I’ll admit it I probably have ten or so domains registered with GoDaddy. SOPA controversy aside, I have found many other reasons (including Bob Parsons) to be an unhappy consumer of GoDaddy’s products. Despite the annoyance of switching domain registrars I have been doing some research and “playing the field” so to speak in an effort to look for a new registrar. Here are a few of my prospects:

1. DNSimple

Good:

- Configured DNS Management
- Bundled Monthly Domain Registry Plans
- Zero Up Selling
- Domain Transfer
- Excellent Support
- iPhone App

Bad:

- Billed monthly

2. Name.com

Good:

- Clean UI (way better that GoDaddy’s)
- Little to no up selling
- Good Deals on .CO domains

Bad:

- Poor top-level domain selection

3. Domain

Good:

- Less Up Selling
- Less “evil”

Bad:

- No Live Support
- Domains cost the same as GoDaddy

4. Namecheap

Good:

- Great Pricing
- Some up selling
- Navigation experience is well thought out
- Good top level domain selection

Bad:

Still some up-selling

5. 1and1

Good:

- Great Pricing, especially on .CO’s in the first year
- Good/Short purchase process

Bad:

- Pricing better only on first year of domain registry.
- Up Sell (with clear opt out)

6. Gandi

Good:

- Great selection and pricing on international domain extensions such as .CA
- Private domain registry available with every domain

Bad:

- Some upsell on .Com’s
- UI leaves something to be desired

7. iWantMyName

Good:

- Great Selection if International domains
- Easy path to host your domain on services such at Google Apps, Amazon S3, and Squarespace

Bad:

- Domain Management Dashboard not very useful.

8. Hover

Good:

- Unlimited custom URL’s (branded shortcuts)
- Site is easy to navigate and well designed
- Easy-to-use domain management
- Supposed great customer service.

Bad:

-Pricing pretty comparable to godaddy

9. Canvas Dreams

Good:

- Powered by Wind Energy
- Pricing starts at $10.99/year

Bad:

- Web Site not very helpful

10. Yahoo Small Business

Good:

- First year pricing is good
- 24-7 phone and online support
- Free private domain registration
- Complete DNS control

Bad:

- Domain management not easy to use
- Pricy renewals

Many thanks to Gregory Heller and Mahdi Yusuf for help and inspiration when compiling this list.

Tailor-Made

The truth is that as a designer there is no way to completely predict everyone and in every way they will use your web site. As a result some strong arguments for a “context-aware” approach have been made. Designer/Coder Jeff Croft challenges responsive web design by saying:

“By and large, mobile users want different things from your product than desktop users do. If you’re a restaurant, desktop users may want photos of your place, a complete menu, and some information about your history. But mobile users probably just want your address and operating hours.”

This argument is well-founded and definitely can be proven to be the best solution for some design problems given certain circumstances. There is a time and place for a sharp focus and expansion of certain features or content types. Some would argue that that’s where a “context-aware” web experience comes in.
Coming from background of designing web apps and more recently native mobile and desktop applications there is often one question I wrestle with. Is there enough need, features, and user requirements to necessitate a full native application? Or, could the same benefit be gleaned from an improved and more flexible web experience? The same holds true for the question of whether a device-specific, “context-aware” web site is necessary. Is it worth the extra time and effort to build, when maybe half of the effort would be needed to improve and adapt your web site for mobile users? It might turn out that you have the need, but not the time to create your vision of what a tailored mobile web experience is. Enter the shining beacon of light that is responsive design.

Responsively Agnostic

A recent and recommended read of mine by Ethan Marcotte, Responsive Web Design, explains the world of fluid grids, media queries, and designing a sites with a “flexible foundation”. Essentially he suggests that you should design something (one thing) that will “work” on most devices that you anticipate it being viewed on. More than likely you won’t be able to hit every possible requirement for every Windows Phone 7 user (for example), but you’ll be able to get to most of your users what they need.
Marcotte’s approach is efficient and in the long run can save time for designers and developers alike. This device/platform agnostic approach doesn’t just serve as a “quick fix” solution to check off your “mobile presence” requirement, but it gives you a bridge to the next step. As mentioned earlier you have to examine the need and in many cases you’ll find that the needs of a designer to reach mobile users can be met with a responsive, device agnostic solution.
With the power of media queries, determining the way your site is displayed is fairly straightforward. It’s like getting a desktop, tablet, and mobile web sites all-in-one.

It Works!

The number of designers and developers using responsive web design techniques seems to be growing. This becomes evident when you visit their personal websites. Speaking as one who has been meaning to “mobile” my site for quite some time now the personal sites of “cool kid” designers such as Meagan Fischer are rather inspiring.

Her site adheres to these ideas to a tee. At most common screen resolutions she has designed a layout that best displays her content in a legible and visually pleasing fashion. By my count there are 4 different layouts: one for desktop viewing, one for larger portrait-oriented tablets, one for smaller portrait-oriented tablets, and one for phones. You can experience all of these layouts by going to her site and and resizing your window to different sizes. Thanks to media queries it is possible for her site to know what layout to display.

