ThoseGeeks Blog

ThoseGeeks Co-Founder Presenting March 1st at Blog On Conference

2012-01-31T13:57:01+00:00

In case you might like to attend, I will be presenting at the 1st Annual Blog On Conference at the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center on March 1st, 2012.

Get more details and register here.

The Blog-On Conference was developed to answer these questions for individuals and business owners interested in starting a blog and current bloggers looking to expand their presence in the blogosphere. The Virginia Tech Southwest Center is hosting the 1st Blog-On Conference on Thursday, March 1, 2012 to assist those who are interested in learning more about blogging.
Topics include:
Creating and Maintaining a Blog People Will Read
Blogging Software and Hosting Options
Tools and Gadgets to Help You Connect
Managing a Blog Without Being Overwhelmed

Get more details and register here.

SOPA & PIPA - It Ain’t Good

2012-01-18T14:23:40+00:00

By now, many of you have surely heard about SOPA and PIPA. If not, let's take a moment to overview what it is and why it ain't good.

SOPA and PIPA are before Congress as a means to fight illegal online piracy.

First, PIPA and SOPA would censor the web and would give the entertainment industry a way to do so which pretty much resembles how China censors the Internet. If the entertainment industry sees something on eBay which could infringe on copyrighted material, the result doesn't have to be the deletion of that one item. They could shut down the entirety of eBay. How do you think eBay, its investors, and its users feel about this? The same goes for Facebook. The way the bills are worded, if somebody mentions Lady Gaga and her label decides that the comment was infringment on their trademark, they could potentially have the entirety of Facebook shut down. Your Farmville crops would surely die. Oh, and I just mentioned Lady Gaga. I hope our site doesn't get shut down if the bills pass.

All in all, that kind of radical power in censoring the internet would create huge risk for many businesses which operate online. That kind of risk will stiffle innovation. If SOPA and PIPA had existed when Zuckerberg were back at Harvard thinking about Facebook, he may not have created it for the risk and liability of having conversations going on which might infringe on somebody's trademark. When innovation is stiffled and investors see risk, that means they aren't as likely to invest in the startups and existing companies creating we enjoy online today. What does that inevitably spell? Unemployment for many. Haven't we had enough of that?

And not only that, it gives them the power to reach out to banks and online payment providers and cut off funding for anybody they deem to be infringing. Where's the due process?

Lastly, these guys won't stop piracy. Yes, it's a problem, but all anybody has to do is get a new IP address for their site, or provide users *just* an IP address to continue using services. If you take one down, they'll pop up in five other places. It is my opinion that they need to shelve this communistic approach. They need to sit down with people who actually understand the Internet and work out very targeted solutions to the piracy problem which won't jeopardize innovation, job creation and the freedom of expression on this medium which has become so much a part of our lives.

What are your thoughts? Share in the comments...

Additional SOPA/PIPA Links:

SOPA, PIPA: What you need to know (CBS News)
End Piracy, Not Libery (Google)
Say No To SOPA (Zeldman)
Stop American Censorship

Responsive Design For Mobile

2012-01-08T17:58:38+00:00

As we previously mentioned, the new ThoseGeeks site is built on a responsive layout. I thought I'd take a few minutes to explain what that means and how it's useful.

First, let's talk a little history about mobile development.

Just a few years ago, the best way to serve up a mobile-friendly version of a website was to use some fancy detection and redirection to a completely different version of the site. We've all seen that m.whatever.com or the www.whatever.com/mobile in the URLs we've visited on our phones. There were several problems with that. First, the detection wasn't always reliable. Detection depended on what's called the UA (user agent) string. That string is meant to identify the device a visitor is using, which means it varied between most every device. In order to detect, you had to keep a good list of all user agents, which with all the new phones coming out each month, was an impossible task. You just couldn't do it. The second problem is that you had to make assumptions with your mobile design. Maybe we designed the site for devices with a screen width of 320 pixels. Well what happens when somebody visits on a device with a screen width of 480 pixels? What about when they visit with a tablet and the user agent string says that it's mobile? That's going to deliver a worse experience than if you just left the site alone.

So what is a developer to do?

Enter responsive design. Most new devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones, now have more sophisticated browser which are capable of using a technology called CSS3. CSS3 has a feature called media queries, which lets us specify styles based on screen sizes rather than user agents. So what does that mean? Well, instead of building a whole new site for mobile with all the problems inherent with those assumptions, we use the exact same website and specify a few display rules to make the site look great based on a few different screen sizes. In essence, our default styling would apply to desktops. We create a media query and a set of rules for tablet screen sizes. We set another set of rules for smartphones. Then we specify another set of rules for lower resolution feature phones. In this way, we're able to slightly (or majorly) alter the layout of the page to respond to the screen size. Usually slightly does the trick.

