From getanewbrowser.com, there's a discussion of a blog post on SiteReference about The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites. The author, Mark, comes to the conclusion on SiteReference that ugly sells. I'll add my opinion here ...

I feel Mark is way off base on this one and confuses why many ugly web sites, such as Ebay, Plenty of Fish, Craigslist, and many others, are very successful.

They are functional. They have features or information that people want. Users are willing to ignore the sometimes serious cosmetic issues, looking instead for the beauty inside. (Isn't that something your mother always told you? ).

This picture below represents ebay and those other ugly web sites. It's a face only a mother could love, yet for many people, pug dogs are the perfect happy little dog that make great companions. (I like pug dogs -- don't get me wrong!).

Interestingly, I thought that the Pug Dog Club of America (surely a well respected and professional organization), would have a bunch of pictures I might be able to use of their furry little friends (and nicely designed web site). I couldn't find any color pictures, but I could find a lot of very useful information that I'm sure pug owners and potential pug owners find very useful -- thereby providing exactly the service that their 'customers' need. It's not flashy -- unless you count a small animated GIF pug dog -- but it's functional. Although I'm speculating, I bet it gets quite a few hits each day. If I was looking for pug information, I'm sure I'd use the site.

Clearly the Club concentrated on functionality and information first. Great! You rarely want to get bogged down by the appearance of your product or web site until you've got some functionality developed. I see it happen much too often though. Once you get functional, then start considering appearance, branding, etc.

If there were two Pug Dog Clubs (and maybe there are -- I'm not a pug dog owner), the web site with more information and functionality that helps pug dog owners is likely to be more successful than the one that does not. It has little to do with the appearance of the web site.

Competitors won't be able to sell beauty if they don't have at least the same or more often, better, functionality. Ugly doesn't sell to the masses.

Posted by Aaron at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Saw this here ... Bunchball -- embedded games and other things for your web site. Not sure what their plan for revenue is though.

Posted by Aaron at 7:22 AM | Permalink

Here's a brief review of RocketPost if you're considering purchasing the software from Anconia:

Don't buy it.

It's bloat-ware that frequently crashes (here, here ). The company doesn't respond to requests for help any more. It gets more unstable over time. They push out releases far too quickly and with limited (or any?) testing.

I'm not even using RocketPost to post this as I don't trust it anymore (I just tried posting something and it crashed twice when I tried to add a single hyperlink!). Please don't buy RocketPost. It's a waste of your money.

When they respond to these issues, I'll be happy to update or even remove this post, but until then, I want to warn as many users as possible.

Posted by Aaron at 2:46 PM | Permalink

A great web site with a large variety of links to generally nicely designed web sites. Maybe you'll be inspired.

Posted by Aaron at 7:35 AM | Permalink

If you haven't checked out Windows Live Image Search (beta), you should (if you like cool DHTML web sites).

For example, I did a search on XAML. Hover over one of the images:

It grows nicely and enlarges the thumbnail. Very slick.

Two odd things though. I can't seem to find a way to actually jump right to image searching (if I know that I want to search for an image). Am I missing something? Dumb error though that you can encounter. Go to Live.com and hit the search button without putting in any text.

You'll be thanked for your click:

Please. Fix that Live.com team. Even the capitalization is strange. MSN search at least suggests typing in a phrase if you just hit their search button.

Don't let the user screw up.

Posted by Aaron at 8:53 PM | Permalink

Atlas, the AJAX-style framework running on ASP.NET 2.0 from Microsoft, is now available for download -- more importantly (for a lot of developers), with a go-live license! Oddly, I can't seem to find a specific link proving that although a number of "Atlas" blogs make that claim (here and here).

Posted by Aaron at 8:22 PM | Permalink

Dude. Way too much free time. Way too much.

Mario Brothers cleared without collecting coins

Posted by Aaron at 8:10 PM | Permalink

A great quote from Henry Ford, regarding the first car he ever built:

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Great! When you consider designing anything, from software to a new hammer, make sure you properly consider how customers influence your designs. The customer -- get this -- may not always know what's best for them!

Posted by Aaron at 6:15 AM | Permalink

I continue to use RocketPost. A new set of bloat, I mean features, comes out quite frequently. The quality of the software hasn't improved much. I laughed when I saw this tonight in the latest build:

A set of double scroll bars on the list of blogs! No, it's not a feature, it's a bug. When I size the top list area, the scroll bar on the left will disappear, if t the size of the list is just right.

