Tag Archives: Web Design

Perspective 2 Studio is hopping!

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Screenshot of the Perspective2 Studio web page.

Screenshot of the Perspective2 Studio web page.

This past summer my friend Adam (of Envision Internet Consulting) and I worked with Lynne Brown and Matt Schulert of MediaGraphics, Inc. on a website for an exciting concept of Lynne’s, called Perspective2.

The idea was to create a studio space for the artists and producers in the area, and, wow, has it taken off!

It’s been exciting to see Lynne pull it together. When we first started talking about the website, they had just acquired the building space in Lansing’s Old Town, and she was wrangling with contractors and deadlines, shooting for a Fall 2007 opening.

Well, they built the space and opened their doors, and the few times I’ve stopped in since, there is always something going on. Last time it was a photo shoot. The time before that, a local photographer was preparing to teach a seminar on “Photo Raw” in one studio, while a photo shoot was going on in the other. They’ve had theater companies in for shows, and have recently added a baby grand piano. What fun!

Community is another aspect of the picture. With a space like this that draws creatives in, the community and connections can only grow stronger and more supportive of each other. (Hey, I can be an optimist.) Lansing needs more art, and this is a way to help the local creative sector grow in visibility and viability. Awesome.

So, this to say, if you are a photographer, videographer, need meeting space for a seminar or small conference in Lansing, P2 is pretty cool. Check it out.

Design connections

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A couple days ago I stopped into the Com Arts building at Michigan State University to meet a new professor in the journalism program named Karl Gude. [Karl's blog]

I heard about Karl from my friend and colleague Liz Weber who handed me a clipping from the MSU News Bulletin which explained that Karl had been the Director of Information Graphics at Newsweek, had brought together a conference on information architecture (or info graphics), and was now teaching at MSU.

Regardless, I was excited at the news that someone with such great experience in the information graphics field was so close to home!

I found Karl to be enthusiastic about his work and the field, and he shared with me a couple names and examples of work.

Alright, so why am I hyped about this?

Till now, I think it’s been a gut-level feeling that this a good thing. If I put words to it, it’s because as I’m leading this Web Design Team in ACNS at MSU, I realize more and more that we rely too heavily on words and numbers to communicate important information. So often, that textual information can come alive and communicate so much more effectively if we lay it down as an information graphic. Right now, frankly, we suck at this, but I am determined that we will get better at it.

Restricting search indexing to sections of a web page

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If you think about websites as having different page types, with each page type having different sections within it, such as content sections, navigation sections, and footer sections, it becomes apparent that the value of a particular page is defined by the content on the page that is unique to that page. Sections like footers or site-wide navigation systems are repeated on each page, and give no specific extra value to that page.

So, it would be helpful to be able to instruct search engine robots to not index specific areas of the web page. Here’s a wireframe of what I’m thinking.

Wireframe showing regions of a page that should and shouldn't be indexed by search engines.

Wireframe showing regions of a page that should and shouldn't be indexed by search engines.

How? Well, I haven’t found a real solution. Here’s an idea though.

We could extend XHTML with a schema that would include the ability to add attributes to elements like DIVs, ULs, OLs, Ps, and so on.

The attributes could be along these lines:

<div robot-follow=”yes” robot-index=”no”>Stuff you don’t want indexed here</div>

Of course, then the makers of the bots would need to program to heed these attributes.

So, yeah, all-in-all, a fairly impractical idea as nothing is implemented. However, if it were, I would use it on many websites.