I understand the point of PowerPoint - I really do. Even when criticised for a "pipeline" approach to presenting information. Even when the three-way simultaneous bombardment of visual, textual and aural information is causing mental shutdown in the audience. Even when presentations become so bloated that they become a hindrance to global security... even when drowning in the deepest depths of clip-art hell, I understand its appeal and why it remains so entrenched in corporate life.
What I don't understand, however, is why Microsoft seems content for it to remain such a clunky, buggy, temperamental albatross of an application. Over the past couple of revisions we've seen the introduction of pseudo-3D text styles, nice fades rather than the old-school pixel dissolve, and a larger range of fly-ins than Easyjet. All very lovely (if still lagging somewhat behind Apple's Keynote), but still not even coming close to addressing the real problems.
Take one of our recent experiences as an example. Our client wanted their PowerPoint presentation to offer a little more in the way of visual punch. Aware of the common traps when designing engaging slides, they wondered if we could add some fancy eye-candy using Flash. Surely no problem, right? The software has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and is as widespread as any other document format. Heck, there's even an option to insert a "Flash Document" under the "Insert Object" menu. Except... um... that doesn't work, either crashing the application, displaying an error or settling simply for displaying a Flash icon.
No, instead we need the "Developer" menu (helpfully hidden by default), so we can insert a "Shockwave Flash Object" control. Cue a baffling series of parameters, embedding options, not to mention delving into the code view's Visual Basic editor to hack a script that makes sure the Flash movie rewinds correctly when returning to a slide. Which in turn means your PowerPoint is now loaded with enough macros to terrify even the most liberal of corporate IT lockdowns. When it works, of course... which it might not :-/
Oh, and don't expect any of this to work on any Macs running the slides. Nope, this is ActiveX territory only.
Surely this isn't the future of corporate presentations - locked into slide after slide of the same stale templates simply because PowerPoint is so backwards it can't cope with the inclusion of anything more complex than a sound file?
31 August 2007
28 August 2007
Distorted images in Internet Explorer
One of our clients recently complained that the images on their website were looking distorted and fuzzy when viewed in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. We tried to replicate the problem on our own IE6/XP setup but we could find any problem. We asked our client to try other computers and browsers in his office and they worked just fine too.
After a long and drawn out process of elimination, googling and head scratching, Ian finally came across an article that talked about distorted images in Internet Explorer caused by the operating system using non-standard DPI settings.
Basically, there's a setting in the advanced settings of the display control panel that allows you to change the DPI from 96 (normal) to 120 (oversize). This setting is sometimes used to increase system font size but has the side effect of badly scaling all images in Internet Explorer by 125% - hence the distortion and fuzziness.
Needless to say, after changing the DPI setting back to 96, our client's problem was resolved.
If this post helped you with the same problem, please let us know by adding a comment.
After a long and drawn out process of elimination, googling and head scratching, Ian finally came across an article that talked about distorted images in Internet Explorer caused by the operating system using non-standard DPI settings.
Basically, there's a setting in the advanced settings of the display control panel that allows you to change the DPI from 96 (normal) to 120 (oversize). This setting is sometimes used to increase system font size but has the side effect of badly scaling all images in Internet Explorer by 125% - hence the distortion and fuzziness.
Needless to say, after changing the DPI setting back to 96, our client's problem was resolved.
If this post helped you with the same problem, please let us know by adding a comment.
24 August 2007
Does Google prefer hypens or underscores?
Senior Google guy Matt Cutts has recently confirmed that it is still preferable to use a hyphen instead of an underscore when naming files or web pages. Google will read a URL such as www.wordsun.co.uk/corporate_web_site_design.html and conclude that the page is about "corporate_web_site_design" not "corporate web site design". Do you see the difference? In the former example, corporate_web_site_design is treated as a single word (one that no one would ever for search for) whereas the latter example will give Google four separate key words to chew on plus a whole phrase "corporate", "web", "site", "design" and "corporate website design".
In the long term Google may be looking into interpreting the underscore character as a word separator but for now the advice is still definitely - don't use underscores!
