Website Features

When we started re-architecting this site, one of the crucial aspects during development was that it had to be easy for us to manage. Being only a two person company, we could easily spend a good portion of every week managing and maintaining our website and internet presence. While we wanted a fully functional website, we also didn’t want to be a slave to the maintenance of it.

So to that end here is a brief description of some of the cooler features that are under the hood here.

Flickr Driven Portfolios

If you head over to our porfolio or our product pages, you’ll see we’ve added a lot more information. One area that we’ve beefed up is the product and portfolio image galleries. In the past, we manually added the images using the WordPress system, and while that worked, it wasn’t very fast or efficient. On this new site, we’ve tied all the image galleries into Flickr, so they are completely managed and updated using Flickr and associated tools such as Flickr uploader. All the titles and descriptions for each image come from Flickr as well, and given Flickr’s AJAX content editing interface, it is a real snap to edit content on each of the images.

Remote Plugin Information

Most of our plugins are updated every week or so, and keeping our website up to date with regards to the changes in each version used to be time consuming. On our last website, we finally started pulling some information in from the content on WordPress.org, and have enhanced that even further with this version. On all our plugin pages the download links, change log, last time the product was updated, and associated file sizes are all updated remotely from information over at WordPress.org. From our side, as soon as we check in a new plugin version on the WordPress plugin repository, the associated information will automatically update itself on BraveNewCode.com.

Enhanced Fonts

It’s a real shame that the Internet has essentially been limited to only a handful of web-safe fonts. While there are various technologies that allow the use of additional fonts, we finally came across one that we wanted to try on BraveNewCode: Cufón. As you can see, most of the headings are now in a dynamically generated font called Steinem. We felt that this font added to the look and feel of our website, and fit in well with the spirit behind the content.

jQuery Love

You’ll find sprinkles of jQuery effects and ajax around the site (for example the nice tooltips that pop up on download buttons), all of which was added to make navigation easier and to add some UI gloss to the website.

Jenga: More Than Just A Game

We had a little fun updating the content in a few areas, as evidenced by our spiffy new page talking about our website design and development practices. While we take pride in the work we do, we also like having fun while doing it.

Support Forums

We know that many of our plugin users have been aching for support while the support forums have been down. We apologize again, but it’s the only way we can truly complete our client work, continue to develop our plugins, and finish the overhaul to the forums themselves.

Still More To Do

Not everything is completed with the site revamp, and we’ll be adding more in the coming weeks ahead. Enhancements to the blog, portfolio and product areas, as well as the addition of user accounts here at BraveNewCode.

The New Frontier

We still have a lot to roll out in the next few months here at BraveNewCode, but our new website was a pretty big bullet point on our to-do list, and we’re happy to finally cross it off and share the end result with everyone. By all means, drop us a comment and let us know what you think. Look forward to some more great stuff from The BraveNewCode team in the near future. Happy surfing!

“There are a number of trigger phrases that people use to try to prevent you focusing on the detail of a project and back to nice, sweeping, high-level thinking, and ‘that’s executional’ is one of them. I think it is supposed to mean that the particular detail you’re focusing on is not central to the service under discussion and is something that can be worked out at a later date.

This attitude frustrates me so much because I think you make great services by obsessing over details. I think one of the ways to make awful services is by developing some pure, abstract concept in isolation from how people will actually use it. To me, the concept is contained in the execution.

I don’t mean to suggest that every detail must be worked out at planning sessions, but I do think that digging into detail is a very good way of examining how sound the service is. The way users interact with services is often in very small transactions, and the detail of those transactions is vital to engaging the user.

I can never shake the feeling that people dislike getting into details because that’s when service design gets hard, as if it’s the concept that is always right and that the details can be massaged and shaped to fit. Coming up with a grandiose plan is relatively easy, but working out how much of the plan can actually work in detail is much harder. I think we could work much more efficiently if we got into detail sooner.”

I agree with the entire article and its sentiments.

