GUI Tip: Tabs need to keep state
March 18, 2008
Here’s a fast, free GUI (Graphic User Interface) tip.
Your navigation is extremely important – it “orients” visitors to your site.
If you decide to use tabbed navigation, it works a lot like a physical folder would – the tab is attached the folder, and when you pull on the tab, the folder opens.
However, it’s very common in the web world due to lazyness or lack of programming skill to make the tab not “save state.” That means, if you click on a link, when the new page loads the tabbed navigation should change so that the tab that is “active” (or looks “connected”) to the page below should be the new page.
Even worse is if you click on different page tabs and the active tab that is connected to the main content stays the same – so you go to the media room, but the navigation bar looks like you’re still on the home page. It confuses visitors.
Not changing state is lazy programming – it can be done a variety of ways (even in flash) – and a little thing to look for to decipher the skill of your prospective developer.
What if Bear Stearns Had A Blog?
March 16, 2008
With the purchase of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan Chase for a fraction of it’s worth a year ago – my mind started working in the quirky way it does.
What if Bear Stearns had a blog? I mean a real, honest to goodness blog? And not a blog by an executive about movies.. that doesn’t count (and as far as I’m concerned, a non-story). A blog that let you ask questions, gave honest answers when possible; a two-way communication to say “wow, the way the entire mortgage industry does business has changed and we’re packaging this stuff up in a big ‘ol bundle.”
Publicly traded companies tend to, at times, eschew social and community media… when of all companies, they should be doing it the most because they have the most people with a stake in the business. From tens of thousands of employees to thousands (if not more) of shareholders, what better way to show transparency?
After all, one of the rules of PR is to control the story… and keep putting information out, otherwise rumour and speculation become rampant. A void is filled, regardless of what you do in the situation.
This works in the other way, too… if consumers would of been more educated instead of just grabbing the lowest rate at the time and/or buying too much house (evidenced by too high of a payment – the focus obviously moved away from the monthly financial reality of what can I actually afford?). Social media could of helped that to a degree, too.
Not to say that this credit catastrophe would of been avoided through transparency… but maybe caught earlier and the damage less.
iPhone SDK… the Third Web
March 10, 2008
Amazingly, there are now three versions of the web today.
There is the main version – displayed on computers and the like; the mobile version, for the Blackberrys and Nokias et all; and now, the third version, the iPhone version.
A version that is flash-free; a version that is undeniably going to integrate with the new SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone taking what are now “web apps” and giving them the ability to run them in a dedicated manner and using the web as a data source instead of for the whole experience.
Now that there is going to be Exchange integration and the like, there will be more and more people who are tied to it; and with the iPhone having an insanely high smart phone market share so fast, it’s now a consideration.
My ranking of the importance of these “webs” are:
1) Mainstream
2) iPhone Based Web
3) Mobile Web
You just don’t have the ability to do what you want to on traditional mobile web platforms; I am thinking that spending the resources to develop there might be folly, especially since it’s quite obvious that in a year or so the new standard is going to be putting the full version of pages on mobile devices.
