Petit Bourgeois

The web site of Jewelry store Eugène van Baal, as renewed by Splandigo, has launched today. Notable features, besides the usual clean URLs, elegant design, etc., are the Flash illustrations, that dynamically pull the information from the PointComma database. I've done only a bit of the Flash part.

My favorite co-operative hosting provider Ouvaton will soon be using Hostflow to manage its (new) platform, allow its users to manage their services, and invoice for usage. It's looking pretty good already, as it includes the Sympa mailing list system.

We'll have to adapt to many of the new platform's details, we're not happy about them all, but the improved and new features are overwhelmingly positive. Soon a beta release, I hope that the users' response will be positive as well!!

The Pakano lighting web site is live. Maarten has done the design but isn't very happy about it, and I've done the OSCommerce implementation (severely crippled: the client wanted only an online catalog, not a shop yet). I kinda like it, actually, especially that prism effect on the logo. Well, the terrible flash intro was quite forcefully requested by the client...

In two sessions (February 17 and March 3), six Splandigo employees assembled for the first installment of the Splandigo seminars. We had not set extremely high goals for this test, so that we could try out the idea a bit. The results were however quite satisfactory.

The initial idea was to ensure that we didn't get too strictly bound by the necessity of productivity, and that we kept ourselves sharp and up to date. It also had the very positive effect of allowing us all to be kept posted of the various fields we're each active in. Indeed, while many of our respective activities overlap (we are, after all, a web agency, and everything does roughly revolve around creating web sites), we do have quite distinct interests.

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I eventually did get home!

My bike is in here somewhere...

We're studying users. We're documenting objectives and constraints. And then we try to come up with a navigation. What I've been missing all along is the notion of dimensions. I used it in a couple of posts (about Stèles and this site), but it was sort of a randomly matching name for a very vague idea. It just grew a bit more firm (hmmm), after fermenting with an aspect of Carsten Schwesig's bendable interface, Gummi, where he mentions the capability of his system to handle various directions of the interaction (up, transition up, neutral, transition down, down, with the bendable interface, plus a 2D mapping of the screen's surface, cf. page 4).

The interesting factor here is that on the web we're working with a very abstract metaphor, primarily using the "page" object, with markings on it that aren't related to its (virtual) materiality. However, information architects do talk about location within a site. Links "take" the visitors "to" pages, or even to "places".

So where are we taking the user? There is of course a sense of space and of direction in the way we talk about navigation, but I feel that in order to deal with that sense of space, we ought to further study the dimensions of the information we're providing an interface to. The dimensions of the information are precisely what creates the navigation space and therefore that ought to define how the space-related aspects of that navigation are presented, behave and react to the user.

I will try, in the next few weeks, to explore what this means for a few sites I'm working on, and I'll see if that delivers results in terms of providing specific guidelines that increase the "obviousness" or helpfulness of the navigation devices I can think up. I'll try to see to what extent it matches the products of our other means to come up with navigation devices.

Warning: this is an utterly uninteresting post. However, I need to have that information available somewhere handy. Sorry for the noise!

The RINO Noord-Holland web site gets its course information updated from the RINO's office system 4 times a day, action triggered by a cron entry on our office server, Lancelot.

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I hadn't realized MacOS still had a different way of interpreting image colors than Windows. So the green area at the right side of my title bar (right of the photo) looked clipped when it shouldn't have. Fixed this with a solid-green background image. Can't check right now, but I'll ask Marius at the office to check that for me. Changed the color of the title too, now that the brown headers are (almost always) gone.

To keep each other (within the company) posted of what we each do and are interested in, we picked the date of February 17th for the first installment of the Splandigo Seminars. That's going to be a 3- to 4-hours session where all Splandigo employees will (in turn), make a presentation. I'll probably be talking about the business model of the blogosphere. Hopefully, the second session (March or April?) will be semi-public, with a few of our close contacts in attendance. Then, later, if things turn out well, we'll make this an actual public event (I can't wait!).