Want to see what that looks like? If you're reading this on our website and you're using a modern browser (IE9, Chrome, or Firefox 3.5+), just slowly decrease the width of your browser window. Watch what happens as you shrink past certain widths. Once the window is about the width of a smartphone help in landscape orientation, you'll see our header and body adapt. Once your window is about the width of a smartphone held in portrait orientation, you'll see all double columns turn into single columns to make a great viewing experience that way too! Pretty sweet, right? And since this isn't a separate website, maintaining the site is much easier.

We believe this is how mobile websites should be developed. Implementing a responsive design ensures a great visitor experience across all devices. It's maintainable and much less time sucking (less costly) than developing a whole other mobile site like we did in the past.

What do you think? Have any questions? Let us know in the comments. Or if you want to talk to us about it, give us a shout.

New Year, New Site

2012-01-02T16:39:22+00:00

Throughout the course of 2011, we learned a lot working on our client projects. We discovered new, better ways of doing things. We improved our design skills. We picked up some new best practices. As we were closing in on a new year, we looked at our own site and figured it was probably a good time to put the new things we've learned to use. What you see now is the result of several months of work and we'd like to share with you how we arrived at the new design as well as some of the highlights we're proud of.

Taking Branding More Seriously

We've always taken our clients' brands seriously, but honestly we never really developed something formal of our own. We just did what we felt like at the time, which is silly for a design organization. We evaluated our colors and officially settled on red, black, white, and tan colors as the official color scheme. Based off that, we also developed the little "tg" icon which we've already started using on our social media presences and as our new favicon in the browser.

As part of the redesign, we wanted to look more closely at fonts which convey us a bit better. For the large headings, we're using Bebas Neue. We felt it was bold and sleek at the same time with its heavy, but condensed lettering. It speaks clean and sharp to us. We were also pretty sick of Arial as a body font. We settled on PT Sans as its a little wider and more legible than Arial. We also took our leading (or line height) more seriously this time, applying the golden ratio and modular scales to the body copy. The result is visually pleasing, easier to read copy throughout the site.

Simplified

One of our main gripes about the old site was how cluttered it felt. We tried to use every bit of space to pack in stuff. This time around, we started from a blank canvas and evaluated each piece of material for each page more carefully. What we found were certain things which were truly important to the page. Everything else, while perhaps applicable, wasn't really important. The result - cleaner sections with more whitespace. We like it. This is perhaps most evident on our blog. In the previous design, we had packed every share button imagineable along with a list of recent posts, all categories, recent comments, and whatever else you could think of into the sidebars. That made for a really cluttered blog. In this round, we have our article, a single share button which lets you share on Facebook and Twitter, related categories, and a few related articles. This is so much cleaner and it makes the reading experience an enjoyable one.

We also decided to eliminate some sections to simplify things. We condensed our old About and Services pages into a single Us page with relevant information on it. We also eliminated the Resources page, but we have plans for that old content for the future. Our navigation is now simplified, and thus easier.

Cleaned Up The Portfolio

Our Google Analytics showed that our second most visited page on the site was the Projects page. Going back through all those projects, we realized that many of the projects shown were built up to eight years ago and weren't good representatives of what we're capable of today. The way our industry works, what we did yesterday may not be representative of what we can do today. That's why we like it. We decided to empty out all projects and pick only a few featured ones which better represent what we're able to do today with modern best practices and content management systems. In pairing down the projects to a handful, we didn't want to lose the fact that we've worked with a breadth of organizations over the years. To help with this, we've created a list of clients for the sidebar on our new Work page. Now, we can showcase our best work and showcase the various businesses we've worked with in the past as well.

Mobile Focus

Mobile isn't the future. Mobile is now. The site was built using a responsive design this time. What that means is that the layout responds to the size of the browser. On desktops, you see the site in all its wide glory. But when you have a smaller window (think mobile devices), the layout adapts that accomodate. The navigation shrinks and moves down, the right column moves underneath the main column, and fonts size appropriately. What we like about the responsive approach is that it doesn't depend on detecting what specific device you're on, but adapts based on the size you're working with. This is much more future-proof than device detection routes. We also like that it doesn't require a completely different "mobile" site in order to work. What you see on smaller screen sizes is the exact same site you see on your desktop or laptop - the syling is just adapted. We think it's sweet and we hope you like it too.

Smarter Numbers

Google Analytics has always provided us page views and related statistics, but we wanted to know how people interact with elements on pages. Google fortunately released Event Tracking, which we've put to good use. Now we'll know how our big homepage feature is used, how our Project Planner download is used, as well as social media button clicks and sharing link clicks. We're really looking to learning how visitors interact with the elements on each page along with page views. It will help us to continue improving.

In Summary

Overall, we're pleased with how our redesign turned out and we hope you are too. We'll get more specific with certain aspects of the redesign in future posts. If you have any feedback, please let us know in the comments below.