There are a lot of thanks to go around for this project, but we’d especially like to thank Omnia who largely took up the role of architect and developer throughout the process. We also want to acknowledge Steve, Ryan, Tyler, Bryant and Ted for their amazing work in all things creative.

We had a lot of fun making this game app and we hope that families traveling on highways and byways all over the U.S. will enjoy it too.

Among his many relevant points was the notion he referred to as ‘the dominance of search.’ Matt’s focus for the evening was specifically on sites that serve up social commerce, but I think the search issue is something any site needs to consider seriously. What Matt was referring to was his claim was that 50-80% of traffic across the web comes from search. This was a profound, yet not to surprising statistic when I heard it. However, in my experience, clients are not very proactive in doing everything they can to make their sites findable. As web designers we should take more responsibility in educating our clients on the importance of being findable. Traditional means of SEO such as embedding tags in code, writing bot friendly copy, etc. are still a great start, however the effectiveness of user generated comments/reviews of your service should not be overlooked.

Matt remarked that a quality review can, and will, bring in roughly 50 people to your site. At which point. if you do a reasonable job of converting those 50 people to buy (say 3 or 4%), one could argue that the person who wrote the review for you actually played a more valuable roll while they were on your site than if they had actually made a purchase! This view may be a little subjective, but the key takeaway is that the people who are using your software and are actually taking their time to participate in the social sphere are extremely valuable users. They’ll give you credibility, get others involved, and help you create meaningful content. They are valuable for many reasons, but if for nothing else, they’ll bring other people to your site.

“Will my users be able to find me through search?” is a question Matt proposed everyone who wanted to have a successful presence on the web, should be asking up front. In other words, get your clients on board with SEO right out of the gate! There’s no way around the fact that there’s an overwhelming amount of content online. Having a site that is cutting edge, cool, innovative, clever, refined, well planned, etc. will not make your software successful based on these factors alone. You have to be findable. For more on findability you can check out findability.org or Peter Morville’s book called Ambient Findability.

What started as an idea in our humble office on the north side of Chicago is now available to web designers worldwide!

BrowserLab, formerly named Meer Meer, was made available for free trial download on June 2. Read the press release here.

Our principals, Charles Stevenson and Ted Billups, formed a collaboration with Joshua Hatwich and Dean Vukas in 2006 to develop a web-based experience testing tool that would streamline web designers’ cross-browser testing processes and save them thousands of dollars on hardware required to do the tasks.

Together our team worked on all facets of this nascent SaaS idea: application development, remote and scaleable hosting, branding, business models, interface design and usability, additional rich features. etc. Before we even released the beta version to the public, however, Adobe Systems learned of our application and contacted us. Making a long story shorter, we sold Meer Meer to Adobe in December of 2007. Since then, the tool has been in further development and testing for eventual launch to the public one day soon. Yesterday was that day.

If you or your web agency would like to try Adobe BrowserLab to see all the things it can do for your cross-browser testing processes, go to the Browser Lab product page here for a free trial user account. Here are a couple of sample tests we ran this first day of early release billupsdesign.com on Firefox 3.0 OS X vs. Internet Explorer 7.0 Windows XP: 2-Up and onion-skin view.

We at Billups Design are extremely proud of this application and our role in bringing it to web designers all over the world. We hope you like it too! For more information on the original Meer Meer software, please visit the case study in our Portfolio.

It’s clear from the moment you open Espresso that the application is meant for web designers that code their own front ends. The sort of people that take good aesthetic design into their purchasing decisions. The welcome screen is a beautiful, albeit unnecessary, illustration that gives the introduction to all this application can do. Everything from the icon work to the UI panels in the application are simple yet there is a fine attention to detail. So much so that the team at MacRabbit even created their own monospaced font for the text editor. There are little subtleties that one up Coda and even my favorite editor at the moment, Textmate. The line numbers are very clear and seem as though they are part of the document without the need for extra spacing like Textmate. The code folding features is another great example that is tucked away until you hover over it and when you do you get another visually excellent feature implementation.

Although Espresso is trying to achieve the same end as Coda it goes about it in a very different way. Coda does things by projects which it stores on a dashboard screen. Once a project is open you see the ftp directories on the left and your files on the right. It makes editing things already on the server extremely simple and easy. Espresso differs from the edit on the server model quite a bit and I think it lends itself to better development practices. With Espresso Your work area is laid out to cater more towards local copies. You give Espresso a folder of files, or you can download the latest from the built in FTP client, and you work from there. The real genius comes into play when you have to upload your changes to the FTP server. Espresso has nifty Update, Merge, and Mirror functions that will keep track of what version of the file, your local copy or the server’s, is the newest and sync accordingly. This way you have a backup and a way to test without disrupting the live server, all without worrying about what files you’ve changed.

There are some problems with Espresso, and some of them exist even in Coda. The first one is page templates. I use TextMate as my primary text editor and whenever I’m starting out a new site the first thing I do is use TextMates XHTML Strict template. Doctypes are far too long to have to remember and code by had every time and although I can create a snippet for this in Espress and Coda, it’d be logical to include the full page template by default. The other issue I have with Espresso is how weak its snippet capabilities are. Espresso categorizes the snippets into System and User tabs, and no matter if I’m coding Javascript, HTML, CSS, or PHP my user snippet category is the same. I would love the ability to have my user snippets depend on the file I’m working with. I don’t need my custom XHTML Strict page template getting in the way of my WordPress Loop snippet. The final annoyance of Espresso is how it handles projects. I’m not saying they should copy Coda’s project dashboard, but if I take the time to set up the directory and add my FTP servers (sometimes multiple) then don’t make me hunt to find this project file on my hard drive every time I open the application. The Recent Items list only goes back so far and doesn’t cut it. Some sort of dashboard or projects splash window is a must.

