Store Wars
Isn’t really a parody of the Star Wars saga. And no, don’t worry as I’m not going to be blogging on the trilogy. I be blogging about Grocery Store Wars done by FreeRangeStudio. It’s simply an excellent short film done in stop motion and I believe it should be worth an award or nominated for an award.
A little about the studio. They’re actually a group of creative minds that don’t just design. They’re a group of humans aiming to do better good in this world with their talent. Most of their portfolio involves creating work for a better cause. The context of Store Wars tells about harsh processes our food goes through with delivery on reasons we should support only organic food.
On their official website, you can view the video or download it right away. You can also view the great making journey and join the fun by looking at the characters. My favourite is ChewBroccoli. 
Anyway, have a look at the website and video, HERE.
Who Links To Me
Is a rather cool little thing going on. I spotted this while reading the blog; The Silent Room, that you can visit HERE. It was located almost at the bottom of his sidebar just above the ‘Malaysian Bloggers demand a systemised building evacuation for the disabled’. Was there reading about how someone plagiarised his articles and artwork too. *gasp* But I guess you do get people like that online.
Anyway, what Who Links To Me does? To me, it’s kinda like a tool to just see who’s linking to your blog or articles out there in the humongous blogosphere. It doesn’t function by going to their website and entering your URL. It requires you to place a link on your website and you MUST ping weblogs.com.
It’s need on having to ping weblogs.com makes it a bit of a hindrance so unless you’re really curious who links to your blog then I guess it’s alright to use this. On the other hand, I like the concept or idea behind this because they’re kinda killing two birds with a stone now. They not only offer you a utility such as this, they also get to promote themselves for free and if Google’s Pagerank still exist, they get tons of it. 
If you’d like to find out more on this, proceed HERE.
CSS Formatter and Optimizer
Is a handy tool suggested by the Sitepoint newsletter that I find simply useful. When you visit the website, there are several choices you could select to help optimize your code. I just went for the default and tried optimizing my blogs CSS. It managed to compress the size by 24.4%.
However, the major setback of the optimizer is that if you’re creating a stylesheet for readability so it’s easy to find certain things in the code, then I’d not suggest using this. You could turn that option off as well but then there wouldn’t be much optimization to any code now, would there?
Take the optimizer for a test run, HERE.
Squarespace
Is another web publishing service that runs like Blogger. I just took it for a small test run and I must say, with the detailed help system always along with you, it’s almost hard to go wrong when posting. But alas, I think its too perfect for the starting blogger who wants to customize the look of their website.
To be more specific, you won’t really have a problem customizing the colors and font you want to use for text. But design wise, it might be a hassle to learn what does each part of template does before you could break free of the layout. Not to deter away starting bloggers, they’ve also got an in-built function just like Blogger.
The look and functionality of Squarespace reminds me of Wordpress and Blogger combined. Wordpress because it has a login right on the homepage of your website, controlled my modules though not PHP and Blogger because of the ease of publishing. I can’t describe the template system so if you want to know, you gotta tryout Squarespace, HERE.
Broken Web Design
Was what the article I read HERE at Digital Web Magazine was discussing. It was a very deep and interesting view on how websites have evolved into its worst form. All the factors and relations that the author speak of are quite rational though there’s one or two things that I might have my own personal opinion on it.
To start of this post, I’d like all my readers who are interested in website building to understand the conceptual model that has been done in the original article. The model has illustrated very clearly the thinking process of how companies tackle web design in conjunction with a designer’s view. Can’t believe that was one of the things I learnt last semester.
The article also hinted what web design would be molded in the future with just this 1 phrase:
Each company or individual investing in site design is buying usability and user experience. Design teams are dutifully grinding out personas and scenarios and matrices, trying to figure out how best to communicate to the people they need to reach.
This phrase mentions of principles that should be adopted by all web designers soon so that we can eliminate the need of designing just for eye candy. Website designing would have a more functional and objective purpose then what we might see now with overated full Flash websites and websites that have been dressed to just look good.
In the article, the author also explained one of the processes involved for planning a website, which is pesonas. What P-so-nas you ask? Basically, the process is about imagining yourself as different types of visitors surfing your website. Then you start listing down the assumptions(needs) they’d make while visiting your website. And my classmate; Mario, intuitively came up with the phrase, “..addressing assumptions is meeting expectations..” that explains the pesonas in just few words.
The one process or factor mentioned in the article was Environments. From my understanding, it suggested a standardization for certain elements. To me, it does have its good and bad but I’d object to a standard process since I am a designer. 
Another sign of the future for web design is in ‘Enriching the user experience’. Now, when I even began to read the first sentences, one company popped into my mind right away..37signals. A company that has now taken web design by storm with just simple design with a lot of usability and accesibility in mind.
When the author spoke of desktop applications replacing web applications, it was a rather intriguing read but I feel it might take awhile to adapt that since systems like that would be expensive to build. Especially in Malaysia, price is everything.
However, hopefully with the emergence of more talented web engineers or software developers in Malaysia, we might be able to make it. To all would be web designers;
..the people who interact with our creations are physically experiencing..
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About This Blog
Hello and welcome to Websites Made Simple. I'm Danny Foo and this is my Malaysia web design blog. I manage and co-founded a small Malaysia web design and development team; Simpleet Solutions. -
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