Stefan’s blog

Here is something I learned recently from the web site of dConstruct - user experience design conference. Their web site has one example of how not to design for user experience, especially if your users are keen on using bookmarks and services alike - which most people do trust me.

I was just thinking that I need to go out between people again, someday, somewhere. Attending conference is great to meet like minded people and learn something new at the same time. As I was running through my Del.icio.us bookmarks I end up at dConstruct page and “Sold Out” popped just into my mind before I realized that the page is for 2007. What? I wanted to go. Ok something has to be wrong. Off course it was for 2007 and my bookmark 2007.dconstruct.org was wrong. I rewritten the URL for 2008… and luckily found what I was looking for. It took me quite a while to realize that the page was out of date.

Here is the hassle. Dconstruct web site always moves you to sub-domain and if you bookmark such a page, your bookmark is referring to old conference a year later. I consider this broken. I think that you should promote your actual content at your top domain. This way if people bookmark your pages, they get link to your main domain and always actual content. Even if they return one year later. Move the archive of your old content to sub-domains, that’s fine, but keep the actual content at the main domain.

By letting people bookmark your top domain you will always serve them up to date landing page. It will not only avoid confusion but you will also create better user experience.

I came across interesting article discussing 7 tips for designing and maintaining a large site. When it comes to growing web site, maintainability is probably the biggest issue. That’s why it is good to keep straight focus on it right from the beginning. Article nicely discusses various techniques from the development point of view. There are however few interesting facts I would like to share from the web site management point of view.

From this side it is very important to have the right content management system. CMS should allow you to easily add new pages, new content and update it when needed. CMS should handle various types of content e.g. texts, pictures, products etc. But most important is extendibility. It should be easy to add new type of content onto your site. Ability of CMS to manage site’s content should not be limited to type of the content you already have. It should be easy to add another format if needed. (e.g. you want to add new kind of product with completely different features as those you already have). “typevista” for example uses plug-and-play content models, system which makes it is easy to create new model if needed.

Second, design for scalability is important. Even if you have good CMS, pay attention to right information architecture and site structure. It is crucial to know where new pages will go, how they will interact and relate to other pages and what is the role of content on these pages.

There are many more things on my mind, but I will leave them for now so you don’t get overwhelmed. If you feel a bit technician read the above mentioned article ;).

Whatever web based application you will be working with you will almost certainly need to generate image thumbnails on-the-fly. We were dealing with this issue when we start to develop our own content management system few years ago. Users willing to publish pictures on the web will almost always upload their pictures from digital camera. Those are however high-resolution photos not very suitable for web. You need to scale them down to appropriate size. But how?

There are two ways to do it. One is to automatically scale picture when user uploads it or upload original picture and scale it down when the picture is displayed. I like the last option, because it gives you freedom of use. You can link to original high-resolution version or you can scale it down to whatever size you like.

Creating thumbnail is easy as creating link to an image e.g. /thumb/images/photo.jpg?w=150&h=150 . Yes you can specify width and height of image directly in the link and script will give you picture of appropriate size.

I was working with this approach over years in PHP. Now I created similar thumbnail generator in Ruby on Rails.

Download RoR thumbnail generator here.

The Ruby on Rails version works as good as PHP one in our CMS. It supports JPG, PNG and GIF pictures. It is just single controller with easy three steps install. It has cache build in so all the scaled down pictures are saved for later use which saves future processing time and promptly delivers resized picture.

If you have online gallery, picture library or any other place where you need to scale down pictures feel free to use RoR thumbnail generator.

I will be also happy to hear about any suggestions or improvements.