In the long term Google may be looking into interpreting the underscore character as a word separator but for now the advice is still definitely - don't use underscores!
17 July 2007
Summer holidays are coming
It's that time of year again when everything goes quiet as everyone goes off on their summer holidays. This year has been the worst summer weather I can remember (global warming innit?) so I'm looking forward to some better weather in France next week.
Strangely though, this year has also been the busiest summer so far that I can remember and the phones haven't stopped ringing. We're busier than ever now when we would normally be taking advantage of a lull in business to catch up on some housekeeping tasks.
Anyway, I'm going to sign off now for a couple of weeks and start practising my holiday French: "Je suis désolé mais je ne parle pas Français..."
Strangely though, this year has also been the busiest summer so far that I can remember and the phones haven't stopped ringing. We're busier than ever now when we would normally be taking advantage of a lull in business to catch up on some housekeeping tasks.
Anyway, I'm going to sign off now for a couple of weeks and start practising my holiday French: "Je suis désolé mais je ne parle pas Français..."
04 July 2007
Update on Corporate Website Design experiment
I've been keeping an eye on the search engine positioning experiment we started on the 19th June and whilst there's no obvious result for the blog at the moment, a similar experiment I started on the www.wordsun.co.uk website has yielded excellent results.
After making my last post, I decided to try optimising the main website for the phrase 'Corporate Website Design' as well and discovered that by adding the phrase to the title of the page, adding a link to a page called 'Corporate Website Design' which also mentioned the keywords in context and a few other minor nips and tucks, we jumped quite rapidly from position 16 on Google to 8 which puts us firmly on the front page. Even better, if you search for "Corporate Website Design" (with the quotes) we appear at positions 3 and 4!
I've made a few more tweaks to the page to see whether I can get it any higher - I really want to get to number one on Google now. I'll let you know how it goes...
After making my last post, I decided to try optimising the main website for the phrase 'Corporate Website Design' as well and discovered that by adding the phrase to the title of the page, adding a link to a page called 'Corporate Website Design' which also mentioned the keywords in context and a few other minor nips and tucks, we jumped quite rapidly from position 16 on Google to 8 which puts us firmly on the front page. Even better, if you search for "Corporate Website Design" (with the quotes) we appear at positions 3 and 4!
I've made a few more tweaks to the page to see whether I can get it any higher - I really want to get to number one on Google now. I'll let you know how it goes...
29 June 2007
On wide monitors, liquid layouts and line lengths...
Read any decent article on CSS layout nowadays and you'll inevitably see mention of "liquid" layouts, where the page contents scale to fill the available browser space. They've become something of an obsession for developers recently, with many going so far as to coin the phrase "the Holy Grail". In slightly less hyperbolic terms this refers to a 100% cross-browser compatible 3-column layout, with fixed outer columns and a central column that scales to fill the remaining available width. When even CSS guru Eric Meyer has a proposed solution, you know its a movement with some traction.
It would be somewhat controversial then to suggest that maybe a liquid layout isn't always the best option, but that's what I'm about to do.
We've hit a point when wide-screen monitors with high resolutions are becoming increasingly commonplace, especially with many of our clients, who tend to be highly technical companies working on products and systems which require as much screen real-estate as possible. And from an aesthetic point of view, I'd agree that a website constrained to a maximum width can sometimes look a little odd in a full-screen browser on some of these monitors.
The question is, do we design and layout content to fit the technical specifications of the visitors machine, or the physical limitations of the person using it?
Unfortunately, the human eye and brain haven't quite developed at the same rate as our monitors! Studies at the end of the 19th Century (Weber, Javel & Cohn, from 1881 to 1883) determined that 4inches was the optimum line length for printed media, and things haven't changed that greatly since then. The shift to computer monitors at the end of the 20th century saw a slight change, with Dyson and Kipping (1998) finding that reading rates increased as characters per line increased. In their study using 12-point type, the 4-inch line length produced the slowest reading rate and the 7.3 inch line length produced the fastest. However, users preferred the 4-inch line lengths. Similar studies have since been carried out by Youngman and Scharff (1999), Fernandez and Hull (2002) and most recently Dawn Shaikh (2005).