Courtney has an aesthetic approach very similar to ours: keep it as simple as possible. Elegeance is found in such things, but only where the simplicity is derived from distilling complexities into the most palatable and digestible of forms and formats. The short version of that sentence is: If something doesn’t need to be there it shouldn’t be there, and if you need that something, does it have to be complicated?

Most of the time to answer those questions is to work in design. In the case of Courtney Summers’ websites, we wouldn’t call it work.

Unique

We’ll always advocate that there’s room in this business for guys like us who build custom websites. Courtney’s design is a perfect example of why this is: functionally it does everything she needs it to, and design-wise it’s unique and stand-out and perfectly her own. Those things are hard to get when you look at some of the cookie cutter services and products out there. Not everyone knows PHP and CSS and Photoshop, and that’s where we come in.

V2

This theme is a version two. It’s an evolution of Courtney’s previous site that we did together. There are refinements, elements were removed and elements more appropriate for what she needs added. It’s still familiar to those who visit regularly and yet different enough to perhaps excite them about the new UI and what it offers readers. Complete re-designs are for the desperate, the misguided, and those who like whims and whimsy. Evolution is for those who see the purpose, branding, and identity of a website as something that does not need to be torn apart to be improved.

We had a great time working with Courtney again and look forward to seeing her grow and develop as young author with a bright career in front of her.

As we approach 300,000 downloads of WPtouch and nearly half a million if you count up our other plugins, we’ve been reflecting on what we’ve accomplished and where we’d like to go from here.

Our plugins are freely available and GPL, which means that donations are the only source of income they generate at this time. So our main source of revenue is working with some terrific clients building websites, and doing various development and graphic design for 3rd party services and products.

Over the past year and half that we’ve been running we’ve poured thousands of hours into our client work, and hundreds into our plugins. More recently we’ve had very little time to improve upon our GPL offerings, though.

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me that at times it seems that people think they’re entitled to the work we produce and improvements upon it. Though it is very much the minority of what we experience from our users, it’s something that can easily take the wind out of our sails— having someone acting as if a bug in your free software is a serious problem that you must resolve or they’ll axe you.

As tough as it is, we’ve realized that our experience with free software only serves to embolden the reality of the expectations we have regarding the future and the real liklihood that we’ll release some pretty cool products or services that will be revenue generating— and which will indeed be supported and will be improved upon over time.

The Ever-So Cool Pipeline

With all of that said we’re excited to soon promote and discuss the future of BraveNewCode and what we have coming down the pipes. Our focus remains with WordPress, but we’re looking at ways we can both expand upon our existing plugins, add new and powerful ones, and build an eco-system of BraveNewCode products and services which will enhance not only WordPress but the way people use the internet, period.

It’s an exciting time, and there’s nothing but hard work ahead for us.

Fade To Black

We’re taking off on a company hiatus/strategy planning vacation in late November, and at that time we’ll be phasing the next steps for what we’re trying to accomplish. For the most part there will be a code-freeze on what we’ve done to date, but rest assured that WordTwit, WPtouch and our other forthcoming plugins like Integrity are going to get the love and attention they deserve.

Look for some exciting changes to take place in the coming weeks/months ahead from us. If you want to stay on top of the pulse follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter— in both places we share secrets you won’t get here : )

To that end, Dave’s donating the proceeds of the sales of his Chalkwork icons to the Snook adoption fund for the next few weeks. If you’re looking for sexy, professional icons, now’s a great time to grab a set and help out a good cause at the same time.

In Dave’s words:

“…in short, they weren’t given enough time to prepare for the expensive legal fees they suddenly find themselves facing. Jon appealed to the web design community at large for some assistance, and we rallied around him and gave what we could. But he’s still coming up short. As of this writing, they’ve only reached a third of their target, and the adoption is happening quicker than they expected. And that’s where we come in today.”

Both Dave and Jonathan are not affiliated with us in anyway, but we both admire and respect their work, and hope to help the Snook’s adopt their third child.

