Fagstein » Web design

V pour vendre

Fagstein — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:42:33 +0000

It's been suggested to me that V's website is a bit heavy on the advertising.

I don't see it, do you?

Journal de Montréal launches website, nobody notices

Fagstein — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:46:00 +0000

I came across it in a search - an article the Journal de Montréal wrote that was entirely based off an article from La Presse. I was surprised to find a new website for the Journal, one that looks just about identical to the one for the Journal de Québec and similar to the one for 24H, not to mention the Toronto Sun and the rest of Sun Media.

The fact that the Journal is producing little journalism of note (what with their journalists being locked out and all) is probably a big reason. The fact that the website is so forgettable is another (I'm not even going to bother with a review), as is public support for Rue Frontenac, the website setup by those locked-out workers.

Nevertheless, this is significant. The Journal had been prevented from launching a proper website because of clauses in its labour contract that gave the union some say in it. Employees started Rue Frontenac in part to show that they're not opposed to having an online presence and a website - they just want one unique to the Journal and not some cookie-cutter site that gets lost in the giant Canoe web.

So much for that.

The Journal also setup a Twitter account (@LeJournaldeMtl), which apparently quickly followed and then unfollowed a bunch of people, resulting in it getting suspended for spammy-like activity.

CFQR adds to website

Fagstein — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:18:15 +0000

925theq.com

Only eight months after they rebranded themselves from "Q92" to "The Q", CFQR has opened up its website to more interesting content.

New features include:

A "recently played" list (which right now includes a bunch of Christmas songs)
A page of local news headlines and a movie guide both "powered by The Gazette"
A community calendar
And a bunch of other crap I won't bother linking to

There's also a schedule, which has scrubbed the name of Tammy Moyer from her late-morning show. She hasn't been fired, says Program Director Brian DePoe. Rather, she's "taken a leave from the Q to deal with some personal life issues."

As they await more "clarity" on the situation, the show is being hosted temporarily by Chris Reiser.

Polish woman wants to save local Canadian TV

Fagstein — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:43:51 +0000

Continuing my research into the origin of stock photos, I should point out that CTV's Local TV Matters site makes generous use of microstock.

This woman with a bullhorn, which used to adorn its splash page, is from a stock photographer based in Poland.

And that giant "on air" sign is from a 3D animator. It even comes with an off-air version, or one that says "vacancy". There's no French version, though, which forced CTV to kind of awkwardly photoshop their own.

Save local TV!

Star redesign: I don’t hate it

Fagstein — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:19:57 +0000

After inexplicably hyping it for weeks, the Toronto Star finally unveiled its website redesign last week. I took one look at it and was unimpressed, but figured I'd return for a closer look.

Toronto Star's thestar.com

Colour me more impressed.

I'm still not crazy about the visual design, which is filled with rounded corners, blue-grey gradients and just about every other Web 2.0 cliché in the books, but some of the functionality is worth noting.

One is the topic pages. News organizations have to get used to the fact that the Internet provides them with a different way to present information. Background doesn't have to be repeated in every newspaper article to re-educate the reader. Instead, you can simply link to a previous article in a series, or better yet to a summary of the topic so far (kind of like what you'd see on a Wikipedia page). Many topics have short introductions followed by a list of articles on that topic. It's simple, but very useful. The best part is the "hot topics" banner at the top of the page, which allows quick links to the big issues of the day.

Another is the timeline view, which translates as "everything published on this website, in reverse chronological order." If you don't know what you want to read, go here and just read whatever is new. There are other views like the "visual news" view, which presents stories as a series of pictures, but that's only useful if all stories lend themselves to good pictures. Many don't and are illustrated with boring file art instead, lessening the usefulness of this page.

Text in these boxes don't have enough ...

More from teehan+lax, Torontoist and the Star itself.

Dear “Friends of Louise Harel”

Fagstein — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:22:35 +0000

Friends of Louise Harel

Good for you with the website rallying anglos to the defence of Louise Harel. Providing a new voice in the election campaign is always welcome. And you're getting the francophone media to use anglo headlines, which is always a plus.