For a while, Manish and company were making good strides at fixing things up, but ...?

Here's some other nice fit and finish:

For a while, I seemed to have Manish's ear so to speak (as I reported quite a few bugs), but since he doesn't respond any more to my e-mails, I'll start posting my issues here again for all to see in hope that either they notice or others shy away from buying until the problems are resolved.

Posted by Aaron at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Since moving hosts I wanted to find a new method of displaying some of my digital images. I had my own custom-written solution on WH4L, but for now I don't have time to do that again, so I've grabbed something via Fantastico.

My new image gallery if you're interested is here. It doesn't look very nice -- I haven't had a chance to see what sort of style configuration it offers. I haven't enabled comments, but each image can be rated. Enjoy.

I don't like that it must do a round trip to page through the images -- my old solution didn't require that nearly as much.

Posted by Aaron at 10:35 PM | Permalink

I'm just starting to learn Ruby -- slowly. First step -- get it installed in a virtual machine running Linux and on my Mac. Next step, start reading.

During my hunt for information, I came across this news article about James Gosling today via Loud Thinking. Go to Loud Thinking for the Ruby part, but here's a fun quote about .NET from James:

The Father of Java then dismissed Microsoft's C# as having had potential, but no longer: "We were afraid they were going to do something really creative - but they're hopelessly focused on one platform."

Eh? James, dude, you need to take a vacation. Microsoft actually doesn't need to work on other platforms, the Mono project addresses the cross platform "issue" quite nicely for .NET.

How's Sun's stock doing James? That cross-platform language working out real well for Sun financially? In the end, like most businesses, they're out to make money, just like Microsoft, focused hopelessly on their evil platform.

Posted by Aaron at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm trying a new web service/application this morning from Stikipad. The web site and application itself has at least at first glance, the style of 37signals products. It's not much more than skin deep though.

After signing up for a free account, this web page was shown:

I noted some interesting usability issues on the welcome page:

There is no "Edit link" specifically on the screen. There is this little bar in the lower left corner:

No links though. Web users understand links. By default, they're blue and underlined. Sometimes just blue. But a gray bar with gray text with an underlined E is not a link. Moving my mouse over the Edit Page button does underline it, but only then does it seem to act like a link. It's only a link to a developer.

Next up, the second paragraph.

If you click the thumbnail to see the entire welcome screen, see if you can find the "configure" link anywhere on the screen. I couldn't. I'm not really sure what it's referring to at all. OK, I found the configure link after one of the co-founders of Stikipad wrote me an e-mail this morning. It's in the far upper corner of the screen. On my 24" monitor, I missed it completely. It's WAAAAY off to the side, not centered on any of the other features or content. I'd move it somewhere more obvious to new users (like me).

Next is the "Created" stamp (below the last paragraph, but above the button bar):

How many users care about the IP address? How many know their computer's IP address? I don't know mine -- and I don't care. More importantly, I'm sure the loop back adapter IP address of 127.0.0.1 is not my IP address.

Clicking the Edit Page button take me to a plain simple text editor where although the web site claims I should have WYSIWYG editing, I do not. It's just a big text field. I've tried IE and Firefox on a PC -- neither work. The blog says it the feature was just added for all account types from free to paid, but it's not yet available to me. The rich editing won't work on Safari at all as Safari doesn't include the necessary support built into the browser to provide a rich editing experience.

The current pricing runs from free for a limited account to US $149 for a year of use. If you're really only interested in a wiki and don't mind getting your own host (pick a web host with automated installs of common software), you'll be able to get a better deal and likely have less limitations on bandwidth and usage (and you'll have your own domain name!), instead of just a subdomain. Even $49 for a personal wiki seems way too expensive for a simple service like this. They're ripe to be squashed by competitors.

Posted by Aaron at 7:43 AM | Permalink

Via Scott's Site Experts Place, Live.com has undergone some dramatic changes. The most interesting thing I hit right away is the live "infinite" scrolling search. Try a search and check it out. Although the unusual scroll bar takes a bit getting used to, the scroll wheel works fine. Very neat. It's coming along ... soon I might choose to make it my default home page.

