As part of the Web Design class I teach at LCC, we talk about working with clients on website redesigns. As part of that, we need to talk about how to know if a business should redesign their website. A few criteria to consider: Usability criteria: Is the current version of the website still online at… Continue reading When should a business redo their website?

I greatly enjoy listening to NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts. They bring in artists from all over the world, across all genres, and have them play 3-4 songs in their office, literally sitting at a desk. The artists are playing a more stripped-down version of their songs typically, as it’s reasonably-acoustic. Rarely you find more than… Continue reading On Taylor Swift and Tiny Desk Concerts

I was listening to a recent episode of the Distributed podcast, which featured an interview with the CEO of TopTal. In the episode, at around the 15 minute mark, he made an interesting point about punctuality. Specifically, he said that their hiring process gave punctuality – being on time – a high weight. Being late… Continue reading Punctuality as a remote work skill

Sometimes, especially when you’re new to HTML and CSS, your website isn’t appearing the way you want it too. Things might be the wrong color, or appearing in the wrong place, or not appearing at all! There are many ways to debug your HTML and CSS, but here are four options that anyone can try:… Continue reading Finding bugs in HTML and CSS basics

Remote work (or ‘distributed’ work in academic parlance) is an increasingly popular way to work. The work-from-home movement has been growing, and remote workers report higher job satisfaction than office-based workers. It’s interesting to me that remote jobs are often considered as a separate class of jobs. I sometimes talk to an employer who says… Continue reading On remote work as a separate category of work

In September, Tegan and Sara released a new album, Hey, I’m Just Like You. You can listen to it here: I found this album’s concept particularly interesting from a positioning/branding perspective. It’s comprised of songs they wrote as teenagers, 20 years ago, and contains song themes that teenage songwriters would write about. I find this… Continue reading On Tegan and Sara’s new album

Spotify is in an interesting spot. They have a premium membership, and make money from that. They also sell advertising, but the premium membership doesn’t have ads. So, they can only sell ads to be played for non-premium users. They also have an incentive for the ads to be annoying-enough that you subscribe to premium,… Continue reading On Spotify advertising

I listen to quite a few podcasts using Overcast on my phone. It’s developed by Marco Arment, who I also follow; he’s an opinionated developer, to a certain extent. He makes design decisions, and doesn’t add things just because people ask for them. Anyways, on to the main idea – Overcast doesn’t support rating a… Continue reading On podcast ratings and reviews

I’ve recently discovered that there are people who film the pro disc golf events, edit them together nicely, and upload to YouTube with professional commentary. It’s very enjoyable. I grew up watching golf (actual golf, not disc golf) on lazy Sunday afternoons at home. I wasn’t the biggest fan – not enough action for teenage… Continue reading On watching disc golf online

This is a version of a short talk I give during web design class at LCC International University during the second week. When we talk about a single web page, there are a set of key pieces that most pages share. This blog post focuses on the design of a web page when defining these… Continue reading Header, Footer, Main content, Sidebar