Here's the thing: Maybe people would believe you more about the surge of Montrealers from ethnic communities who have come out in support of her if the pictures on your website weren't stock photos from a U.K.-based stock photo service.

These aren't Montrealers, nor are they friends of Louise Harel, so why are there pictures of them on your website? Does Harel not have enough real friends that you've had to import pictures of fake ones?

UPDATE (Oct. 5): And I see you're also plagiarizing blog posts. (Original, FOLH version)

Union Montreal’s new website

Fagstein — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 06:22:19 +0000

Union Montreal's "English" website

I got an email Friday morning, just as the municipal election campaign officially began, informing me that Union Montreal has redesigned its website.

So, of course, I checked it out with my usual critical eye. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The design was clean and simple, the page looked fine even with the style sheet turned off. They've got the usual Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Flickr accounts. They're even releasing their content under a Creative Commons license.

Great, I thought. So where's the English version?

After a bit of searching, I could find some pages that had a link at the bottom that said "English". That would bring me to an English version of those pages. But then I'd click somewhere and it would bring me back to the French website. Or it would be the English page and all the navigational text would be in French.

I asked the guy who emailed me, Marc Snyder, what's up with all that. He said they're working on it:

We're progressing in the right direction: I think this is what a work-in-progress is all about ;-)

Building a website that's bilingual isn't easy. Most cool content management systems don't think of building in support for bilingual websites. So many do so through third-party plugins. In this case, the website is WordPress based and they're using the Qtranslate plugin.

But to launch a website so publicly without even basic information in English (at first, there wasn't even an English bio for the mayor) seems a fairly major gaffe. Even now, most of its content isn't accessible in English. Instead, you get a short apology with a link to the French version.

Remember, this is supposed to be the anglo party, embracing both languages of this diverse metropolis. Vision Montreal, with ex-PQer Louise Harel who speaks little English, and Projet Montréal, which doesn't even translate its name into our language, both have better English versions of their websites.

Maybe next time someone from Union Montreal criticizes Louise Harel for alienating anglophones, she can point out the fact that people don't need to look up what "Arrondissement de militantisme" is before they can donate to her party.

Oh wait, she can't. Neither can Michel Richard Bergeron. Because both Vision Montreal's donation form and Projet Montréal's donation form have random untranslated bits of French on them.

I realize this is small-time politics and we're not dealing with real big budgets here, but these are forms people fill out to give you money. If you're so careless about translation, I can only imagine what kind of controls you have on the $100 I'd be putting in your campaign fund.

Colour me pas impressionné.

Pitter-Patter

Fagstein — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:48:15 +0000

Patrick Lagacé (top), Patrick Lagacé (right) and Patrick Lagacé (bottom)

HE'S MULTIPLYING! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

It's good that Cyberpresse always has extra images of Patrick Lagacé around, just in case you forget what he looks like.

UPDATE: It seems some people have had enough.

Global Quebec’s new website

Fagstein — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 05:14:16 +0000

GlobalQuebec.com

After redesigning its newspaper websites, Canwest has done the same with its Global network, giving each station its own proper domain name and doing lots of Web 2.0 stuff like SEOed URLs and using bluish grey everywhere.

Global Quebec's site still takes virtually all its news content directly from The Gazette (which in turn links to Global videos for major stories).

Mercier Bridge construction begins (and it’s on Twitter!)

Fagstein — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:27:34 +0000

Starting next Monday, what's been described as a "first in this country" construction project will be undertaken on the Honoré-Mercier Bridge. It involves 1,300 prefabricated concrete panels which will replace the bridge deck in a way that is designed to minimize traffic disruption.

In other words, they're going to replace a bridge without closing it to traffic.

It's not quite so simple (there will be night work that requires rerouting traffic), but it's still pretty impressive.

The rusted Mercier Bridge is in dire need of replacement

The first stage starts on Monday, when the ramp for the 138 East (from Châteauguay) is closed and replaced. Traffic will be sent along a side road to the other approach on the 132. The other three ramps on the southern side will be replaced one by one, and then work will begin on the bridge itself.

What's impressive about this operation to me though isn't the construction, but the communications. A (fully bilingual) special WordPress-based website has been setup (complete with RSS feed and question-and-answer forum), and there are Flickr, YouTube and Twitter accounts to make sure everyone is aware of what's going on and can share information easily. Unlike what you see with most marketing campaigns, these tools are used quite effectively.

This YouTube video shows the steps that will be taken over the coming weeks to replace the southern access ramps. It's long, but it's clear.

Kudos.

Globeandmail.com redesigned, broken

Fagstein — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:00:30 +0000

The new Globe and Mail website

In case you haven't noticed already, the Globe and Mail redesigned its website this week.

The site is excessively slow right now, which I assume is only temporary, but still quite embarrassing.

As if to underscore how little has actually changed, the video introduction by Edward Greenspon (which I can't embed here but looks like it was shot in a basement in the 80s) talks a lot about how great the website has been doing but very little about what's actually changing, beyond the "new nav bar" (exciting!)

The old globeandmail.com

Among the changes from the old site:

URLs lose their /servlet/story/RTGAM.../BNStory/home nonsense, replaced by search-engine-friendly URLs like this one that are based on the headline. This change will probably make the most difference for traffic reaching the site.
After going overboard on the grey in their last layout, it's much less prominent here in favour of black and red (making it look a bit Maclean's-ish).
Speaking of colours, each major section is colour-coordinated, including a rather garish purple for Globe Life.
Gone is Trebuchet MS, replaced by serifed Georgia for headlines.
The story pages are much cleaner and less cluttered, but for some reason photos are limited to 360 pixels wide.
No more page showing articles that were in that day's print edition, supposedly because they're all found in their respective sections now and don't need their own page.

But the most pretentious change is the name: It's being rebranded from "globeandmail.com" to "The Globe and Mail", because, Greenspon says, "it is the Globe and Mail and everything is integrated". I can see the point (even if every newspaper says that and subsequently ignores it by spending 90% of its effort on the print edition's front page), except Greenspon keeps referring to it as "globeandmail.com" and the video ends with the old brand.

Overall, I think it's a positive change, if a bit over-hyped.

The STM’s new brand

Fagstein — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:52:36 +0000

stm.info

For those who haven't noticed yet, the STM has redesigned its website to bring it into the 21st century. The previous version, while functional, wasn't very pretty and looked quite dated.

The new version fixes that, with all the current design clichés:

Rounded corners
Gradients
The colours blue and grey
Flash-based Cycling series of main images
JavaScript-based collapsible menus
Helvetica and/or Arial, mostly in all caps

Fortunately, the design change is cosmetic. Most of the content is the same and even the URLs don't change, so links aren't broken.

The redesign fits in with the STM's "Society in motion" brand, with a yellow and blue chevron forming a green one (it's not clear what this represents exactly), and an increased emphasis on the environmental benefits of using public transit. The INFO STM page in Metro has also been redesigned with this new design.

They also launched Version 4 of Tous Azimuts, the trip planning application that uses the STM's database of bus, train and metro departures. The new version is faster, easier to use and shows a map of trips, in addition to allowing smart searches of departure and arrival locations. If that's not good enough for you, the STM also gives people the choice of using Google Transit, which has had access to departure schedules since October.

Some people should not be designing websites

Fagstein — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:51:53 +0000

I have a feeling I'm going to break someone's heart with this post, but it's true. There are professional web designers, and there are people whose pages belong on Geocities in the 90s.

The website for (long-shot) mayoralty candidate Louise O'Sullivan belongs in the latter camp:

partimontrealvillemarie.ca

Let us count the ways:

Test2
Candidate's photo in 256-colour GIF
Photo of the city stolen from Google Image Search
Drop shadows on everything
Scrolling marquee
Coloured boxes inside other coloured boxes inside even more coloured boxes
Text is all in bold
Date written via JavaScript
No links in main text

I'm sure you can add more in the comments. Feel free.

