Mike Industries

So May 1st is Reboot Day and I’m sure there are going to be plenty of great redesigns around the web, but without even seeing them all yet, Croftie’s New Hotness gets my 1st place vote and my supreme jealousy as well. In fact, the redesign is so good that I’ve vowed never to make fun of Jeff’s penchant for pink again.

Normally a blog redesign is not something I’d write an entire post on, but the new jeffcroft.com is pretty special. I don’t mean special only in the visual sense, but rather in the paradigm-breaking sense.

Has anyone ever really seen a “live search” that impressed them? Live search, until now, has just been about saving you the trouble of hitting the enter key. But Croftie’s live search is a jaw dropper. Start typing in a term like “SXSW” and down slides a panel which shows you not only blog entries which contain that term, but comments, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Flickr photos as well… all separated nicely into columns. I fully expect to start seeing more of this around the web once more people get wind of it.

Another interesting aspect of the new jeffcroft.com is that it’s written entirely in Django. This really intrigues me, given that there seems to be a growing groundswell of discriminating bloggers looking for a way to break out of the MT/Wordpress/TextPattern mold in as dramatic a fashion possible. MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django have been getting a lot of love lately and I’m wondering if CroftieCMS might just be the catalyst for this sort of thing to really take off. I’ve yet to even dip a single toe into the MVC waters, but developments like these are hard to ignore. Of course, no sooner do I profess my curiosity in Django that The Wolf tells me he has something cooking as well… and it has nothing to do with either Django or Rails. More details as they become available.

Technology and design aside though, the single most impressive aspect of Croftie’s new site to me is how comprehensive of an expression platform it is. It’s not just about blog entries with all sorts of miscellany decorating the sidebars. It’s about all parts of Jeff’s life. It’s about essays. It’s about link collections. It’s about photos of Jeff with strange women. Just about the only thing that’s not on there yet is his portfolio, and considering how impressive the site itself is, he really doesn’t even need one.

Any other noteworthy redesigns around the web today? Feel free to plug them in the comments…

Some thoughts from the month of April:

• Credit where credit is due. After lampooning the idea of a five-blade razor, I actually went out and bought one just to be sure it was as ridiculous as it sounded. It was not. The Gillette Fusion is actually a pretty nice razor and I have switched to it full-time. I don’t feel like it even gives the closest shave (even among Gillette razors), but it is the most comfortable razor I’ve ever used. My problem with the Sensor was that it cut too close and was thus, very uncomfortable. The Mach 3 was a little smoother, but the Fusion is like butter. Any other opinions on this razor so far?
• Never underestimate the coolness of clean URLs: newsvine.com/humuhumunukunukuapuaa
• Mike Industries is apparently the most popular graphic design site in the world among Internet Explorer users who are willing to install marginally useful toolbars. More evidence that that Alexa kid is not to be trusted.
• I must be the last person in the country to have discovered that postage went up to 39 cents in January. I rarely send snail mail anymore but my damn tax return got returned today because I was two cents short on the postage! The irony of the government returning a $7500 check because I shorted them 2 cents is amusing to me. Thank god for return addresses. I rarely hand-write those in either but did in this case.
• If you’ve been waiting as long as I have for a way to preview things live in Movable Type with all appropriate styling rules applied, wait no longer. Go check out the great new plug-in MT Live Preview.
• I’m not a huge Gatorade fan, but the new “Rain” stuff is pretty decent. I think they are trying to tap into the whole Vitamin Water taste. The Berry and the Tangerine flavors are not bad at all. In trying to find a good link for this item, I discovered that my buddy from ESPN, Darren Rovell actually has an entire blog dedicated to Gatorade now! In other news, my Coca Cola Blak blog launches tomorrow.
• Of all the people who sent in Friend Requests after the “hacking MySpace” post, the person with the coolest name is Cock-Punch Jones.
• While on the subject of MySpace, most people understood my last post correctly, but just to be sure: I’m not saying that MySpace has recently begun inflating their page view numbers. I’m just saying they’ve been incredibly page-view-inefficent from the start and they don’t seem to be doing anything about it. It’s their choice to be this way and it’s definitely not illegal. The upside is 30 billion page views a month (which they can’t sell). The downside is a huge user experience sore spot. Only time will tell if this ends up hurting them. They are strong enough right now that it probably won’t dent them for awhile, but my argument is that strength shouldn’t cause complacency. Take where you are today and make yourself even better. Don’t be bad just because you can.
• Render Incomplete: I was going to do a whole post about IE7’s unresolved rendering peccadilloes even though the product was “render complete” (according to MS), but now it appears it wasn’t actually “render complete” at all. IE7 Beta 2 “For-Reals” Edition just shipped and it apparently includes some CSS behavior improvements. We’ll see if the problem of disappearing text when using clearing divs has gone away as well as the problem of white space between list items causing white space on screen. For the record, I’m still not sold on the browser, but the more of this stuff that gets fixed before the unwashed masses get ahold of it, the better. Hell, do a Beta 3 if you need to.
• It’s very interesting to me that Dave Hyatt is talking about high resolution web sites already and how Safari will handle them with SVG. This seems like a concept extremely far away from mainstream adoption, so I’m trying to figure out why Apple has dedicated resources here. The hint I picked up from the article is that they are talking about wildly varying screen resolutions. I can only take that to mean “something other than a traditional monitor”. A super-high resolution tablet or eBook perhaps. A handheld. A cell phone. A widescreen TV. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it would be necessary to talk about if we were just discussing a standard monitor line or standard web sites.

