Recently in Interactive Category
Earlier this summer I began a look at the alternatives available to those of us who have domains on our hands but neither the desire nor the resources to build them out to full-blown sites. Beyond simply using the domain parking provided by your registrar, what are the possibilities?
If you've been involved in web work for a while, you've probably accumulated at least a few domain names. These could be for sites you planned to build, but never got around to. Or ones you launched but then dropped when the concept didn't pan out. Or even wacky ones you registered on a whim, just for fun. After all, for just a few bucks it won't set you back much more than a MacLunch to be the proud owner of a shiny new domain name. But as these start to pile up, the renewal costs can become significant. Get those emails often enough from your registrar reminding you that your account has been dinged again and a little voice starts saying, "Just why the heck have you spent the last ten years paying for HarryPotterSucks.com?"
Sometimes it's only years after an initially bad experience that you finally embrace something that once seemed repugnant. Take opera, for example. While I periodically give it a shot, I just haven't been able to develop a taste for what many feel is one of the highest achievements of Western civilization. I chalk my aversion up to a traumatic exposure to the works of Florence Foster Jenkins.
The above photo was taken at the exact moment when a website designer, having finished a complex new site for a client, belatedly thought to check how it displayed in Internet Explorer 6. Been there, lately?
There are hundreds—yes, hundreds—of awards available to those in the ad agency biz, ensuring that just about everyone should take home a prize at some point. Not that competition for these bits of plastic and glass isn't intense, since not only individual careers but the fate of entire agencies rests on continually snagging them to ensure a steady stream of top accounts. In fact, it's gotten to the point where campaigns are increasingly created with an eye on awards, not always to the benefit of the client. A good way to monitor this is on AdsOfTheWorld.com, a Graphics.com Network site, where visitors are quick to comment on campaigns that serve agencies first and clients second.
The latest version of Microsoft's browser for Windows XP and Vista is available for download. Oh, the horror.
Abraham Maslow famously said that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Closer to home, it would seem that for Adobe Systems, every web site is starting to look like an application. We're further and further away from the company's early 80s origins, based on the brilliant PostScript page description language developed by founders Warnock and Geske. But who can blame Adobe? There's an undeniable attraction to playing in the big leagues of application development, along with Microsoft and Google.
As I wrote in Are You Deprecated, I've been making a valiant effort to shake off my antiquated Web page coding habits, which date back to the days of Notepad and Netscape 0.9. With most of my more horrendous old practices now behind me, I've turned to looking for solutions to display problems in new places. Hence my recent, if belated, arrival in the land of Dynamic HTML and fancier CSS. If, like me, your main focus is graphics and publishing, with just a secondary need to create and maintain Web sites, then the good news is that you can use these to quickly add snappy, modern functionality to your pages without making it your life's work.
With Internet Explorer 7 out for some weeks now, I'm confident that you've installed it and gone through your Web design projects to ensure they all render properly. And if you came across any shortcomings, you carefully went through Microsoft's developer support material and quickly brought any offending pages up to speed. Needless to say, whatever process you employ to track browser usage has been updated, so that you can keep an eye on the accelerating number of version 7 users visiting your sites. What's that? You say you didn't know 7 was available yet? And you have no intention of ever installing it or even checking your pages for version 7 compliance? Sir, you sound to me like a die-hard Firefox user and to you I say: Shame!
