I couldn’t see Star Trek tonight

…and the blog is a little light lately, so this will have to do:

Updated below the fold…
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Lock, Load and Launch

Just a simple post about the final steps in building a website;

1. Lock the features. QA can’t be done on a moving target. And while a live website is “never done” like a print edition, establishing and meeting defined goals produce better results than just throwing things at a server and seeing if they stick!

2. Load up the content. Pretty self-explanatory.

3. Launch. Establish the protocols for delivering and/or deploying the site in the proposal. Waiting until the end to find hosting or get DNS registrar credentials will only delay the result!

Everything Wrong with Flash

…in one convenient location.

Why, oh why? I ask.

And, here is my prayer: make it stop.

Click on the link if you are semi-comatose and the sheer overload of pointless bouncing and blinking transitions will perk you right up!

Otherwise, you can learn a lot about what not to do with Flash by trying to watch the monstrosity that is the intro movie at that site. It’s not like I have anything against Flash, as I really like programming in ActionScript. And 10 years ago, I started animating in Flash (Terry Gilliam has nothing to fear, but I was definitely inspired by Monty Python).

Back in 2000, Jakob Nielsen wrote how bad Flash could be for web content, but in less than two years, Macromedia paid him off hired him as an information architectural consultant in an effort to turn things around. Unfortunately, that whole effort seems wasted on the developers of iccm.org.

Here, then, this is the usability sermon that the counter-reformation developers ICCM might understand: