The Blog Studio

Google Chrome, has recently become available for OSX, and we’ve spent some time taking it for a test drive.

The first thing you’ll notice is how fast Chrome opens and launches your homepage. It starts noticeably faster than Firefox or Safari. The address bar, is by default, a Google search box. You can type in what your looking for, and Google will start displaying results in the bar. The search also feels extremely snappy, and it’s a nice convenience to be able to search without having to open an additional tab.

Chrome supports tabbed browsing, and when you open a new tab you’ll be brought to a favorites page that displays your most visited sites and recently closed tabs.  The tabs can also be dragged visually to arrange them in any order, and you can pop them out to start a tab in an entirely new window. This seems to offer a nice combination of the way Safari and Firefox handle tabs.

In our completely unscientific tests, Google Chrome does seem to load nearly every page much more quickly than Firefox, and is about as fast as Safari. Plenty of people have done head to head browser tests for speed, and Safari seems to show up as slightly faster in technical tests. We found Chrome very fast overall.

The user experience with Chrome is fantastic. It’s clean, uncluttered and very easy to find and tweak the settings. There is no fluff in the user interface, and Chrome seems built for simplicity. Either choose a favorite site from your thumbnails, or type what you’re looking for into the search bar. It all happens in one place, so you don’t need to jump around.

The Preferences pane is the most well organized we’ve encountered. It has three tabs: Basics, Personal Stuff and Under the Hood. You can change every setting that matters right here, and each setting is clearly explained. The preference panel here is much more user friendly than Firefox or Safari, where you sometimes need to dig a bit to find the setting you’re looking to change, and the function of these settings can be somewhat confusing for inexperienced users. Google has done a solid job of highlighting the setting most users need to change, and eliminating some of the more confusing setting you find in other browsers.

There’s one feature we really love and have been getting a lot of mileage out of. You can set Chrome to open up a few sites in separate tabs whenever you start the browser.  When Chrome launches, Google Wave, Co-Tweet and some of the other web apps we use open automatically. Basically, you can pop open the browser and get ready to work.  This is especially helpful when you’re trying to get used to using a new app, like Wave.

There’s also some interesting technical stuff going on under the hood as well. Each tab in the browser is it’s own separate entity. What’s going on in one tab, doesn’t effect the others, which is an added layer of malware protection.  If you have the bad luck of opening up a data stealing site in one tab, and happen to be purchasing something or looking at your bank account in another, your personal information is safe. It’s a solid security feature that is built right into the design of the browser.

The one place where Chrome for OSX fails, at least for now, is with addons. Firefox and Safari have an enormous amount of plugins, addons and hacks available that can make your life much easier. Chrome doesn’t currently support any extensions, although this is set to change in the future. If you’re a power user, who has a suite of plugins you can’t live without, Chrome isn’t the browser for you. Yet. We’ll reserve our judgement in this area until Chrome starts adding extra functionality, but it will be difficult to replicate the large hacker community surrounding Firefox, that are always adding new functions.

However, there is a hacker build of Chrome, called Chromium that addresses some of these shortcomings. Chromium has a full suite of extensions available, features daily updates and removes the Google branding from the browser. Chromium is a good choice for tech savvy power users, and does a great job of showing the future potential of Chrome.

Chrome does offer some very cool themes to change the look of the browser, including ones by Jeff Koons, Karim Rashid and Anna Sui. These are wonderful looking, but just window dressing. Very cool attractive stuff, but they don’t add any functionality.

Overall, Chrome is a very light, solid and fast browser. Safari users may be tempted to jump ship, as it seems more stable and nearly as quick. Firefox users will enjoy the speed increase Chrome brings to the table, but without the plugins, Chrome won’t be the best choice for geeks who live inside their browser. Our feeling is that Chrome is a great choice for casual web users, especially those that aren’t very tech savvy.

Chrome is still in beta. When the community expands, plugins become available, and Google tightens things up, we imagine Chrome will become the number one browser on the web in the near future.

When you’re building a new site, it’s common to spend considerable time brainstorming, planning, wire framing and conceptualizing. You want your site to be perfect. So do we. When it comes to hosting your site, you probably give a hundredth of the amount of consideration to the company you use. This will make your developer grouchy because it makes their job much more difficult. Choosing poor hosting companies is extremely common. Sadly, we deal with substandard hosting outfits on a daily basis.

Choosing the right hosting company will make all the difference in the development and success of your site. A bad hosting company can cause the development process to drag on much longer than it should, knock your site off line for extended period of time and cost you lots of money with little return. Bad hosting can turn your dream site into a nightmare in a few seconds.

Here are the three most important factors to investigate when looking for a hosting company for a new site.

Support
What type of support does your hosting company offer? Ideally, you should be able to get someone on the phone who you feel comfortable communicating with 24/7. When you are first developing your site, there are numerous minor tweaks and changes that will need to be made to your hosting account to get things up and running. Most aren’t very time consuming. Having to send an email, get a ticket number and wait for someone to contact you can severely cripple the development process. Having to wait 4 hours or 3 days to have a change made that should take a few minutes is unacceptable. You may need to put your hosting provider in touch with your developers directly, so enquire if they are comfortable and capable of working with developers. They should be. In the best case, you will have one or two support people that are assigned to your account, that understand your site and become an extension of your development team.

Reliability
If your site goes down, you are temporarily out of business. Most hosting companies will tell you they have ’99% Uptime’. This isn’t always the case.  Things happen at even the best hosting companies, and sooner or later your site may go offline for one reason or another. Ask about the safeguards your hosting company has in place to prevent this. More importantly, find out how they have handled outages in the past.  Get a reference from other users, and get a first hand account of their recovery procedures.  A really solid hosting company will admit when they have had issues in the past, and will be proud to discuss how quickly and how well they have corrected them. If a hosting company tells you they never have issues, and have never had a server go down. Run away. Quickly.

Pricing
It’s really, really easy to get ripped off when you are paying for web hosting. Unlike many other things in the world, the most expensive hosting companies aren’t necessarily the best. Strangely, we’ve had nearly the opposite experience. Many of the less expensive hosting companies are some of the best we’ve dealt with. This is economies of scale in action. Larger hosting companies can offer very competitive pricing because they have so many clients. Some smaller hosting companies charge exorbitant prices, but not necessarily superior service, features or support. Take advantage of this, and shop around. Don’t make a decision based solely on the lowest price you can find, but there is no need to pay through the nose either. Investigate the amount of disk space, data transfer and other extras that are actually included in the available plans. In many cases, a low price upfront can easily soar out of control with data and transfer costs, or other fine print extras.

You do the research for every aspect of your business. Please do the same with your hosting company. It makes the job of a developers much easier, and in the long run it will benefit your pocketbook, your business and the people who visit your site. We’re always happy to help with any suggestions, so get in touch or leave your questions and favorite hosting companies in the comments. 

Working on a development project can be complicated. The days where everyone is sitting just a cubicle away are long gone. You need to keep the project manager, the clients, the copywriter, the developers, the marketing people, the designers and the SEO team in the loop. Every decision that’s made effects every part of the project. There are lots of project management tools available, and they all fall short. Email chains get unwieldy after a few replies and sharing files can become a burden quickly.

Google Wave might be the answer we’ve all been waiting for. It’s a combination of email, social networking and file sharing that brings people and ideas into one place. We’ve been playing around with Wave for a few weeks, and it’s impressive. It especially excels as a way to keep complicated projects moving along while removing the bulk that comes with other methods of project management.

Here’s a few reasons why we’re using Wave:

Media Handling Forget attachments

• Wave handles every media file we’ve thrown at it in an elegant way. Relevant links, videos, audio files, copy and code can be shared right in the message. You seem them right in front of you without having to click around. That’s efficient. There’s also an option to browse media files which is very cool. Clicking through the various stages of a design, or every photo being used on a project is very convenient when making design changes.

Latecomers at Different Points in a Project

• It’s sometimes necessary to bring a new person into the mix. Getting them up to speed can be a difficult dance of dredging up old emails, zipping groups of files and filling them in on past conversations. With Wave, simple include the new people working on the project in the Wave and they can get briefed on thier own time, see all the past revisions and discussions, and view the various iterations and changes that have been made. This is a gigantic time saver.

Tags

• Tagging your projects gives you the ability to build an archive of your work over time, making it easy to see how problems were solved in the past. If you’re diligent about tagging specific issues and solutions, when you run into a similar issues, just search Wave and see how you developed a working solution in the past. That’s something so valuable you can’t put a price on.