A Responsive Bridge to the Future

It’s nearly impossible to keep up with every new device and web browser being created, but with a responsive design, some research, a savvy developer, and perhaps a little luck you can help make the growing pains that come with testing for new things a little easier. I’m not saying that responsive web design is ultimately the best solution for every situation, but what I am saying is that it can definitely serve a useful purpose in most cases. With it you empower yourself and your website to be better experienced by most people that come across it. Even if you have the eventual need for a dedicated mobile website, a well-designed and planned responsive site buys you time to make it great with fairly minimal effort. It gives you a means to something, whatever it is you need it to be.

Originally Posted by Max Foundry – http://maxfoundry.com/blog/2011/12/07/responsive-web-design-a-means-to-something/

Upside: It’s super easy to back to specific point in time and see what was going in your life at that time. It definitely encourages you to fill in the blanks. And I think the focus on photos especially the hero image is a nice change. Down side: it’s so easy to go back to any point in time.

After reading Jeremy Johnson’s review of Timeline it does beg the question: What happens if stumble upon something that you would rather forget? Deaths, ends of relationships, photos buried deep in under the “Older Posts” link now are easily accessible.

Ten things that I took from SXSWi this year:

• “Mobile” is becoming the new “web 2.0″
• People listen a lot better than you might think they do.
• Apple knows how to make its presence know, without officially doing it.
• Large is most popular t-shirt size at geek-centric conferences.
• The use of the words “analog” and “physical” is now necessary prefixes when describing actual objects.
• People are still impressed with a well-done letter-pressed business card.
• Not all the “cool kids” live in New York.
• Just because you are a “VIP” for an event it doesn’t mean you can get in to it.
• 80′s retro is still chic.
• Everyone loves a good meme.

The importance of the properly punctuating my last name was stressed into me as a young child by my mother. As she would take any opportunity to label all my possessions with from lunch boxes to pencil bags with a piece of masking tape reading “Benjamin Hernández”. So it should come as no surprise that as an adult I have grown accustomed to including that all-important accent when signing or writing my name. Once I even going as far as once correcting a professor’s roll-sheet as it was passed around. I discovered when it came to the web, in many cases it using that “á” created some problems resulting in several different flavors of “Hernández” including “HernÅndez” and “Hern&%ndez”. I soon memorized it’s HTML code counterpart: &aacute; .

For a while this appeared to (I thought) take care of the issues, then when I started working at ArtWorks I made the mistake of properly punctuating my last name on an online application, effectively hiding any record of Benjamin Hernandez (no accent) and only showing Benjamin Hernández under their employ. Eventually it was figured out what the problem and most my records were changed to reflect the Tex-Mex edition of my last name, but I’m still missing from a lot of directories, at least the me sans accent is. Kind of an interesting problem.

It poses a good question. How is this handled in other countries where English is not the mother tongue? What would poor Tobias Bade Strøm to do when typing his name to create a new foursquare account? Apple seems to have figured it out, making it easy on its iOS products to add these proper punctuation’s, even including an “on-the-fly” keyboard language switcher. I can only hope that one day I live in a world we are all free to punctuate freely and correctly, no matter the medium. Until then I’ll keep accenting my á’s, “tildeing” my ñ’s, “diaeresising” my ü’s, and memorizing HTML codes.

So, I decided to take advantage of the early upgrade that AT&T so graciously offered me. I was an early adopter of the iPhone, and have been relatively pleased with the device. My biggest complaint being issues with AT&T’s service. This became evident as soon as we moved into our curent rental and discovered that we now lived in an AT&T dead spot. Amid rumors of a possible Verizion iPhone this winter, I considered waiting for that and jumping ship. Then I realized that I still had another year on my current AT&T contract, so to move I would have to pay an early termination fee. Lose, lose…sort of.

Call me impatient, and I was a bit unsure about making this upgrade; “Antennagate” and all, but I was intrigued by the new features. Today I purchased a 16GB iPhone 4, my third iPhone (6th if you count the Apple Care claims that I’ve had). I have to admit I’m pretty pleased. HD video is great, the Retina Display is as advertised Spectacular. Any concerns I had about antenna issues were eased by the reassuring words of the sales person I overheard while I “dropping eaves” in line at the Apple Store:

“It’s just media hype! I can prove it!”

Eight hours in I can say I’m pretty pleased. I still haven’t gotten a chance to FaceTime with anyone, so please fellow iPhone 4 users give me a call, I want to make sure it’s not just “media hype”.

For many people (myself included) there is a need to find an outlet to express yourself. You want a place to share you opinion about everything from politics to religion to the very details of your daily personal routine. I get it. For many of us we find that outlet on our blog, Facebook or Twitter. Once those thoughts and words are out there they are out there for every one to read, to Google, to “stumbleupon,” or to judge. With every post you are, as Gary Vaynerchuk in his book Crush It! put it “building your personal brand”. So what does your personal brand look like?

It amazes me how often people misuse their social media outlets. The most obvious culprits are the people that use these mediums as their personal (and very public) diary. These chronic over-sharers like to fill you in on the blow-by-blow details of their latest doctors appointments, make veiled references to personal relationship problems, and tell you about even their latest “euphemized” bowel movement. The end result has a great effect on personal brand and diminishes social value.

As someone in his late-twenties, I was in high school when LiveJournal and other seminal social media efforts began, and college when Facebook came to be. Needless to say there have been some growing pains and hard lessons many of us early “Gen-Yer’s” have learned about the misuse of social media. At first we could get away with posting pretty much anything we wanted to our various social media profiles. Soon though, as communities like Facebook opened to not just college students, but anybody who wanted to join, we had to think twice before posting the latest kegger pics on our profiles. Eventually we started getting friend requests from our parents, our parents’ friends, and even our grandparents. Soon, everyone could have a very public personal brand, and all the baggage that comes with it.

We live in a world where some employers consider their potential hires’ social media profiles as much as their resume when making hiring decisions. Some company’s don’t even allow their employees to have these accounts, or at least heavily police them for fear of being embarrassed by potential employee misconduct. Yet at the same time a well-written, carefully-meditated social media presence can do wonders for you and your career.

With each mused key stroke, these smart or “boss” social media contributors not only build a strong personal brand for themselves, but also contribute to the general canon of human knowledge. They are the ones have the know-how to sort through the muck, find the useful and informative and bring it to the masses. Their power is pretty incredible, almost as incredible as the influence of those who are thoughtless and reckless.

To me, no matter if you are a college freshman looking for fun on a Friday night or a mid-level manager on his way to the top, the way you present yourself on the “interwebs” really matters. Just as in real life, if you present yourself as an intelligent and relevant professional, people will take notice. Your worth to them will be more than just a blip on their rss reader feed; it will be an opportunity to learn.

It has been my at-times-frustrating pleasure to use Google Voice for the past year and half. Thanks to Steven Ray, I was an early adopter to the service, using the service since the time that it was called Grand Central. In so many ways it’s been fantastic: allowing me the freedom to have an essentially free business line (my 512 number), screen calls, make discounted international calls, and get text message transcriptions of my voice mail messages. It’s amazing!

About those transcriptions: for anyone who has used GV for any amount of time could tell you, those transcriptions are pretty useless. Whether it’s “Brother” (I’m an only child) “calling to expose Bravo” (no clue) or a friend calling to inform me of his “DMC a claim quick bottle automatic form”. Google Voice has been doing a mediocre job of putting my voice mail messages into written form for over a year now, and not once have I found it helpful. If nothing else it has served for some good entertainment. Let’s hope while google continues to improve and perfect Android OS and its many other technologies that it doesn’t forget about Google Voice. Because 90% of the time I’m a huge fan.

“Regarding that Russian or your interest in the dogs.”
- Google Voice, 3/26/2010

I’ve heard both sides of the debate about whether a “web designer” should be able to code his own designs. I know the reasons for and against, and frankly it worries me. I’ll be the first to admit that nothing puts my mind at ease more than knowing that the design that I’ve put together in Fireworks will be marked-up with highest level of accuracy and care the the developer (me). But, I know this is unrealistic. I don’t have time to do it all my own, nor do I know everything, I need help. Try as I may, I am a designer first, developer, a distant second, and I’m okay with it. What worries me is the disturbing trend that I keep seeing on places like craigslist and job boards everywhere; ads that read more like a entrepreneur’s Christmas wish list than a job description:

“Looking for a web designer to finish an online shopping site that is under construction now. MUST have at least 3 years experience building online shopping sites. MUST have deep knowledge of methods and ways of search engine optimization, customers database, shopping carts….etc. After finish building site position might be available to maintain and upgrade site all the time.

Compsensation: $14-15/hr”

The line between web developer an and web designer have become a bit blurred as of late. I can’t tell you how many times I see people call themselves web designers that are really only developers who how know just enough photoshop to themselves into trouble. The result is well developed site with sub-par design, for less money than if a true designer had been involved. Side-effect being that the potential client pool on both sides now has an overall diminished perception of quality and lower acceptable price-point . This in-turn devalues every designer and developer’s work.

Let me be clear designers are just as guilty of this, I’m just as guilty of this at times. I can, at times write pretty some ugly css, I know it I admit it, and I’m working on it. What I don’t do is tell a client that I am a be-all, end-all, without-a-doubt, full-fledged developer. I can do a lot of things, but not all, and I’m okay with that. I don’t use Terminal to write my code, I use Code and have to use Firebug to make sure my page matches as close as possible to what I did in my design comp. I code like a designer, and I advertise myself as such.

But the damage has already been done. Perhaps it’s a result of the 1990′s mentality of the internet, specifically web design and development being overly technical and unaccessible to a lot of people especially those of the “50 and better” persuasion i.e. potential clients with money to spend. The shrewd business man (and now AARP member) does more with less and the idea of a utility man- web designer is very appealing. This has lead the way for companies like elance.com to further lower competitive prices for design and dev. work by promoting low-priced, foreign vendors. Also, the door has been opened for services that offer bargin-basement prices on bottom-of-the-barrel web site design and development.

Welcome to my nightmare:

None the less its still healthy to dream big, push yourself and expand your skill set, its the only way things get better. Good, true hybrids do exist, but are not as common as you may think. I want to be one when I grow up.