Almost uniformly, participants read varying line-lengths at similar speeds but expressed a preference for lengths of around 4-6 inches (or 10-15 words). This fits the natural arc of the eye, meaning it has to travel less, enabling the brain to concentrate on the text on the page, which is ultimately the point of most websites!
So yes, of course there are reasons why one might want to make page content "liquid", and while it can present technical issues there's certainly no shortage of solutions. But when the underlying purpose of a site is to convey information - in some cases very detailed technical information - I would argue that improved usability for the visitor should always be the most important goal. And if that means a constrained-width layout, then that's the layout model we'll adopt.
It would be somewhat controversial then to suggest that maybe a liquid layout isn't always the best option, but that's what I'm about to do.
We've hit a point when wide-screen monitors with high resolutions are becoming increasingly commonplace, especially with many of our clients, who tend to be highly technical companies working on products and systems which require as much screen real-estate as possible. And from an aesthetic point of view, I'd agree that a website constrained to a maximum width can sometimes look a little odd in a full-screen browser on some of these monitors.
The question is, do we design and layout content to fit the technical specifications of the visitors machine, or the physical limitations of the person using it?
Unfortunately, the human eye and brain haven't quite developed at the same rate as our monitors! Studies at the end of the 19th Century (Weber, Javel & Cohn, from 1881 to 1883) determined that 4inches was the optimum line length for printed media, and things haven't changed that greatly since then. The shift to computer monitors at the end of the 20th century saw a slight change, with Dyson and Kipping (1998) finding that reading rates increased as characters per line increased. In their study using 12-point type, the 4-inch line length produced the slowest reading rate and the 7.3 inch line length produced the fastest. However, users preferred the 4-inch line lengths. Similar studies have since been carried out by Youngman and Scharff (1999), Fernandez and Hull (2002) and most recently Dawn Shaikh (2005).
Almost uniformly, participants read varying line-lengths at similar speeds but expressed a preference for lengths of around 4-6 inches (or 10-15 words). This fits the natural arc of the eye, meaning it has to travel less, enabling the brain to concentrate on the text on the page, which is ultimately the point of most websites!
So yes, of course there are reasons why one might want to make page content "liquid", and while it can present technical issues there's certainly no shortage of solutions. But when the underlying purpose of a site is to convey information - in some cases very detailed technical information - I would argue that improved usability for the visitor should always be the most important goal. And if that means a constrained-width layout, then that's the layout model we'll adopt.
19 June 2007
Corporate website design
Corporate website design experiment: how to use a blog to increase your ranking in the search engines.
Everybody knows that a better result in the search engines = more traffic = more sales, right? So here's an experiment to see just how easy (or difficult) it is to claw your way up the search results using the power of your blog. I've carefully written this post to include the key phrase "corporate website design" in several prominent places and you'll notice that in some places I've spelled the phrase corporate website design (three words) and in others corporate web site design (four words). This is because Google will differentiate between a search for "website" and "web site" and treat them as two different searches bringing up different sets of results.
Now, I have to be honest, I'm not sure how well this will work on a brand new blog with no one linking to it yet but I'll keep an eye on the results over the coming weeks and let you know what happens.
At the time of writing (19th June 2007) this blog did not appear anywhere in the top 50 results when searching Google for "corporate website design" or "corporate web site design". Take it away search engine spiders...
Everybody knows that a better result in the search engines = more traffic = more sales, right? So here's an experiment to see just how easy (or difficult) it is to claw your way up the search results using the power of your blog. I've carefully written this post to include the key phrase "corporate website design" in several prominent places and you'll notice that in some places I've spelled the phrase corporate website design (three words) and in others corporate web site design (four words). This is because Google will differentiate between a search for "website" and "web site" and treat them as two different searches bringing up different sets of results.
Now, I have to be honest, I'm not sure how well this will work on a brand new blog with no one linking to it yet but I'll keep an eye on the results over the coming weeks and let you know what happens.
At the time of writing (19th June 2007) this blog did not appear anywhere in the top 50 results when searching Google for "corporate website design" or "corporate web site design". Take it away search engine spiders...
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