I’ve got this friend who is responsible for a corporate front-end web environment with almost a dozen browser-facing web applications. Pretty much all he can do at the moment is change static content in the antiquated and wildly inappropriate CMS. Changing anything significant requires implementation of an expensive one-off SDLC waterfall-type project with a business case, requirements-gathering, PM, BA, dedicated test-resource – the whole box and dice. These projects often under-deliver, with scope being reduced en route to avoid budget and deadline blowout.

He’s not happy with the way things are.

He’s got it into his head that it would be far better to create an easily-manageable front-end, with a unified, standardised UI under the control of his front-end web team. Key aspects are simplicity, speed, cost-efficiency, and trust – none of which can be used to describe the current state of affairs.

Some ideas

I was talking to my friend, and he said that at a high level, he’d like to abstract the various applications from the UI, where possible, by means of API/Web Services/etc. On the front-end would be a web application framework – He’s thinking Symfony or similar. He believes he has sufficient developer resource on his team to build/maintain/support this.

Some other ideas he’s been tossing around, in no particular order:

• Source repository. (He doesn’t have one at the moment). svn or git? Stable trunk policy?
• Continuous integration. (thanks Mike!)
• Test-driven development.
• Automated processes.
• Security.
• Content management.
• Performance. Code-efficiency, caching, etc. (Although he’s heard it said that performance shouldn’t become an issue until performance becomes an issue)
• The database. Does CouchDB lend itself to supporting a content-driven web application?
• Will it blend scale?

More ideas…

… are welcome. He needs all the help he can get. While it’s all very bluesky (with pie) at the moment, he needs to turn it into a watertight, bulletproof, business case. And soon.

He now works for Twitter.

It saddens me to see so many people knocking Doug for the less-than-inspiring design work found in many of Google’s products. Take this Gawker / Valleywag article, particularly the comments, for example.

If anyone of these deriders knew of Doug and the standard and quality of the work he produces, they’d be holding their tongues.

It helps to know the full story, so here it is from the horse’s mouth. It also helps to know a bit of background from others, like Joe Clark, and to get a picture of the sort of people that run the show at Google, such as Marissa Meyer.

It’s surprising Doug stuck it out at Google for as long as he did – with such a vast array of products, and what appears to be just one visual designer amongst a multitude of engineers and mathematicians – it must have been an incredibly trying experience.

All the best, Doug, for your move to Twitter! I hope they can really let you go to work, and I can’t wait to see the outcome!

So is it that they are written in aspx which makes them bloated?.

Well, I guess that’s what I’m kinda implying.

Building in the .NET framework with the Visual Studio IDE tends to mean that lots of components and snippets are provided for you. So by default you get things like having all your page content wrapped in a <form> element and you get the lovely __VIEWSTATE hidden input field and stuff like that.

I think that there can be a tendency amongst back-end developers, i.e. .NET, Java developers, to produce something that works well technically, and then take the PSDs that the designer gave them and put them on the front, so you’ve got something that looks like it’s supposed to, and works kinda like it’s supposed to, but with the interface between the front- and back-ends being very ugly, slow, and inefficient. Of course this has an often considerable negative effect for the end user.

While this may be a generalisation, I’ve experienced it first-hand, with developers who struggle to understand, or at least show some care, about good clean lightweight, semantic front-end code that performs well in the browser.
When you’re developing with .NET in an IDE like Visual Studio, you have to put in a bit more effort to get that good code.

Developing in .NET doesn’t necessarily produce bloated code, but I think if you took a look at the average .NET (.aspx) site, I think you’ll find greater code-bloat than in your average hand-crafted-in-TextMate code.

But lately, I’ve come across a few sites that have made me cringe; a colleague pointed out a couple of Swiss ones: migros.ch, and gate24.ch, and I came across the new upandgo.co.nz site on newsites.co.nz.

Let’s look at some stats, with vodafone.co.nz (my old gig) thrown into the mix:

The first three sites are ASPX sites, with bloated, invalid, (W3C) table-based markup, and what appears to be no performance tuning whatsoever. Sure, they are visually heavier than vodafone.co.nz, but being visually heavier doesn’t necessarily equate to looking better, and more often the end-user benefits of the visual components are offset by the performance overhead they introduce.

So, if you’re a web developer and you don’t use, or know of, Firebug and YSlow, stop what you’re doing right now and get familiar with them. Chris Pederick’s Web Developer toolbar for Firefox is also invaluable.

Learn about ETags, far future Expires headers, gzip, script placement, semantic markup, reducing the number of HTTP requests.

These are all vital factors in presenting a great website.
Figure out what you can do to make your site lighter, faster, and more search engine-friendly.

Jason’s site is one of my regular reads, and his design work is really solid. As art director at Happy Cog, working with the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason is up there with the best of them.

It’s very tidy, but I can’t wait to see it get richer with each new post. Read his post about it and you’ll know what I mean.

I must say, it’ll take a bit of getting used to.

So it seems the grid is still alive and well. Khoi Vinh and Cameron Moll really got me interested in grids, but I’ve been too lazy to try my hand at my own sweet grid layout. One of these days, maybe.

Anyway, nice work, Dan!

I’m not sure what happened to the page I linked to the other day; it seems to be down. [Edit: Here's the google cache of that page.]

There are a few good lessons that can be learned here:

• If you’re going to have any sort of site with user accounts, ongoing earnings, prizes, etc. and/or anything that can convert or relate to actual monetary value, then I’d recommend not using a standard open-source platform (i.e. Joomla). If there’s money involved, then you’ll quickly attract hackers.
• Don’t attempt to do any sort of worth-related calculations client-side, returning a response via a form POST. Any savvy geek will mess with the HTTP headers (using Charles, for example) and will get rich quick.
• Get your site a proper security audit from an outfit like security-assessment.com. It can cost a few grand, but for the sake of an embarrassing mess, I’d say it’s money well spent.

I’m interested to see what will ensue.

I must say, I wasn’t overly impressed with Mintshot’s shoddy layouts and presentation, but I never thought it would be so crappy underneath!!