Simon Griffiths Blog

These are some questions I normally ask clients when I am looking to develop a website.

I will expand on this post later to add in more details.

1. What is the website for?
Brochure, E-commerce, Business card, reinforcement
[Why: to see what the site need to include and what technologies should be involved]

2. Who are the customers?
Male, Female
Age range
What do they do
What is their job title
[Why: to try to profile the customer so that site design and content can be created to suit the audience]

2a. Who is the competition?
[Why: so we can look at their sites and see what we can learn about keywords, expected layout etc]

3. How would you expect the customer to find the site?
Search, word of mouth, literature/business card
[Why: to see how much emphasis needs to be placed on SEO/SEM]

4. If search, what would they be looking for to find the site?
[Why: so that keywords can be checked to see if there are more available]

5. What sort of device would they use to access the site?
PC, netbook, phone
[Why: to see what technologies need to be involved/avoided, to look at creating specific content for a device]

6. Where would they typically access the site from?
Office, home, out and about (using public wifi or mobile connection)
[Why: to see how much bandwidth the site can take without inconveniencing the user]

7. Are you geographically based?
What are the limitations you want to put on area.
[Why: to make sure content is written to make this clear, make sure Google is aware of this and to see what type of hosting is required]

8. What type of site are you thinking about?
Examples of sites that you like.
What do you like about these sites?
[Why: to get an idea of what you expect from the site]

9. What tone do you want to set with the site?
Professional (typically more subdued), light hearted, fun
[Why: to make sure that the tone of writing matches that of other literature or the image the company is portraying]

10. Do you have other literature/business cards?
[Why: so we can make sure the site matches the style and creates a total company image]

11. Would you want to be able to edit the site content?
All content, a blog, social media
[Why: to see what technologies we need to use and what you expect from updates]

12. What timeframe and budget is the site required in?
[Why: Timeframe will set what is there is time to do in terms of design and interaction, also whether the designer can actually do it or not. Budget will set again set what is possible to do].
[Note: Budget is always tricky as the client will not want the designer to design to a budget. Possibly ask for a range, or look at requested features and say roughly what each will cost].

I have just put up a post on the Webxopt site showing how to structure 2 and 3 column layouts to makes sure that your main content is always at the top of the HTML page, where search engines like it.

I’m never sure where to post these things these days, but just in case the link is

http://webxopt.com/wordpress/2009/08/web-page-structure-for-great-seo/

The only MP4 Video Player that doesn't play MP4's?

I have just bought a Ben10 MP4 Video watch from Targets sale for $99. In theory this looks like the product I promised to make my son from a video photo frame and an old Ben10 watch surround, so why bother making it? This way it has custom Ben10 animations and everything right!?

First things first. What’s in the box. The box itself says it includes Earphones, USB Cable and CD-ROM. Open it up and guess what, no USB cable. That’s not such a problem though as it’s the micro USB sort that often come with a camera, so I had a couple of those knocking around. STOP THE PRESS – I’ve just found it. It is about 2cm long and part of the strap.

One thing missing from the box…instructions. There are none. That’s right none at all. Not even a brief explanation of the buttons. I guess that might be on the CD, but it is one of those microsize CD’s and I have a slot loading drive on a Mac, so I can’t have a look to find out. So I searched the web and nothing (hence this post) the supplier Canal Toys has a website that is “Under Construction”.

Okay, so I have a few set backs here, but no problems, according to the box it will play “mp4, avi and wmv (software included)”. I can’t get to the software as it’s on the CD, but I have Quicktime Pro, Handbrake and a number of other video converters that will move things over to mp4 and avi just fine.

Plug in the watch, and up comes the disc with no problems. The file system is easy to see so I navigate into the folder and ….the file is smv, not mp4 or any other format.

I had played the video before and found that it looked a bit rough with a very low frame rate but I had put that down to some dodgy encoding but on further investigation it seems that the only thing that will play is this SMV format (which was originally designed for the Super Nintendo to give you an idea of quality). Hmm an MP4 Video Watch that doesn’t play MP4′s!! I have looked for a converter but with no luck for the Mac.

By the way the ‘speakers’ are so quiet that you can’t even hear them well in an almost silent room. Think taking ear phones out of you ears and listening to those.

The next thing I tried was putting mp4′s in there and see if it will read them. I dragged on mp4′s formatted to 160x128px and 15fps (to be safe). Then tried to unmount the watch. It unmounted, then remounted. I tried again and got the same. After multiple attempts I had no choice and just pulled to cord, which corrupted all the data despite having made sure there was no writing going on. Now I have a watch even without the free Ben10 episode included!

At this point the problems have ceased to make the device fun, and have basically crippled it to the point that it is impossible to use and the only thing I can do with it is try to take it back.

