Not a complete failure

When, like me, you’re not a web or a graphic artist, and you redesign your website with higher standards, you always learn a lot and find that things are more complex that they seem.
You don’t redesign you site from scratch every day. I did it last week. It was long overdue, and the two years-old site design it replaces was not difficult to improve upon.
So let me explain you the process I’ve followed:
– Disclaimer: I’m not a professional, I’ve just tried to get as good a website a non-professional, self-taught, can –
When I started redesign, I had already for a few months taken bits of notes from pages, sites, or ideas collected during casual browsing. I also did some benchmarking by visiting and analyzing the design of half a dozen of sites related to my business.
You end up with a long list of items that you like and may want to copy. A short extract of mine:

• Clean layout, nice graphics, excellent presentation of products, this website is an example to follow.
• Create hi-res pictures of main features. If screenshots are used, give them life with perspective effect, …
• Present product by features but also through “success stories”. People identify better with a short story than a list of tech specs.
• Pages will be indexed by search engines and people will land on a page directly after a search. Make sure the content is adapted.
• Search button can easily be implemented by posting a form to a Google address.
• Nice layout to present a list of features

You’ll have to filter the list and retain maybe 1 out of 5 items because you cannot implement everything you like in just one design. That’s when you need to figure out the style, layout, structure and technologies.

Let’s go one by one:

Technologies were in my case a constraint. Remember that I’m not a web professional. I opted for the simplest possible: Static pages served by Apache server. No Flash, ActiveX or Javascript involved. Just plain HTML with CSS style sheets.

What I call the structure is a hand-drawn sketch where a put a box for every page and I draw lines to represent navigation between pages. I tried to keep the number of pages low while using one page per topic. What shall be avoided is a page that contains ten different topics, or a topic scattered in ten different pages. You want to make it readable and clear to the visitor, but also indexable by search-engines.

For layout, I picked a template from a web designer, many very good templates are available for free on the Internet. I wanted something simple and elegant, with several possible layouts (2 or 3 columns, feature box, …) to have some variety between pages.

Finally, style is the most difficult aspect. It’s a bit how your website smells and has to reflect the relationship you try to establish with your reader. If it’s plain, descriptive style, no emotion is transmitted, we are in pure technical communication. If you want to feel “cool”, you’ll probably get the opposite effect. I’ve tried to be personal and honest. I think it corresponds to the way I’m running the business and behaving with my customers.

So the result is certainly not perfect, but way better than before.

After more than one year of development, SimpleMovieX version 3 is finally ready. Software takes a lot of time to make, and if you want a good product, most of the time will be dedicated to what I call polish, or Mac polish to use carpeagua words. Take the Timeline for example. It’s a critical element of user interface that must give clear information that you can understand in a fraction of a second, and also a space for mouse interaction. And it has to be nice looking. You can’t come up with something radical or new, as the user has already worked with other similar applications. You have to ensure “backward compatibility” with what the users bring, what they take for granted.
So, you may ask, why do I persist in using a 2-knobs interface when QuickTime Pro and iMovie use a 3-knobs one?

This was one of the first design decision taken, two years ago, and maybe it was taken for a wrong reason: At that time, SimpleMovieX was not doing much, and I couldn’t just copy the QuickTime timeline without trying to “improve” it. So I decided to simplify it by dropping the Playhead knob. After all, when you are editing a movie, what is the point of playing it back if not locating one of the 2 knobs at the playhead? So let merge the 2 functions.
The other reason is that as a developer I use the keyboard a lot to test and use my software, so I tend to optimize the design for me. And driving the 2 knobs interface with the keyboard make SimpleMovieX fly. The power-user that invests a bit of time in learning the 2 knobs interface and the keyboard shortcuts gets a huge reward. But a good user interface is also learnable and with the lowest possible entry cost. I may have turned away a lot of people with my “improvement”.
Still, I can reconsider this choice in a future version of SimpleMovieX. If I switch now to a 3 knobs interface, I take the risk of infuriating the user base that is happy with the current one. I can always make it configurable, with a little switch in the Preferences, but nothing is free: I would probably end up with a fragmented user experience, some actions working better with 2 knobs, other with 3. Divide and conquer is rarely the best option when you’re short on resources like me.
What do you think about my choices?

You hear this everywhere. Every software developer, every start-up founder should write a blog.
You hear few arguments against blogging, but this one sounds quite reasonable: “Blogs are a fine thing but they grow best out of having something to say.”
Personally, I’m quite skeptical. What will the readers find in my blog ? I’m not even a native english writer. I can tell stories about my family life, my day job, about SimpleMovieX and other things I’m developing. But will someone care?
Maybe I can invert roles and try to figure out: Why do I care about other persons blogs?
And yes, the answer is included in the question, I read person’s blogs. Not companies or committees blog. Because you want to hear that little voice when you read, you don’t want to hear it distorted through a corporate filter.
So if I read persons blogs, what have those persons in common? Well, they usually talk about subjects that interest me a lot, and I want to hear genuine opinions about those subjects. I build trust in those persons, because it’s genuine, and they become my “experience proxies”.
To start, let me give you a short introduction:
I’m married, one kid and soon two. I have a day job and a night job, not related at all. Blogging is part of my night job. I’m french. I know, it’s terrific but I live abroad to keep the mental balance.
I develop software for Mac, and it’s not a complete failure.