So I just read the big article about MySpace in today’s New York Times and it got me thinking a lot about growth, monetization, and user experience. People always talk so much about how many pages MySpace serves up and how that represents such dramatic growth.

After playing with the thing for a few weeks and writing a hugely ridiculous article on customizing it, one thing has really stuck out to me: there are a tremendous amount of extraneous page views being generated at that place. It’s a factory of unnecessary clicks. And so when one would view MySpace’s current page view trends on Alexa, one would see this:

Here’s a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here’s what the graph would look like:

(Editor’s Note: I originally fat-fingered the first graph above when uploading it and used the Reach graph by mistake. Fixed. Both graphs show the exact same curve, however. Thanks to Owen Thomas of Business 2.0 for the heads-up.)
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A guide to creating a more tasteful MySpace layout. Sample images and CSS are included at the bottom. End product: myspace.com/mikeindustriesThe social phenomenon that is MySpace is one I don’t fully understand, and yet, one I must fully respect. In fact, with over 50 million unique users, it is something everybody must respect. Any website which rolls up that amount of usership is doing something very, very right, and no matter what your thoughts on it as a vehicle for your own expression are, you must give it its full due for what it is to seemingly everyone else.

Several weeks ago, I finally signed up for an account, and within seconds I was instantly put-off by what had been created for me: a hastily-designed “profile page” with uninspired colors, misaligned tables, and a mish-mash of extraneous cruft and design elements which made this feel more like a halfway house than a “home”. Now, granted, I am a designer by trade so my tolerance for this stuff is orders of magnitude lower than most of the population, but clearly, this was not a place I even felt comfortable having my name on.

So with the default home page this underwhelming, what is a MySpacer to do? Customize, of course. One of MySpace’s greatest features is its ability to let you skin your own home page. Unfortunately, 99% of the customizations I’ve seen are chalkboard-screechingly awful, but what could a MySpace home page look like if some actual design thought went into it? That is the question I sought to answer.

But first — as Keith Robinson asked me when I first showed him what I was doing — “Ummm, why?” The answer is twofold. First, I love a design challenge. Second, we’ve been building a lot of new social components into Newsvine over the past several weeks and I wanted a good reference point for what is already done well online and what could be improved.

So without further ado, on with the surgery…
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