My first real website

Fagstein — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:50:05 +0000

The Link's website in summer 2002

For some reason that completely eludes me now, I took a trip through the Wayback Machine this week to visit my first big website. It was for The Link, the better of Concordia University's two student newspapers (at least while I worked there). And sadly, it's a website that no longer exists except in the form of a few snapshots in the Internet Archive.

Taking us back to 2001

Having been appointed to the position of webmaster for a newspaper that didn't have a website, it became pretty clear what my first job would be. During the summer of 2001 I embarked on a project to create a server and install a content management system on it that would be suitable for newspaper articles.

The first part wasn't too complicated: a generic desktop server with Slackware Linux installed on it, a few tweaks, and the server was up.

The CMS was a different story. This was two years before WordPress. Months before the first MovableType. After minutes of searching, I figured my best option would be to use Slashcode, the Perl-based engine behind the popular Slashdot. (Hey, remember Slashdot? Apparently it's still there.)

In hindsight, it was a horrible mistake. At the time (and I suspect this is still the case) it was an awful, inelegant piece of hacked-together software, built from scratch to support Slashdot and awkwardly patched with new features. That meant changing things very difficult.

Among the annoyances that only grew over time:

Accounts had to be created for each author. Every time a new person contributed or even just wrote a letter to the editor, an account had to be created. A few years in, the "author" drop-down menu had over a hundred names in it.
No concept of "issues" to tie together articles of a certain date. Instead of showing all the articles for a particular issue, it would be programmed to show the latest X number of articles.
An impossible-to-understand caching system that required all sorts of manual resets in order to do something simple like change the background colour on the main page. This is combined with a background daemon that had the habit of turning itself off.
A database that tended to get corrupted causing everything to go bad.
Hard-coded or semi-hard-coded constants and variables, such as a "security level" that was in the form of an integer instead of a list of capabilities.
No built-in way of handling photos or their captions.

But for its faults, the system also had many useful features, some of which were ahead of their time:

Threaded comments, comment rating and group moderation (being Concordia at a time of relative political chaos, these got a lot of use)
Integrated RSS, including the ability to pull RSS headlines from other sites
Form keys to prevent spamming and double comments
"Boxes" (what WordPress calls "widgets) that provide for various functions and bonus content in the sidebar

For about five years, the website ran on Slash, frustrating webmaster after webmaster, until a database crash in the summer of 2006 forced them to switch to a new system. By then, thankfully, technology had progressed to the point where more elegant solutions were available.

Still, it's a shame the archives have disappeared.

You can see what the website looked like a few months after launch in 2001, a few months later after a redesign, and in 2004 before I ended my tenure as an editor.

Globaltv.com redesigned

Fagstein — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:54:59 +0000

Global TV made a big announcement about its website redesign. It includes 30 "refurbished microsites" (read: branded pages for each show), an "up-to-the-minute Twitter function" (read: link to Twitter account), an "enhanced" and "dynamically updated" schedule guide (read: a schedule) and coming soon a "newly revamped search engine" (read: they're fixing the search engine).

The new website also includes a new video player, which most Canadians still don't know gives them access to Family Guy and House on demand. (Though it still doesn't work properly for me.)

And it's got lots of boxes with rounded corners, scrolling Flash menus and gradients, which we all know are required in any properly-designed site of this era.

Sun Media’s new insert-paper-name-here redesign

Fagstein — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:28:11 +0000

Redesigned calgarysun.com

The Calgary Sun today redesigned its website.

Actually, I should say Sun Media redesigned the Calgary Sun's website. The new site is nearly identical to those of the Toronto Sun and Winnipeg Sun which have already been converted from the old Sun website layout (you know, the one that overused the Impact font and just looked so 90s in general?). Even 24 Hours and the Journal de Québec have most of the same layout styles.

ottawasun.com uses the old design

Two papers remain with the old, quaint web format: the Ottawa Sun and Edmonton Sun. Expect them to be switched over some time over the next few weeks.

