Studioblog (n): a blog by Studiobanks about design, marketing, internet, business, Charlotte and more.

The Return of Webmonkey

Robbie 1 Comments

Back in 1998, I started learning HTML one summer afternoon after visiting Dave's HTML Code Guide. It didn't take me long to exhaust that resource and I was ready for more. Webmonkey was my next stop in the wonderful world of web development and I learned the lion's share of my early HTML and JavaScript knowledge from their articles and tutorials. With that said, I'm happy to see the relaunch of Webmonkey by Wired.com. They've definitely stepped up their game and incorporated a wiki-styled approach to their tutorials. Anyone with a free Wired.com account can add or edit tutorials, but there are some editorial guidelines and the community is moderated by the Wired staff. Nevertheless, Webmonkey has reintroduced itself as a great resource for web developers. If you haven't checked it out yet, definitely bookmark it or grab a feed. You're bound to learn a thing or two.

Google Indexes Flash

Will 2 Comments

Google has announced improvements to their Flash indexing!

Unfortunately, Googlebots do not execute all JavaScript they encounter, so, if your SWFs are loaded via JavaScript, you may want to switch to SWFObject 2’s static method in order to ensure visibility.

For now, only static textual content is crawled but, as a Flash Developer, it's exciting to have Flash applications becoming more legit in the eyes of search engines. For a more detailed Q&A, head over to Flash Charlotte.

Starbucks Coffee At Home

Will 7 Comments

Yesterday, Robbie and I had a pretty good discussion about the Starbucks Coffee At Home site, so I thought I'd share it here.

At a quick glance of the site you know that the design and execution were both top-notch, so there are a lot of little details you can appreciate. However, what impressed us the most was that when a section was erased from the chalkboard/screen a ghost image remained. We wanted to achieve a similar effect with the Bouvier Kelly site we launched earlier this year, but due to the limitation of ActionScript 2 and the fact that most of the sections displayed dynamic content, we were unable to do so.

Talking it through, we decided the effect was created in either two ways.

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HTML 5 vs XHTML 2

Robbie 0 Comments

If you've noticed references to HTML 5 or XHTML 2 pop up around the web and aren't aware of the differences between the two, then be sure to read "HTML5, XHTML2, and the Future of the Web" over at Digital Web Magazine.

The article lays out the pros and cons and the general arguments for each language. As you'll read, there's quite a lot in the pipe as far as updates to the functionality of forms, basic client-side APIs and the structure of markup.

Some additional reading:
The future of HTML, Part 1: WHATWG
The future of HTML, Part 2: XHTML 2.0

Microsoft Continues to be an Inglorious Copycat

Robbie 0 Comments

Not that most of us who deal with web design don't already feel Microsoft to be the leading cause of daily frustration, but those guys continue to come up with new ways to infuriate our industry. If it's not lack of standards support in Internet Explorer 6, it's the completely-avoidable Eolas update last year.

The latest "next generation" product from the folks in Redmond goes by the name of Silverlight. One of the intentions for this proprietary, web-based runtime is takeover a bit of the Flash/Flex market from Adobe. While some healthy competition is good for innovation, Microsoft is just playing follow-the-leader yet again. The name Silverlight even invokes the same feeling as Flash. Moreover, one of the development tools for animation in Silverlight, Expression Blend, was code-named "Sparkle." The scariest thought is that designers or developers might actually have to rely on Microsoft applications for creative work.

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The New AIGA.org CMS

Robbie 0 Comments

Designer Naz Hamid recently posted some screens of the new AIGA.org content management system (CMS) on his website Weight Shift. It's a page-based publishing system, which differentiates it from our own record-based Toolbox CMS. But, I'm not trying to pitch you on our Toolbox.

The lesson here is not to neglect the visual appearance of a CMS. Developers are usually great at what they do, but they are not designers. AIGA realized they were going to be spending a lot of time maintaining AIGA.org's content using that interface. Wisely, they contracted separate design teams to build the front-end and back-end for their newly redesign site and then handed those designs off to development teams. Hamid's informed choices on the layout not only make the site's content and structure easy to update and understand, but it gives AIGA something nice to look at while they do it.