What’s New In Design

We’ve softened up the design and also made the layout a little thinner- some who visited on 1024×768 desktops will likely enjoy the change, as the site won’t seem so disproportionately large to them. We’ve polished, refined & changed the fonts in a few places, and overall have reduced their sizes for proportionality’s sake.

Those viewing the site in Mozilla-based (Camino, Firefox) and Webkit-based (Safari, Shiira) will notice some additional features and qualities in the design. As a general rule we support the very highest in web standards and new functionalities in browsers, so we’ve opted for more work with things like rounded corners using CSS not images, and when Internet Explorer gets its act together (read catches up to where everyone else is at) we’ll add its advanced support as well.

What’s New In Development

Duane has added an incredible functional and unique Portfolio package together, which takes advantage of custom Ajax & jQuery javascript to accomplish the heavy lifting.

One neat thing about it is that from any individual portfolio client’s page (Jessie farrell, for example) you can browse the whole portfolio, just as you can on the landing page itself. This is also a good thing for Search Engine Optimization reasons, and something we routinely make sure we consider and include where needed for our client projects.

WPtouch 1.8: Coming Soon

We’ve also been hard at work on WPtouch 1.8, the next update to our popular WordPress mobile plugin. The update will offer a couple significant new features, along with solving some bugs that cropped up in the 1.7.x series. Look for it out in the next couple days.

If things are out of place or broken, give us the weekend to sort it out…

Oh! And we’ve got a WPtouch Update to release at the end of it as well, one that we’re sure you’ll like : )

Case in point this article on MacWorld, which highlights the frustrations a recent Windows switcher to Mac faced when presented with installing the new Firefox 3 application off of the disc image. Once mounted, the well-designed DMG without text explanations was designed so well that the user thought it was just a depiction, not actual icons which required interaction. In this case both the common setup.exe methods on Windows combined with the lack of explanation on the Mac proved to confuse this person.

This highlights a very important fact: Simple does not automatically mean intuitive, and likewise intuitive does not have to be simple. When designing an interactive environment of any kind, taking the user’s knowledge for granted is a big mistake. Intuitive in computer terms means that a user can anticipate how the feature or device functions, without having and previous knowledge regarding it.

This kind of consideration cannot be overlooked. Simple can masquerade as intuitive, as an easy to understand design feature can come across as intuitive easily. But once things get more complicated, intuitive user understand needs to take over, and it’s here where (for the most part) Apple does an excellent job.

Mac OS X (in all its flavors) has set itself apart on the UI front by providing novice and advanced users with a powerful environment to work in, while not over complicating the experience of using it. People not familiar with Macs often take the interface for ‘face value’ and claim it the Fisher Price of computing, and presume it simple because it’s a streamlined, ‘fun’ looking, and doesn’t require ponderous tasks to get through while you accomplish tasks.

Apple looked at what people want to do with personal computers, and also looked at what others were doing in response to that want. They extracted the best and worst among them, and delivered a way to do things with a UI which all interfaces should model: knowledge obtained in one aspect of the interface (application) is transferrable and applicable to others.

For example Apple’s ‘i’ suite of applications. What you learn in iTunes you can apply in iPhoto, and vice versa. Manipulating content with similar or identical interactions trains the user quickly and gives them confidence to explore an application, giving them more opportunity to do improve what they can accomplish.

Contrast this with some applications on Windows which operate completely different from each other, even when they don’t have to. It appears that some developers come up with an interface that looks cool, and then try to figure out how to cram in all the elements of the application needed within it.

That’s neither a simple approach, or an intuitive one. With WPtouch, we spent considerable time considering what elements needed to be formatted for the touch-based interface, and intuitively guide someone using it. We settled on some key usage styles which were already in use on the iPhone, such as the ‘load more’ feature in the YouTube app which we used to load paged entries.

As with Apple’s work, simple is not easy, and creating great user experiences requires time, thought, and a focus on what’s intuitive rather than what seems simple, appears to looks good, or just fits into a given space.