It's another example of the Sun chain going where Canwest has already gone. National news desks, centralized layout desks that create copy-paste pages, dumping Canadian Press in favour of its own in-house news service, electronic editions of its newspapers, laying off hundreds of people, and now white-label websites whose contents can be copied from site to site with the click of a button. (Not that the old Sun sites were that much different from each other of course, but this just furthers the process.)

In addition to the wider design that looks like all the other newspaper websites out there (in good ways and bad), a mobile version, and what is sure to be an improved backend, the new system allows reader comments on articles (or at least it says it does - I can't find any articles with that feature enabled).

(via TSF)

Tourism Montreal up for Webby Award

Fagstein — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:37:35 +0000

I've never really been a fan of the Webby Awards, the anual awards for Web design. It's not that they charge hundreds of dollars for entries (and then more hundreds to actually attend the ceremony) or because that source of income encourages them to inflate the number of winners, but for the simple fact that the judges for these awards always prefer style (or should I say "Flash"?) over substance.

Looking at the list of nominees, it seems clear that Flash-heavy multimedia ad campaign sites are held in higher regard than genuinely useful boring HTML. The famous websites and bloggers get their nods, of course (assuming they're willing to pay or their fame is high enough that the Webbys think they'll add prestige and eyeballs to the event), but everything else seems to be judged on looks alone. In fact, many entries don't even link to the websites themselves but to special awards pages that explain how awesome the Web campaign is instead of just pointing people to the sites and having them figure it out themselves.

That is reflected in the nominees with Canadian connections. Officially there are 13 Canadian nominees, making Canada the fourth-most nominated country behind the U.S., U.K. and New Zealand, and just ahead of Australia (notice a trend there, perhaps having to do with the primary language of these countries?) Metro has links to them. But nationality is judged by the organization which created the site, not the site itself, so there are actually others.

Here are the Canadian website nominees I've found:

Tourism Montreal, by local outfit Sid Lee, in the tourism category. Best known for its slick (and expensive) Montreal in two minutes video, it also has an event search that warns you not to use the basic functions of your browser.
Adidas 60 years of soles and stripes, another Sid Lee joint, in the fashion category. Appears to redirect to another Adidas site. In any case, it's a flashy site for a company whose business model relies on being lashy and cool.
Visual Dictionary (Merriam-Webster) from Montreal-based QA International, in the education category. A quality nominee that's both good-looking and useful.
Smartset's Fashion at Play, by Toronto-based Taxi, in the animation/motion graphics category. A completely useless site, it encourages people to spin boxes around to reveal new outfits, and then plays a video. That "unlocks" access to a downloadable ZIP file which contains a desktop background, ringtone and video, all of which are connected to the campaign and aren't interesting at all. And when you unlock everything ... nothing happens. Fantastic. But hey, the boxes spin.
1000 Awesome Things, a Toronto-based one-person blog about things that are awesome, in the personal/culture blog category. (Hear an interview with its creator with Terry DiMonte on Q107)
Kaboose, a Toronto-based parenting site, in the family/parenting category. No complaints here.

I should also point out that the Boston Globe's Big Picture blog, a very simple idea simply produced, is also nominated.

There are also nominees in advertising, video and "mobile" categories, but I don't care about those (except to note that my favourite remix of all time is nominated as a viral video). Here are the Canadians:

Interactive ad campaigns

Russian Dolls

Nokia Accessories Portfolio Video

The Big Wild Email

Let's Change Insurance - Aviva Banners

Coffee Cup

Online videos

Follow Your INSTINCT (2 nominations: Best Editing et Best Sound Design)

The Curse of Degrassi

Cyberpresse is hit-and-miss for video

Fagstein — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 03:59:04 +0000

We're in the middle of a revolution in the newspaper industry, and even though I'm caught up in the middle of it, it's kind of fun to watch everyone try to muddle their way through.

