Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

This is a follow-up to my recent post “MostSliced.com summary - picking PSD slicing company“.

Once the choices for the PSD slicing service were established, I did the next step - actual order.  I started from the top of my list, which happened to be xHTML Master.  I sent them the order through the form on their web site and got a pretty fast response apologizing for the fact that they were too busy to undertake my order.  No problem.  Good that they notified me in a timely manner.  So, I went to the next choice - PSD Slicing.  Again, submitted the design and went into the waiting mode.

Pretty soon I received an email letting me know that the order is OK and that they can start on Monday (next working day) and finish it by Wednesday (two pages, with one of them being a rather complex design).  The timing was well within my limits.  I sent them 50% of the down-payment and started waiting again.  Today, on Tuesday, around lunch time, I got my order back, fully done and finished.

First of all, of course, I was a bit surprised with the speed.  I thought it would take them more.  When I checked the results I was even more surprised.  In short: outstanding job!  The images were cut properly, some in PNG, some in GIF, some in JPG - properly chosen each time.  The xHTML was small and clean, validated perfectly with XHTML 1.0 Strict (not even Transitional!).  DIVs, proper CSS, nicely indented.  CSS was also done nicely - small, simple, and straight-forward.  Fully valid.  Also, the whole codebase is pretty semantic and, as a bonus, validates with web accessibility standard (Section 508).  To say that I was really impressed with the result was to say nothing at all.  I was stunned for a few minutes.  It’s been a really long time since I saw anything so beautiful.

It was so good that I couldn’t believe it.  So I thought maybe it will break in one of the major browsers.  Then my attention was caught by something else in that email message that they sent me.  It was a link to BrowserShots.org , which is the web service that can show you how your web site looks in a whole lot of browsers.  PSD Slicing provided me with the link to the screenshots of their results in all major browsers that I cared about!

After checking that code back and forth, the only suggestion I could come up with is … comments.  They aren’t required or anything, since the whole CSS and xHTML files are very small (something around 6-10 KBytes), but still it would have been nice to have some comments, especially in CSS.

Am I satisfied with their service?  You bet I am.  Will I ever recommend it?  Yes, of course.  I’m doing it already.  Is it worth the money (around $120/page)? Yes!  [insert more questions here and answer them "yes"]

Very much in line with the image explaining simplicity of user interfaces, comes the list of Googley Design Principles:

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Anyone doing any sort of user interface work should learn these by heard and repeat them as every morning mantra.

If you have a lot of attention for details, you probably noticed a few things moving around and changing on this blog in the last few days. You weren’t dreaming - I indeed moved changed a few things. Here is a round-up for those of you who enjoy these sort of things:

• List of categories moved up. Since I am interested in and blog about many different things, I don’t blame you if you would like to skip some of them and read only things that you care about. I moved the list of categories higher up in the sidebar, so that you could jump directly to the topic of your choice.
• Full posts in categories, tags, and archives. This should also make reading posts about specific things easier. You won’t need to jump to the full post page all that often now. Less clicks and all.
• Category header images. Some categories (see Photography, Movies, and Technology for examples) will greet you with different header images (once again, thanks to Igor Gorbulinsky for his talent and time). This feature should help you out a bit while navigating the site - instant indicator of where you are.
• Highlight of category name, tag, and search query. When you navigate to posts of a specific tag or category, you should see the term at the top of the page. Sometimes the term is highlighted, like, for example, in case of search query. Also, sometimes, you have a link to RSS feed which provides easier access to similar posts.
• Improved RSS feed auto-discovery. Depending on where you are on the site, your browser will suggest a different set of RSS feeds to subscribe to. I’m trying to make these things as intuitive as possible.
• Improved browser compatibility and standard compliance. A few small glitches here and there were fixed. All RSS feeds are valid now, except for those rare cases when content of specific posts causes problems. CSS is now valid and many warnings are fixed. HTML is now almost valid. There are a few issues which which are caused by WordPress bugs, but fixes for these seem to be available in the upcoming version of WordPress. In any case, it seems all theme and plugin specific issues were fixed.
• Upgraded WordPress to version 2.3.3 .  This is the latest version with all the security fixes and such.

As you can see from the list above, all of these changes are rather cosmetic and can be classified as web site polish. None of them should cause any issues to you or your browser, and much of the misbehaving functionality should be fixed now.

If you have any ideas on suggestions on further improvements, or if you notice any misbehavior at all, please let me know.

Cyprus is preparing for the presidential elections, which will take place this coming Sunday - February 17th, 2008 - and then another Sunday after that - February 24th, 2008. Unfortunately, most of the information about the elections is in Greek, so there isn’t much point in linking to it or quoting it.

Anyway, I came across this post in Linkbox blog, which links to web sites of some candidates, as well as the main web site of the elections.  Being a curious web worker, I wanted to see which tools these web sites use, and how well they use them.  Here are my findings.

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