So which is better? What application should you drop everything and start using to code web sites? Well my recommendation to you is that if you’ve already purchased Coda don’t buy Espresso. Both applications are executed very well and Espresso isn’t a clear enough winner to justify dropping Coda yet. If you’re not using either then its a good idea to download the demo versions of both. Both demos are fully functioning for 30 days and its probably a good idea to try out both of them for at least a week with a good amount of use before you decide. For most users that just need to edit text files and upload them to a server both applications are great and it’ll be the dozens of minor details that make your decision. If you’re a power user that needs SVN, Terminal, the visual CSS tools, powerful find and replace, then you’ll probably find Espresso lacking and want to go the TextMate or Coda route.

37signals.
37signals started phasing out support for ie6 starting in October 1, 2008. They’re not stopping ie6 users from logging in and using their software all at once. They’re taking the phase out approach of telling everyone that any new improvements or fixes may not be compatible with IE6.

Facebook.
Facebook has decided to provide an inferior experience and a large warning message to all their users in IE6.

Apple – Mobile Me.
Apple touts Mobile Me as a desktop experience on the web. Thus their site pushes far beyond what developers can even do on IE6. IE6′s slow javascript engine would just end up with too bad of a user experience for Apple, so they don’t even let you log in with IE6.

Notice the ugly transparent png apple logo

One thing these websites have is that they’re not even websites, they’re web applications. They, like many desktop applications, are starting to require a system upgrade to use their software. Users tend to me more understanding when it comes to an application asking them to upgrade than it does a website. We do it all the time on the desktop and this helps these developers get away with such bold actions. The other thing that separates these sites from most is they’re actively developed large applications. So they have new features, design iterations, fixes, and enhancements constantly, and as the web moves forward and IE6 stays so far behind it’s becoming more expensive and time consuming to try to retrofit things to work in IE6. What was financially feasible 2 years ago is no longer today. It had to start sometime, why not now?

Well if web applications killing support for IE6, what are web sites to do? First off, they don’t have the advantage of users tolerating a required update like applications, and they don’t always have the constant development iterations that web applications have, forcing them to kill IE6 for financial reasons. This hasn’t stopped a few others from taking an anti IE6 approach.

Finn.no
One of the largest sites in Norway, Finn.no has dropped support for IE6 and initiated a campaign to get others to follow suit. In fact they saw results of less ie6 users immediately which they’ve interpreted as people upgrading.

45Royale.com
45Royale is a respectable web agency that decided to offer a one IE6 page watered down version of their site to anyone using IE6. The site is very careful to let people know they’re only seeing 9% of their website and offers links to download a more modern browser.

So what does this mean for Billups Design? Currently we’ve worked hard to make the IE6 user experience of BillupsDesign.com as close to other modern browsers as possible.  We use a respectable level of ajax effects, transparent png and advanced CSS layout techniques, all of which we’ve tried to degrade gracefully for IE6. Do we keep putting hours of labor into supporting this one browser when the gulf between it and “modern” grows wider each day?

We’ve decided to take on a little IE6 experiment of our own. Since relaunching our site we’ve been actively pursuing feedback. With feedback comes iterations, and with iterations comes the decision to support IE6 or not. Our Google Analytics stats show that we’re getting about 4.7% of our visits from IE6 users. Thats about 1/20 users with IE6. Its a small percentage, but still a decent size. So we’ve built  a one-pager (a la 45Royale.com) to serve up to anyone visiting billupsdesign.com in IE6. We took a similar philosophy to mobile web design and filtered out all but the most important aspects of our site into the one page. You can check it out at billupsdesign.com/ie6/ .

Further reading:
http://www.bringdownie6.com/bring-down-ie-6.html

http://dearie6.com/

- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great

I’ve been using Songbird (instead of iTunes) lately, and I have to say it’s quite a nice media browser/player. It is an open-source project with a focus on the api and web integration throughout – very similar to Firefox. In fact, it uses Firefox’s XML-based XUL user interface description language, so it even supports many of Firefox’s add-ons like DOM Inspector. One popular add-on is a panel that displays lyrics.

On launch it can import your iTunes library and settings, and instead of “The Genius” it has mashTape, with artist info, reviews, news (Digg, Google News, MTV Music News, etc.), photos and videos. It also has support for Last.FM Scrobbling, SHOUTcast Radio, Concert Tickets, and customizable UI. I’m going to go look around for some sound shaping tools (EQ, etc.), but feel free to download it if you haven’t already!

Our good software engineer friends at Adobe have launched InContext Editing (ICE), which (long last) allows any user to edit directly into pages using Dreamweaver. It’s what people have been asking for since I started making web pages in 1994. Other companies like Yahoo (and their YUI tools) allow for some in-page editing, but Adobe has done it with elegance and complete breadth. I’ll be curious to see how much of the content management software market they will have in 1 year. Sign up, view a tutorial and register a site to get started. The support site is here.

In the next month or so we’re hoping to see a glimpse of another new Adobe software technology that Charles and I created and sold to Adobe. It’s quite exciting!

—- Update 12/11/09 —-

Well, it looks like Adobe ICE turned out to be a web page editor, not a content management system per se. It lets you set up singular areas that can be edited by any browser, but there’s not a robust piece of software that ties it all together as a cms. Lately we’ve been using Expression Engine, SymphonyCMS, and WordPress for many of our cms needs. But I’m excited to see what new tools arrive in the future… who knows, maybe Flash CMS tools will become popular? Ha ha ha. Yeah, right.