Brian Teeman

I am not a fan of template clubs.

More and more the tendency for joomla template club designers is to showcase as many different things as possible that they can achieve in a Joomla template rather than concentrate on the best way to present the site owner's content.

When someone visits a site I have built, I don't want the first thing they think of to be "oh that is pretty" or "ooh look at that slide show". I want them to find the information that they came to the site for in the first place.

And of course I don't want them to think that the site looks familiar because they have seen the template before.

There is currently a discussion on slashdot titled "Open Source Usability — Joomla! Vs. WordPress". In the article the author asks if either of these are better that the other for usability.

Unfortunately it has degenerated into the typical argument on slashdot, "my software is better than your software" with a smattering of people who once tried the software in the dim and distant past pronouncing judgement as if they are the ultimate authority.

Handing over a web site to a client is always a satisfying feeling but is it always finished?

Of course you should always aim to complete everything on the client's brief and to their specifications but are there times when it is best to hand over the site when you still have some work to do?

Recently I have found more and more that I am handing over web sites that are perhaps only 90% complete or that have temporary solutions in place.

Almost exactly one year ago I started work redesigning a large, complex and very un-friendly joomla 1.0 web site.

The site had been built in a rush and had grown rapidly with thousands of pages and a very poor navigational structure.

Users were regularly complaining that they could not find important information even though we knew it was there.

As a source of information it faired badly and the general impression was that it was disorganised and unprofessional and not a good representation of the organisation.

I've got another new toy.

I was having a little trouble today to think of a blog post that would actually be interesting.

I was going to write about my experiences testing an SVN a copy of joomla I. 6 but the current state of the svn made that unproductive.

Apologies to regular readers for the lack of updates this week but it's been a very interesting few days.

Almost all my work this week has in some way or other been in the security sphere.

Hopefuly by now you will have read Steve Krug's excellent book "Don't Make Me Think" and you will have understood how we  speed read a website looking for the relevant content.

But how does a blind person "speed read"? Do they have to "read" all the content of the website or do blind people "speed listen"?

A few weeks ago I was chatting on skype with Fotis from joomlaworks.gr discussing the merits of various different RSS news readers or aggregators.

Despite trying several neither of us really were satisfied with what we had found.

Recently I've spent quite a lot of time looking at how users actualy use a website, where the mouse goes, what the eye scans etc.

It has also been interesting comparing how users with a mouse work differently to those with a trackpad. So as a bit of "Friday fun" have a look at this experimental web site that I bookmarked some time ago.

Can you resist to click

[warning: this will either inspire you to throw the mouse away or to throw it at the screen.]

This blog is my place on the net to say what is on my mind, it is not a (potential) source of revenue. Unlike other blogs or websites you can be confident that anything you see or read here will be purely my opinion and has not been influenced by any third party.