I haven’t even mention that while trying to navigate the watch I managed to crash it to a shell script 3 times!

This is a really, really disappointing product. Any Ben10 fan should love it, but instead it doesn’t include what it should do in the box (no printed instructions is unforgivable), it doesn’t work at all with a Mac (no compatibility info on the box), even if it did, the video was poor, audio via the speakers was non existent, and it crashed to a shell prompt 2 or 3 times in the few minutes I played with it.

I haven’t even mentioned the potential legal problems I’m sure the company could get into by calling the product an mp4 video watch when it won’t play mp4 videos!

What is really disappointing is this stuff isn’t that hard and for $100 ($130 rrp) you should get native mp4 support out of the box, and with a decent frame rate.

Note that there seems to be a few versions of this watch about. Others seem to have a 1.3-1.5″ screen. This one was 1.8″.

The product again is the Ben10 MP4 Video Watch officially endorsed and supplied by Canal Toys and bought at Target in Australia in July 2009.

Avoid this like the plague even if your kids beg for it!

Simons Rating 0/5

I have been doing a lot of work recently to develop a mega drop down menu that is easy to apply and code and is extremely usable. If you aren’t aware of mega drop downs I would suggest you check out the article in Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox dated 23rd March 2009.

The use of mega drop downs is an increasing trend which is sometimes applied well, and other times quite badly. At a recent barcamp in Brisbane I did a short presentation looking at mega drop downs and their use. This is available at http://www.webxopt.com/resources.html.

Over the next few weeks I will put up more info on mega drop downs including example code. This may be on the webxopt site, or I may put it on a specific URL. However I’ll make sure this blog gets updated with links.

I have just started a new company blog for Webxopt (stands for Web Experience Optimisation) and am hoping to put all my work related info on to that site.

My first post is on Overlay Box Usability. Those are the boxes that ‘overlay’ the main content of the page – No surprises there I guess! I have talked about how to put them together and when to use them and when not to!

The post is at http://webxopt.com/wordpress/2009/07/overlay-box-usability/.

btw – I’ll still be using this site for anything that doesn’t fit my work, which will probably be most things to be honest!

I was amused to see this morning that our company webmarshal was blocking Bing for porn!

You may have heard all the fuss about this but you can look at pictures and video in Bing without going to the sites themselves, which makes Bing a proxy for porn.

I have to say though that blocking a search engine because you can find porn on it may be a bit harsh! Mind you it is Bing, so are you bothered?

A quick post to let you know that I have been playing with the iPhone OS3.0 on my 1st Gen iPod Touch for the last 24 hours.

I got the update for copy and paste really, but there is a lot of other stuff in there that makes it well worth the price.

Search is great, it is fast, suggests what you may be looking for and you can refine your search as you need. I can’t really work this out. How come on the Windows XP machine I use at work a search takes about an hour, but on the iPod it is instantaneous? Go figure!

iPod Touch owners also missed out in the 2.1 upgrade, as one of the main features, maps with street view, for some reason didn’t make the cut for the iPod. Well it’s in this time, and I have to say it works very well.

As for stability, so far everything is very stable with no crashes or any significant problems I can see.

I have been setting up a site using a dreamweaver template to set areas of text that a client can edit. There were standard titles which I had put into the template and editable areas for copy between the titles.

To style and space the text I was adding into the css styling such as h2 + p then adding some padding. This worked great in firefox but when I came to test in internet explorer it completely broke.

After a bit of investigation it seems that the problem was the dreamweaver commenting that opened or closed the editable areas. The comment was coming between the h2 and p for example and ie was seeing them as not following each other. Firefox interpretes how you would expect of coarse and ignores the comment! Anyway take out the comments and ie works okay too.

This unfortunatel was the only way I could get the pages to work in ie and therefore broke the template.

This may also be of interest if you are adding commenting into your code and noticing copy spacing in ie is not right.

I have just been reading an article on the capacity of the data cables going from Sydney through to Guam, and then on to the US. Currently it stands at 4Gb/s but with the new cable from Pipe Networks that should increase over time to 6Gb/s.

Trouble is that doesn’t stand up with a 100Mb/s NBN. When you look at the figures: -

The totally capacity coming into Australia when this is up to capacity will be 6Tb/s. The NBN will provide data connections at 100Mb/s or 0.1Gb/s. That means that just 60,000 connections at a full 100Mb/s, or assuming that maybe 20% of households are on the net at the same time connecting to the US (20% of 8.5M households is 1.7M connections) gives just 3.5Mb/s per connection.

Okay I know that there will be local caching, but this is going to need to be huge in order for us to see more than a connection at roughly the same speed as ADSL.