Periodicdesign

I’ve been using, rather successfully, Ryan Duff’s contact form plug-in for some time now, but the only problem is, it works a little too well. I get email from all kinds of people. Folks saying they can enlarge my male organs, or keep me going longer in the sack, and then their was this lady from Russia who wanted me to check out her website. Weird thing is, she was the same lady, but always had a new URL. I mean, domain names aren’t expensive, but they aren’t cheap either, especially when you buy every alteration of the domain www.anitchkadoes[insert goat, xxx, Vladimir].com.

With that said, I had to come up with a solution, and instead of having to program my own, I found this little number by Douglas Karr. It inserts a simple question that even the slowest of humans can figure out. The cool thing is, you can set the question/answer to your liking.

Yeah, it’s not mine, but it’s something better than the basic one that comes with Wordpress and it fits my design style a little better. I’m not much of a fan for the beveled edges anymore. I think there’s a time and place for them, but the Kubrick theme that comes with Wordpress is a tad overkill, although a slick theme for someone with no design or CSS skills. I will be building my own theme over the next few weeks and at some point this site will go straight text as I migrate attributes. All content will be in place over the next few weeks, but watch for changes and hiccups as the look and features shift.

Update: We have hired someone for this position. Thanks to all that inquired. I’ll let everyone know in the future if we hire again, which may be soon.

The company I work for is currently hiring for the following position:

Experience Architect

Siteworx, Inc., an Internet application and development company located in Reston, VA, works to transform clients’ business objectives into powerful interactive solutions. Utilizing strategy, technology and creativity, Siteworx creates fresh, functional solutions that serve many industries.

The Experience Architect will be responsible for performing a lead role in the research and design efforts for Siteworx’s client applications and large-scaled websites. This position requires working directly with client stakeholders to develop strategies and design specifications to improve the performance, usability and effectiveness of customer and user facing interfaces. You will use information gathered from client meetings, best practices, and competitive analyses to develop, site maps, wire frames, requirements and specifications which represent the layout, flow and organization of complex Web sites and Web applications. You will work closely with the client and the Siteworx technical and creative staffs.

Key Responsibilities

• Meet with clients to gather requirements based on existing business processes
• Research the competitive landscape and make recommendations relating to website organization and information hierarchy
• Document strategy by developing site maps, wire frames, representing website and Web application layouts
• Interface with the internal creative and technical staff to ensure that website designs meet both client and end user needs
• Design navigation and interaction systems
• Design nomenclature systems
• Experience changing the Web presence of large or multinational companies

Qualifications

• User focused, highly motivated, organized, able to multi-task, and work under tight deadlines
• Excellent client-facing consultative skills including the ability to lead client meetings
• Deep knowledge of user-centered design principles and information architecture and design
• Knowledge of general business strategy and specific knowledge of Web strategy
• Ability to analyze business requirements to define and improve applications and business processes
• Experience with a large-scale design or redesign of a website
• Extensive portfolio that includes examples of wireframes and specifications
• Familiarity with industry tools for generating flow diagrams, wireframes, and specifications

If you’re looking for a career where your contribution will be recognized and rewarded, if you share our philosophy that hiring the right people is the secret to success, and if you believe in working hard and having fun with a team that enjoys doing the same is for you — we want to talk to you! Please email your resume and sample UI Diagrams/Wireframes and Specs to jobs@siteworx.com or you may contact me directly with questions.

No, I’m not talking about a flock of birds, I’m talking about a browser and a rather nifty one at that. I stumbled across their home page the other day, although I can’t recall how I ended up there, and signed up for their announce list. Well, just last night, I received an announcement about an alpha/beta release for testing. I then proceeded to download both a copy for my home machine and one for my work machine. I have tinkered on both platforms with the browser and am very pleased with what I see so far.

As far as I can tell, this browser, for all intensive purposes, looks to give the major browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, a run for their money. Of course, some of you may argue it’s just another browser and that market is already saturated with the aforementioned browsers as well as many others. To this I say, you are correct and Flock is dead, conversation over! Well, I’m not going to say that, because saying that would be down right ludicrous I tell you!

This thing is more than just a browser, it’s an interaction with the digital life around you. Thomas talks about the Personal InfoCloud and I think this browser moves in that direction. Flock brings what you want on the web, to you, without using web applications or scripting plug-ins for your current browser. This thing ties into your blog and your del.icio.us bookmarks, bringing a portion of your digital life to you. Now granted, it may not bring all of your digital life, but it is a start.

Browsers themselves have faced an unfortunate doom in the past few years. They are all on the same path of rendering valid mark-up being the basis of what a browser should do. On this level, I believe all browsers should be the same and I hope that in that aspect the browser wars are from over. Where browsers will take off is in the functionality and how they tie into the web and the data you want. As Thomas has already said:

In a “come to me web” this is very important.

The browser itself is rather slick in appearance and a rather usable interface to boot. I’m anxious to see what comes of this browser, as it is still in its early stages of development and testing. Will it die, or will this browser become something in the near future? Will this become as valid a browser as Firefox and IE or will it only be embraced by the blog and geek communities? Time will tell I guess.

You know, the web is a huge place. I mean, ha…uge. The down side to this hugeness, is finding what you need, when you need it. Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking to myself about the concept of tagging and what it does to help the user. Now granted, tagging is nothing new and anyone who blogs, knows of Technorati, Flickr and the like, knows what tagging is. My point is this; tagging seems to be growing and at an exponential rate. I read many feeds everyday and a few have been growing in the sense of how you get to the information at hand. Thomas, has been doing this for as long as I’ve known him, but others, such as Dan, James, Brian and Rob have taken on this tagging technique as well (Jared seemed to be heading in this direction for a while). Maybe they have been doing it for a while and I have just now noticed, but the concept works well with finding data and similar concepts tied to the same data.

The popular CMS, WordPress, allows for the categorization of the content on ones site. It does this through “Categories,” which seemed like an odd term for the information at hand. When I first saw this word, I thought to keep things simple and that the less categories, the better. Now I’m seeing differently, that these categories serve well as tagging and at large expanse, need a better place than in the sidebar of WordPress. The list can become rather long and almost unmanageable. Finding data in the lists and sub-lists can be somewhat tiresome and mind numbing at best.

I really like the idea of tagging in a CMS as opposed to categorization. I think along with my redesign will come the expansion of my categories into a tagging system along with a way to manage those tags. Does anyone have any plug-ins or ideas to make the integration of tagging easier? If so, I’d like to hear them.