sugarenia.com

Now that’s an accurate title. I already like the Viget Labs website, imagine my glee when I stumbled upon this particular Viget blog.

Apart from the really useful content (it went into my feed reader almost immediately), this blog sports a design I fell in love with at first sight.

It’s made to look like an aquarelle, so every little detail of it is made in this context. Brilliant. Check out some of my favourite details below.

It suffers from lack of contrast between foreground and background in some places, but I’m more than willing to forgive Viget people. I don’t know if this blog is new or old, I just stumbled upon it and it’s great.

Kudos!

Most of us are not monolithic. We have real lives apart from our online presence, we occupy ourselves with other things, we have hobbies and weird quirks that are unique and strange and awesome.

I was thinking of the amount of diversity that runs my life during the last few years and thank God, I think it’s great.

So think. Name one or two or three things you do and are not a part of this ‘online’ thingy. Things that are totally irrelevant to your web persona.

For example, I’m a web designer / developer by trade and a blogger by hobby. But:

• I always take part in my family agricultural works - the ones that need hands, that is. Olive gathering, grapes harvest, you name it.
• I know traditional dances and exercise them at first chance.
• I always help my sister with makeup, since I’m the big sister and all.
• I iron most of my family’s clothes during the weekends, helping Mom.

All these may sound mundane, but try thinking about olive gathering or ironing or makeup during the time you’re searching around for that pesky Javascript bug and you’ll know what I mean.

You’ll see the whole spectrum of your life and you’ll surely get it: it’s not all about work, blogging, social networking and Internet. There are things beyond.

Guess what people: I don’t read my RSS feeds every day. And I’m still alive and employed.

Like every self-acclaimed web designer that respects herself, I keep an ambiguous folder in my RSS reader (namely Google Reader) that is named ‘Web Design’. In there you can find some of the best blogs in my professional field and a bunch of others that I’ve felt that they were insteresting.

There are tons of awesome stuff posted in there every day - but the sheer amount of information that I must consume every day just to say I’m cool terrifies me. So I don’t read them every day - I sometimes skim through them during the lunch break and that’s it.

What’s my solution? Newsletters, people. Yes, that ’90s thing that works through e-mail, ya know? I’ve subscribed to some great newsletters that compile the best web design links every week to an easy list - so once per week, tada! I have a short list of the latest and greatest in my field.

Easy, no?

So my advice is this: outsource your RSS reading. Really. Put a filter between you and information and let people guide you to the best out there, without having to check daily a ton of feeds. You can use my approach and subscribe to a newsletter - or you can use a service like Mento and a good friend with similar interests and will to help you.

You’ll feel loads better, believe me.

outsourcing, information overload, rss feeds

Pattern repositories are a nice and useful - for once - trend. What are they? In their basic form, they are just galleries with screenshots coming from different sites, showcasing the different approaches in, let’s say, search boxes or contact forms.

I’ve followed almost all pattern repositories that emerged during the last few months - most of those though had trouble updating with the latest site releases and became stale after a while.

Since then, I’ve relied mostly to Flickr for finding inspiration for specific web design modules, until I thought oh what the eff, I’ll post my tids’n'bits from here and there too. Be sure to check them out, I’ll try and update it as much as I can.

Partners to the crime: Paparazzi! for the full screen site screenshots, Skitch for the insta-uploading to Flickr.

P.S. For something more substantial than my mediocre attempts, try out Pattern Tap, the latest and greatest in patterns sharing.

pattern tap, pattern, repositories, ux

You missed WGSS didn’t you? You didn’t? Nice.

‘Cause it’s here again. I couldn’t let this roam free in the ‘nets.

For those not understanding greek or those that refuse to reopen the above page in a tab, it’s an online advertising firm or something, offering marketing solutions even to bloggers. Would you let those people near your blog? I wouldn’t even let them touch my laptop bag.

So without further ado, let’s count the ways this little gem here sucks:

• All the text in this site - and I mean all - is an image. With a hover effect. That makes the text more pale on hovering.

  

• If you look a bit at the code, you see that everything is probably generated by Macromedia Dreamweaver. Which is bad, bad, bad. DW is a great editor and can be a pretty nice WYSIWYG application, but Christ, no.

  

• You cannot really say what’s linkable and what’s not on navigation. Everything is white - no underline or difference in colour or size.
• There’s a strange effect: if you click on the text of a page, it automatically redirects you to the next one. Pure class.
• <td colspan="16" rowspan="14">. ‘Nuff said.

Well, as you see, somewhere along the way these guys messed it up. This is usually the moment when I advise people to just switch off the PC and head for a walk, or paint, or learn chinese.

I do that to myself too, all the time.

wgss, greek, sites, suck, ad-network