Our team has made some giant leaps in helping me solve the recurring design crisis of designing a webpage without knowing what photos will eventually be shown in the space. The new love of my life is called file server technology.

Let’s face it – most people don’t have a robust image editing software such as Photoshop handy to resize, shrink, crop and optimize JPGs and other web images for on-screen delivery. Well, utilizing our file server technology allows us to work wonders for our ecommerce clients who want the ability to manage product imagery on their sites, and keep it looking professional, all on-the-fly.

Instead of requiring clients to upload multiple versions of an image via an administrative interface (usually a thumbnail, regular size and larger zoomed-in size) they ONLY upload one image – the biggest one they can find. From that image, we can generate all the different sizes for thumbnail views, etc. and even do photo optimization that doesn’t render a skewed or “crungly” looking image.

The great example of all the different sizes we can generate from a single image is on the KEEN shopping site. Every image on this product wall is coming from a single giant image that we eventually use on a main product page like this. Clicking on the main shoe image on the right gives you the zoomed-in original image that feeds all the other sizes of the same image within the site…and the best part is – they all look great!

The results have been so amazing that we’ve even been retrofitting some of our older projects to include file serving to enhance the user experience. I no longer lay awake at night wondering how many “crungly,” low-resolution, blurry images someone is uploading to one of our sites!

Based on an overwhelming amount of negative feedback from the community, Facebook returned to its previous Terms of Use yesterday. The new Terms of Use, that have been revoked, gave Facebook perpetual licensing rights to all content on the site, even after a user closed an account. This means any information users put on their profile, from uploaded photos to interests, etc. could be sold by Facebook. As soon as the new terms were released, Facebook users joined groups and discussions, putting enough pressure on the company that it is revisiting the policy.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook would not share users’ information with anyone they wouldn’t want. For Facebook, it wasn’t an issue about selling information, but creating a policy that allows Facebook to share information with other users. Zuckerberg said, “There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.”

Social networking has grown so much over the past few years: over 62 million adults in the US now use a social network, and as sites like Facebook gain even more popularity, debates over licensing rights will surely continue. You can learn more about this social networking issue and the revised Facebook Terms of Use by clicking here.

Internet Explorer 8 is in its final stages of testing and rumor has it that Microsoft plans to release it this summer or sooner. I’ve had a chance to download the beta version, and you can too by clicking here. For the casual user, IE8 has some nifty new features to make your browsing experience a little easier. 

The “Accelerator” tool allows you to highlight text on any page and email the content to others, search Google or Wikipedia with that content, and even map driving directions of an address selection without leaving the page you are on. With Web Slices, you don't have to check back with sites like Ebay or ESPN to get updates: they appear on your toolbar. It goes a step further than an RSS feed, giving you a snapshot of the updated site. IE8 also includes an “InPrivate” mode to browse without saving any information in your history, a “search suggestions” feature that shows you predictive text and pulls information from Wikipedia or Google, and additional security features.

My impressions...
I can definitely see how IE8’s new features will delight the devoted Explorer user. It looks like Microsoft has made significant strides to catch up to the competition as far as features and speed. However, I’m not sure a lot of Firefox fans will make the switch based on these features alone. In my opinion, the speed and efficiency of Firefox still makes it the most user-friendly browser available. IE8 is getting closer but isn’t quite there yet.

As for us developers...
Most web developers hope that with the dawning of IE8, we can begin to sunset the support of IE6. Unfortunately, according to www.thecounter.com, in January 2009 over 34% of the population was still using IE6, while 42% were using IE7. Here’s to hoping that the added features in IE8 will be compelling enough that IE6 users will want to upgrade (didn’t we say that when IE7 came out?). Until then, we will continue the full-scale support of 3 Explorer versions, Firefox and Google Chrome.

These days, most users associate popup windows with spam and annoyance. Nobody enjoys chasing popup windows when they open in a new tab or even behind the current browser. Over the past 1.5 years, one of our goals has been to exclude popup windows from our UI, a trend seen across the Web. Our only exception to this is when we have an external link on a client’s site. If a client links to a site outside of their own, we use a popup window so the user isn’t completely taken off of the client’s site.

For better user-experience, we now use modals instead of popup windows. A modal is a modern UI pattern similar to a popup window where a section of HTML pops up on top of the webpage, and the remaining portion of the webpage is typically greyed out. The user can focus on the “popped up” content, while never leaving the page. Modal technology helps us create a more integrated experience on the websites we build. No longer do users have to interact with a random window in order to pass information to a site: they can do so in a way that feels natural and expected.

We begin each project by writing a content document that serves as the go-to-guide for the website from beginning through launch. After our team has a kick-off meeting with the client to iron out any outstanding questions, I begin to put project-specific information into our content structure. Next, I interview the client to ensure that all of their ideas are incorporated and to nail down any additional content pieces we need to gather.  

Once all assets are received, I fill in the content for each page of the website. This includes everything from the “big picture” words on the homepage down to the “Thanks!” message a user gets after signing up for an email newsletter. But the content document represents more than just the words on the page – it outlines many things that a site visitor never sees, like functionality requirements, search engine optimization and the client’s admin capabilities.

When all of this information has been compiled, we go through a review process so that the client can make sure all verbiage, functionality, etc. aligns with what they envisioned. After everything in the content document is finalized, we move on to the fun part: homepage and subpage designs, when the words finally come to life.

We understand that gathering content for every page on the site and then reading through a big Word document isn’t an easy task, but it’s so important for us all to be on the same page from the beginning of a project. We’ve learned over the years that the better the content document, the better the results. The more we outline at the start of a project, the better the designs and the more successful the project.