at PodTech.net. It’s a good piece, though if you’ve been involved in blogging in the corporate environment there’s not much new. What was new was the focus the Six Apart gang is putting on getting MT into all of the mashups that are coming into vogue. I think they’re really well positioned to take that a long way.

I just hope that Six Apart doesn’t lose its core constituency first – like me, for instance. Shipping MT4 without an easily extendable library of ready-made templates – and without even providing complete instructions at how to build your own – was a huge mistake.

In my travels today

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In my travels today

I came across an extended interview with Peter Merholz, published in the NextD Journal. It’s an exasperating interview to read, because although the interviewer, GK VanPatter is clearly a sensitive and intelligent person, he seems completely obsessed with design-as-boundaried-profession, which makes him unable to truly understand the first thing that Merholz says.

It’s a common reaction, the retrenchment of beleaguered fields into professional re-definition and defense. We have also seen it in terms of ‘journalism’ in the past decade as well as they have been faced with blogs and other new media. But it’s pointless. Professions aren’t successful because, as VanPatter’s ridiculous hypothetical about heart surgeons suggests, they define themselves as the ones who can do X task, they are successful because they CAN accomplish X task. A CEO of a hospital can’t redefine ‘heart surgery’ such that the janitor can do it, because to try to do so makes it no longer ‘heart surgery’ at all.

The relevance of this is not only important for design, but for all areas of expertise on the web. The ones who understand, deeply, business – users and customers, relevant financial models, business goals, marketing approaches, all of those – are the ones who will be in leadership of organizations, including leading design processes. Designers can complain about it or do something about it – but it must be understood that doing something about it means learning how business works, not laughing at business and demeaning business people and their aesthetics. As Merholz says, it’s up to designers to define their role.

I tweaked the design

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I tweaked the design

around here in the past couple of days. I migrated the whole layout to use (close to) standard Movable Type templates, and in so doing made a few other subtle changes. In so doing I was able to (finally) migrate my old and neglected Words page to the current design. It had been stuck for some time in a previous generation.

Design note: the p:first-child selector is critical for me to keep my strange “Title-as-beginning-of-post” approach. Tech note: I still haven’t been able to get the freaking MT search going. I used to use an external service but I’d prefer not to continue. But the Search is down as the cgi doesn’t seem to load. Strange.

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