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Fog of Eternity | Website design and discussion

Fog of Eternity examines aspects of website design, social networking, the accessibility agenda and the wider web and tech related world.

CSS Deserving Of A ShowcaseAugust 20

Despite the increased focus on accessibility and simplicity in web design, it’s surprising how often designers resort all to quickly to the likes of table based design, Javascript, or Flash when creating websites. CSS and HTML are acknowledged as the most important building blocks of accessible web design, but they’re also seen as lacking in flexibility. But the idea that a site based purely on CSS and HTML has to be simplistic or unattractive is wrong. Sure, there’s things that you can’t do, and Flash’s increased (but imperfect) accessibility allows for wider flexibility in design, but all things being equal it’s still better to use CSS and HTML where they can provide the required function.

CSS - Pretty and accessible

I’ve spoken about the benefits of CSS design regularly in the past, but to recap - CSS gives you great flexibility in design and page appearance, keeps that appearance entirely seperate from the actual content of the page, and therefore provides excellent accessibility and makes redesigning a site far easier.

As browsers develop, support for deeper CSS functionality has grown extensively. The extensive glitches in support with Internet Explorer 6 can largely be overcome with stylesheets specific to that browser, and Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera all provide pretty comprehensive CSS functionality. Universal consistency is still some way awa

Look At Me, I’m Alternative…Just Like You!June 20

Blogging is a way for us to have our voice heard. It’s how we broadcast our thoughts to the world at large. We develop an audience. We widen the conversation. It allows for a greater variety of discussion. We give our unique viewpoints on…um…what everyone else is talking about.

Social networking exacerbates the problem. It creates a sameness in the conversation, because everyone is looking at the same subject. In early May everyone was talking about how great Twitter was. In late May everyone was talking about how annoying Twitter’s downtimes were. This month it’s Friendfeed and the fragmentation of conversation.

Did you hear the one about … oh … you did already …

Different viewpoints are all well and good. But how many different viewpoints are you going to get among hundreds of blogs all addressing the same topics? People see that something is “the buzz” because they read it on Scobleizer. Then they talk about it on their own blog and link back to the original articles.

They probably develop more immediate traffic this way - it’s the fashionable thing after all. It’s easier to continue a trend than begin one. But how much value is being added to the wide

Web 2.0 - Prepare For Epic Fail?June 12

‘Web 2.0′ is a made up name that means nothing. It’s a label that’s irrelevant to what’s being provided on the internet. And yet a term with no real definition is being used to fuel financial investment, provoke widescale press interest, and develop large user bases.

Take a look at these quotes and see how relevant you think they are.

…a vast number of companies all have the same business plan of monopolising their respective sectors through network effects, and it’s clear that even if the plan is sound, there can only be at most one network-effects winner in each sector, and therefore that most companies with this business plan will fail.

…an Internet company’s survival depends on expanding its customer base as rapidly as possible, even if it produces large annual losses.

Make a certain amount of sense, don’t they? Except those quotes are paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry on ‘dot-com bubble’. The only thing I’ve done is turn the wording into present tense rather than past.

An

Traffic Growth #10 - Stuff Actually Worked!June 11

I’ve been writing the Traffic Growth series for ten weeks now. The first question was “How much traffic can I get through viral methods?”. The answer to that is “a lot more than before”. I’ve demonstrated that it doesn’t take a huge amount of work. I’ve shown that actively socially networking, and providing decent content, can have a very positive impact on your profile and popularity.

Ten weeks isn’t very long to develop site traffic. In the week preceding my first post, the site had 149 visitors. That’s 21.3 a day, and most of those from Google search.

In the nine weeks since that first article, the site has had just under 13,000 visitors, at an average of 207 a day. The growth in numbers has been pretty much tenfold.

Here is the main lesson I’ve learned:

It’s all about relationships

I could submit this article to something like StumbleUpon myself. It’d get several hundred visitors in a few minutes. It’d look good for my figures, at least on the surface, but might not provide much value.

Submission to sites like StumbleUpon, or more focused and niche sites like Sphinn, is secondary. Building relationships is prime. Ten good relationships with other bloggers might not show up immediately in your site statistics, but over time they’ll generate a huge amount of traffic.

People who like your stuff, read your stuff, and

Is A Brain Dump Interesting?June 7

Every piece of advice on blogging will tell you it’s important to choose your topic before you write an article. You need focus, and you need planning. This post is an experiment on the opposite side of that rule.

I have no topic directly in mind. This post is not planned. I’ve given myself thirty minutes maximum for writing and editing, and will see what comes up. It’s an exercise sometimes used for creative writing and fiction. Wonder if it’s going to work for a design/social media related blog.

May as well try though. If it doesn’t work then it was an interesting exercise and I learned something.

Failing = learning, so long as you let it

Actually that’s something I’m enjoying about blogging in general. It’s definitely something I’ve noticed with the Traffic Growth series. I learn as much from failure as I do from success. Sometimes I learn more. Living things learn from failures in general.

It’s difficult to appreciate learning through failure though. Even if the lessons are important, it takes a special kind of person not to get knocked back. We all motivate ourselves to some extent on encouragement and success. But it’s the natural learning that comes through failure as well as success that leads to the most comprehensive skills development. It’s a slow burn.

Admit it, money is important

Strikes me that we’