Overview:

Search:

Posted by Aaron at 12:55 PM | Permalink

Apple now has a Mac Mini powered by Intel. I think the higher end model went up $100, but it's still a reasonable value for the money if you want an Apple. I see no reason to upgrade mine. The new models include FrontRow.

Buy yours today direct from Apple.

Posted by Aaron at 7:55 PM | Permalink

I hadn't signed into Windows Messenger beta recently. They changed the look (again!). It's clearly taken on more of the live.com look that Microsoft has been pushing to many of its consumer web properties (like the new search.msn.com). Very clean/sharp. Such a change from last versions. It may be lacking though in personality. The minimalistic style lacks character and a strong brand image. Since there aren't very many instant messaging clients overall (compared to the number of web pages for example), maybe its OK.

It's got some bugs ... note how my Angry Beaver (a canceled cartoon) image wasn't carried to the actual signed in screen. It's chess figures below.

Posted by Aaron at 9:32 PM | Permalink

A long time ago on a blog far far away, I mentioned that I was trying Copernic, and liking it. Since that time, I've used a variety of desktop search tools. I've stayed away from Google's and used mostly the Microsoft Windows Desktop search toolbar (and had deinstalled Copernic). Microsoft's is fast and reasonably easy to use, but has trouble formatting some documents -- especially code.

The other day something inspired me to try Copernic again. It's close to what I want after a few overall tweaks. The thing that is missing really is a combined search. It thinks in terms of files or e-mails or .... I just want to search my desktop. Group the types of results, but don't make me pre-decide. It's still extremely fast. The search results are highlighted nicely in an inline document view pane. Even better, you can skip between the matches within a document easily and quickly. Windows Desktop search offers no similar features.

It's a big window/application though -- if they could tighten up the display into a more MSN/Google style experience without the "refine" and "other search results" panes being visible by default, the application would be a bit more tidy (and moving the search text box above the other two panes). The "web" button in the application launches a web browser to the Copernic web search instead of being inline. I'd prefer a built in browser experience, even if they want to default to their web site. If I want to do a web search, I'll pop open a browser and pick my favorite search engine.

Still, overall, recommended. Price is right: free.

Posted by Aaron at 3:34 PM | Permalink

From ExtremeTech ... Secure Surfing to Go: VPN Made Easy.

The article is about establishing a virtual private network with two or more computers on the Internet, using beta software from hamachi.

It looks interesting, but I honeslty haven't tried it -- I have VPN-like functionality using WinSSHD from Bitvise. I'm very happy with it and have had great success using it. Only trouble I've had really is that a Windows account associated with WinSSHD had it's password expire one time when I was on a trip. (That was a fun phone call home trying to explain to my wife how to log into our Windows 2003 Server, open the software ... ).

Posted by Aaron at 9:33 PM | Permalink

I just finished moving most of the existing functionality of WiredPrairie from WebHost4Life. Finally! I waited till it was time to renew my account and switched. I won't talk too much about my new host yet, until I've given them the 'shake-down.' So far though, I can tell my web site is faster and the response time for service requests has been much quicker than WebHost4Life.

Why did I switch? Here's a brief summary/review of why:

WebHost4Life review:

Consistently poor speed on my shared hosting web site. Not until my web site had been down for several days did they offer to transfer me to a new machine. They claimed I wouldn't have any troubles after transferring, yet oddly, I spent days trying to get things back to normal. (security was wrong, etc.) RocketPost hasn't worked properly since the move (although I don't know if that was a coincidence or not). My e-mail has been down on multiple occasions for hours and days. My second move resulted in a slightly faster web site, yet still I noticed in the last month that it was down for several days at a time (it just happened to be during a blog-free period).

Their control panel, which must be custom written (I can only hope), suffers greatly from usability issues. Everything is scattered about with a variety of different techniques for getting the job done. I've been very pleased with the change at my new web host - very slick and efficient generally. I can find things quickly, unlike WebHost4Life, which is more of a 'hunt and peck' operation. Webmail is decent with WebHost4Life -- better than others I've seen.

Although they offer 'unlimited' bandwidth use for a web site, it's clear that you'd really need to work their system and servers extremely hard to approach any sort of unreasonable and unlimited bandwidth-usage amount.

The only pros I can see is that they offer Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 (upon request) hosting at a reasonable price. Other than that, they've got nothing special going for them.

Out of 5, I'd give them a 2.

Posted by Aaron at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)