Team Blog

Much has been made recently about the effects of Internet usage on the brain. Reading web content, according to some, is turning us into a culture of attention deficit disorder sufferers. No longer can we read a web article from beginning to end. Too often our attention is hijacked by a link somewhere along the way.

While much of this may be unavoidable — the web after all is built on the idea of hypertext — there are things we can do as web designers and usability experts to reduce the avalanche of information and distraction on our readers.

Important to many clients is the notion that their website should be built quickly, efficiently, and take into account as many future trends as possible. Yet most of these projects take place in a larger context. Understanding this context and placing the website within it is what we would refer to as strategy. And unfortunately, many of the projects that we get involved in don’t have a proper strategy, but we see the value of strategy.

A host that we refer a number of clients to recently decided it was a good idea to upgrade to PHP 5.3.x on one of our client's VPS's without informing us.
Suddenly, clicking through to a content page was WSOD, but only for certain content types. Frantic debugging begins, and of course there's no project hours to support this level of disaster.
Admin menu broke. Empty white space where it should be, and no "admin-menu" div in the source html.
Emfield broke. Empty white space where videos should play.
Too much other stuff broke to mention.
And then a simple phpinfo() surprise: PHP 5.3 magically appears a few days ago.
Another lesson in "never ignore the obvious" when debugging your suddenly broken site.

We've just solved a highly perplexing issue on a recent project.  Mysteriously, our lovely transitions on a Views Cycle banner rotator were not happening in IE7 and 8!  Instead of smooth dissolves, the images transitioned suddenly with no effect.

Sounded like a javascript issue, maybe a conflict? But Darko disabled each one by one, and still no solution. He did notice that the transitions worked beautifully by switching the theme to Garland, so something in our custom theme must be mucking things up.