What a nice way start a Wednesday, aka. “Hump Day”. Other than the FREE Wednesday lunch meals we get here at MA, I finally received an invite to give Measure Map a test-drive early this morning. Thank you MM/AP–family!
I know its kind of early to speculate on which are bugs or what have you, but the first two gripes I have would probably be: how long URLs are treated, and the extra table-rows under “What’s Happening on your Blog” section on the member’s Overview page. Other than that, I commend MM/AP for something that ranks as a should-be-great-app for everyone! This should shake things up a bit—especially in the Blogosphere.
I wonder if this is due to my recently posted entry on Google Analytics? =) Either way, it should be nice to compare these two analytical tools. At least the comparable features in each application. I’ll give some updates if I find interesting stuff between the two.
With the recent announcement of Google’s rebranded Urchin, Google Analytics is FREE for people to use and improve their website’s traffic and selling point. The only limitation to this would be for the particular site to have less than 5 million page views per month. Unless your site pumps iron like the people over at the GYM, you should be OK with this. If this is not the case for your site’s traffic but are an AdWords user, you’re in there like swimwear.
I haven’t taken a closer look at this yet as Google seems to be upgrading the old accounts from Urchin to their new system. However, I did manage to sneak a peek on one of the account information pages. It seems that you can have more than one website per account. That would probably be why-should-I-use-this reason #2.
With Adaptive Path’s Measure Map and Inman’s Mint, I wonder how gAnalytics* would do with the blogosphere citizens. It’ll be very interesting to get some type of comparison between those three apps above in terms of everyday needs, functionality and usability. Maybe its time for me to upgrade from PHPee’s Power Phlogger to one of these. I’d probably try out gAnalytics since its FREE and open to the public versus Measure Map which is still in beta and invite-only mode… hope to get my invite soon =)
Just happen to stumble upon what I think would be a potentially great extension (amongst others) for Web Designers/Developers—IETab. Its slick that you can open/view a webpage in IE but embedded in a Firefox tab. That, and you can run “Windows update from Firefox!”
Other extensions that are on top of my list and use currently would be:
Coudal goes wild with Copy Goes Here film release. The film was a joint-collab project with Veer. More information and production notes maybe found where Copy Goes Here was linked. “Let’s learn to read.” HA =)
At first I thought their site got hacked. Go figure. These guys are good haha =) …damn creatives!
For archival purposes, a screengrab of the site version exists here.
Day 4 of the Fall ’05 Reboot just brought more people activating their sites for everyone to wonder around and see. Mind you that these were freshly designed. Some are still lacking content but structure-wise, its there. A handful just have great innovation. Some seemed to bring in new techniques, as well as bring back old ones (i.e. animated GIFs). Anyways, there are so many sites to see, but here’s a couple that I really like so far:
tanutama.com (Albert Tanutama) — reminds me of the old ALA layout. I liked the way he has that quote up-top the header area. Its just there for everyone to see and agree.
vivified (Bastiaan Terhorst) — a well done blogfolio. What else can I say but grids, grids and more grids. He totally just got ‘em the way they’re suppose to be used. Also, another thing to checkout would be the way he layed out the comments section, it just reminds me of a resume layout.
Best Plots — now, I don’t know if this was just submitted as a marketing thing but I like the way it disseminates information in an eye-pleasing way (at least for a business site).
Avalon Star (Bryan Veloso) — what can I say? Its delicious. This one probably engulfed lots of design hours. Check out the details. I’m just a bit confused about the articles on the FP. But looking at it further, I guess the bottom-right box is a random past article. I just wished I coulda known this in the beginning rather than trying to figure things out as a new visitor. Anyways, check out his featurettes. Interesting reads.
coredreams studio — diagonals, glass effect, dark and neon green scheme… “webdesign is an art” indeed. Great use of CSS on the graphicsme layout and thumbnails. I like the subtle use of the page curls, with the exception of the FP… just got a bit happy there =)
Hiten Patel — simple portfolio site-layout. Good stuff and too the point.
Low End Theory (Kristin Pishdadi) — this one ain’t for those low-res monitors. She maximized it all baby! Nice photos. I like the way that she does a custom header-image per article as well. That must take a lot of time, its so big… i.e. 650x135 500px-wide by something. Mines only 366x122 usually. Meanwhile, great organization of content. I just wished the number of comments had text next to it. It seems to keep disappearing in Firefox, and not even there on IE. Also, I wish she was a little more clear on the title of her site, or maybe its just me. She has “wiphey” on the page, then “Low End Theory” as the title. Either way, check her blog and flickr gallery integration.
Lealea Design (Lea Alcantara) — wow. One of ones I really, really liked. Eyecandy. Kno’mean? Oh yah, its pink—but a cool use of pink. Nice color scheme—very vibrant, and catches your attention right away. That’s good, it got me looking right away. Not only that, check out the way she wrote the code as well. Clean all around. Great stuff.
Matt Brett — another great Reboot. Another site that stood out for me, and his heavily favored on my list. Love the grunge. Even though it was punkish, he organized it very well. Very well planned, designed and executed. And it shows. Great job Matt!
45royale (Matt Downey) — just clean and easy on the eyes. Nice color scheme. Only thing I noticed when clicking on the profile section, it seems that the background of the content area is a bit, tad late.
ribic.org (Mitja Ribic) — unusual layout but it seems to work with color scheme and the use of animated GIFs. I commend his use of that old skool feature. It just makes his design very interesting when you first view it IMHO. I just wish that he wouldn’t have use popups to display his works. Then again, his content area seems a bit small for them.
RonnieSan (Ronnie Garcia) — love the way he has that tab on top of his image-header. I like the layout displays content efficiently. Simple and clean. Only iffy on the logo. The “stamp” just doesn’t do his site justice the way it is. Then again, maybe its just me, but I just think he hasn’t showed it to us yet. Anyways, a very nice Reboot.
Personal Development (Trevor Delamorandiere) — “business, life, web standards.” Not necessarily in that order but its just true when you are in “this” industry today. I like the color scheme and the simple two-column layout of his content. Nothing flashy, just simple and gets his content out there right away.
Meanwhile, there were some uniform features that most sites rebooted with. I saw a lot of use of gravatars for their comments section. A handful used SIFR but just the right amount of it. A good amount of the sites listed above used the live-preview function encountered when one posts a comment. And did I mention, the cleanly coded XHTML and CSS?
Well, there it is, just a couple of the ones that led the pack. For me, its back to surfing for more standouts. I just wished that there was a better way to keep track of which sites I have visited, rated, etc. It seems that its by cookie when you’re logged in the cssreboot system, and most of the sites I rated were stored on my other PC. Man oh man, I just have to note it down and mark it on the other PC later on again. Anyways, should be good times. I wish to add more to these at a later date. Here’s to hoping.