Contacts

• Having your contacts right in your project management software is very convenient. There’s no imports that fail, no proprietary data formats, and since Wave is spreading quickly, after you’ve collaborated with someone, you’ll be able to add them to new projects with a click. Over time you’ll build a database of old and new collaborators expanding your business network.

Fast

• Wave is fast. Really fast. It swallows big media files, updates in real time, and is hosted by Google, who overall have a solid record of data integrity.

Is Google Wave the perfect project management tool? Maybe. It’s still new, but so far we’re really impressed with it. So impressed we’re about to start a huge new project involving a big team in many different locations, and we’re using Wave to keep it together. We’ll keep you updated.

What are your experiences with Wave so far? We’d love to hear how you’re using Wave for business or fun. 

Web designers are less than a dime a dozen these days. They’re more like a dime a gross. Everyone with a web connection and a copy of Fireworks hangs their shingle out and calls themselves a web expert. It’s a lot like social media experts, but that’s another topic for another day. When you’re looking for a web designer, how do you separate the bad from the good, and the good from the great?

This is a topic near and dear to The Blog Studio, and something everyone who works with us discusses on an hourly basis. Choosing the best designer for your project isn’t easy. Here’s 3 topics you should explore when looking to hire a pixel slinger for your project.

1. Does their work appeal to other designers, or to your potential market? Some designers achieve notoriety because their work appeals to the creative fancy of other designers. This isn’t always the most practical choice for a commercial product. A good, successful design will appeal to the end users, the public & not only to the design community. These aren’t mutually exclusive, but in many cases it’s a choice between one or the other. Choose the designer that has your users needs in focus.

2. How many sites in their portfolio are still up and running? When you view a designers portfolio, take a second and chase down those sites live on the web. Are the sites still live and in business? Are they successful? Take a look at the site traffic on a site like Alexa, are they generating numbers? Have the sites been re-designed by someone else? It’s one thing for a designer to have a portfolio of great looking sites, but it’s another for a designer to have a track record of sites that have become commercially viable. Ask the hard questions above to get on the right track for success.

3. Is your designer active in the design community? While you don’t want a designer that is so wrapped up in the ‘art’ of design, they don’t put your audience first, you also don’t want a designer who works in a vacuum. Take a spin around the internet and see what other designers have said about their work. Find out which magazines, blogs and podcasts they consume. Have they won any awards, or participated in any design initiatives? Are they active in writing about design or commenting on other designers work? Check some of the Twitter hashtags like #design and #web and see if they pop up. Participation in the design community ensures they’re up to date on the newest trends and design techniques. You don’t want to hire a dinosaur.

This is just a jumping off point, because choosing a designer should be a conversation between the designer and yourself. I hope these questions spark some thoughts and conversations the next time you’re starting a new endeavor. What are your favorite questions to ask a potential web designer? We’d love to hear your successes and your horror stories, so drop some science in the comments.

Twitter is a great tool for finding new ideas, meeting the digital hoi polloi and spreading the word about your business. A new, potentially powerful feature has just made the scene: Twitter Lists. Lists allow you to create and share groups of people centered on a common topic. It’s a simple way to find new people that share your interests, or work in the same media sphere that you do. We’ll admit, it can be somewhat overwhelming digging through Twitter to find the gems, so here’s three of our favorite lists for tech savvy Twitterers to get you started. Lists are a wholly new feature and frontier, so expect to hear more from us as Twitter Lists begin to mature. 

@Scobleizer’s Tech People - We all know Robert Scoble, one of the best known and most reasonable, knowledgeable voices in the tech community. He’s created a list of his favor Twitter tech folks. This is a great place to start if you’re new to the world of Twitter, or need to make sure you don’t miss a beat in the geek-a-sphere.
http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/my-favstar-fm-list

Tech Bloggers - If you’re looking for inspiration, ideas and content you can use to improve your own blogging, thics list by @CourtenayBird will be extremely useful. There’s some big names, and some people you haven’t heard of, but I’ll well worth your time to interact with.
http://twitter.com/courtenaybird/digital-and-social-media

Designers - @Grainedit has a well curated list that’s a who’s who of designers of all type who tweet. If you’re looking for eye candy and visual web innovation, you’ve found the right list. http://twitter.com/grainedit/graphicdesign

If you need a step by step on how to use twitter lists check out Freelance Folders post on How to Get Started.

Stay on the lookout for @TheBlogStudio list of web design favorites coming up shortly.