Photographers are learning how to shoot and edit video. Reporters are learning how to blog. Editors are learning how to link. And managers are desperately trying to come up with new ideas that will help save their industry and their jobs.

At Cyberpresse, they're pumping out videos. Newspapers are jumping on the multimedia train, creating videos, audio slideshows, photo galleries, podcasts and other things they couldn't do on paper.

Part of me doesn't quite understand why newspapers are trying to compete with television and radio on their own turf. TV has been producing three-minute packages much longer than newspapers have, and it shows.

On the other hand, some videos I've seen demonstrate that newspapers are capable of reaching a level of depth you won't get on television outside of PBS or the occasional NFB documentary.

Cyberpresse and its producing partner Top Multimédias offer some good examples for newspaper videos, but unfortunately a lot of examples of what not to do.

Bad: Rudy Le Cours

In the latter category, you'll find this sleeper from La Presse business columnist Rudy Le Cours. He's standing in front of a bright window (which is one of the first things you learn in photography school not to do because it makes the subject dark) and for three minutes and 27 seconds talks into the camera about ... I think it's unemployment or something. I had to be resuscitated a few times while watching it and I don't remember much. There are no graphics, no charts, no pictures, no numbers. Nothing to make it worth setting up the equipment to have this guy speak text into a camera.

This video from Mali Ilse Paquin in Italy is also a head-scratcher. The audio is clearly taken over the phone or a really bad voice recorder. And the video is just a series of pictures. A blog post or story with the pictures attached would have made much more sense.

Good: Marie-Christine Blais

On the other hand we have Marie-Christine Blais and her "Week-end chaud" entertainment preview. She too is talking to the camera, but it's clear she and her camera operator are having fun (something I've long argued is sorely lacking in a lot of news media these days). Not only is she adorable, but she piques my interest enough that I'll click on that play button when her face comes up. The videos also put up web addresses of bands that she mentions (although displaying show times would be useful).

Cyberpresse still has a long way to go. There's no way to add comments to videos or embed videos on other pages. And there's no related links on any of the videos like you can find in YouTube video descriptions. All you can do is go to this page and navigate your way through the various videos in a giant Flash application.

Here's hoping Cyberpresse (and others) move quickly toward having more fun (if not effort) and way less talking heads standing in front of windows.

CBC #37 worldwide for blog media links

Fagstein — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:17:07 +0000

Technorati, the service that monitors blogs and tells them whether they're cool or not, has released a list of the 50 media websites bloggers link to the most. (Via TechCrunch)

YouTube, unsurprisingly, tops the list, followed by the New York Times, BBC and CNN.

The only Canadian media outlet on the list is CBC.ca, coming in at #37. This is unsurprising since CBC has been investing in its Internet sites longer than the private media, and it has national television, radio and Internet sites to fuel its news-gathering operation. Plus it has dozens of RSS feeds sorted by topic, an iPhone version of its website (and separate mobile version), it's got Twitter, and it has a news ticker people can add to their blogs.

I also like the fact that news stories (which are all open to comments) use Technorati to link to blogs that link back to those stories, which drives (some) traffic to those blogs and makes them (slightly) more likely to link to CBC than another website with the same story.

If other Canadian online news outlets want to match that, they should start copying some of those features.

CTV Olympics site goes live

Fagstein — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:46:50 +0000

ctvolympics.ca

More than a year before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics begin, CTV has launched CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca, where it will have coverage of the games in English and French. (This pretty much seals that RDS, not TQS, will be the primary French-language network.)

This is the first time in over a decade that CTV will be the Canadian Olympic broadcaster, and so much has changed since the early 90s (this thing called the Internet, for example).

For its first Olympic website, it does look pretty impressive. That said, I couldn't get the video player to work (it's Microsoft Silverlight-based, though I have that installed), and this is what happened when I tried to play with the past medal count widget:

How dare you try to compare more than four countries? Behold our grammatically-incorrect error message!

Fortunately they have a year to sort that kind of stuff out.

Fagstein » Web design

V pour vendre

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