Earlier this week, I ran a poll on what people like to do on Facebook. It’s part of my research on online communities and what makes them so attractive to people. This poll asked the question: “What do you do the most [on Facebook]?” Voters could choose more than one activity, or add their own. The poll received 45 unique visitors and 84 votes. My visitor base was mainly adults with some technical savvy.

Here are the results:

The Top Three
The majority of visitors enjoy doing these three things:

1. Post about my status (15%)
2. Read my friends’ status updates, quizzes and links (14%)
3. Comment on friends’ posts (14%)

The Rest of the Top Eight
These activities are less important to Facebook fans, but still popular:

1. Write on friends’ walls (11%)
2. Upload and tag photos (10%)
3. Post links to videos, articles, etc. (9%)
4. View Facebook on my mobile device (7%)
5. Take quizzes (5%)

Not So Great, Actually
These six activities got low scores:

1. Play games (3%)
2. Get and send emails (2%)
3. Network with people in related industries (2%)
4. Customize my profile with Facebook apps (1%)
5. Add as many friends as I can (1%)
6. Send virtual pets and gifts (1%)

Who Even Does That?
These activities received zero votes:

• Market my products/services
• Invite friends to events

Write-in Votes
The write-in votes were interesting and entertaining:

• “Look at other people’s photos, see about events friends are attending that I mig” (and then he ran out space – sorry!)
• “Look at other people’s pictures” (I wish I had used this on the poll.)
• “Utilize the community to concoct a nefarious plan to take over the world” (Ahahaha.)

What do you think? Should I create similar polls on MySpace and Twitter? Did I leave any important activities out?

It’s not too late to vote, if you’d still like to ad your two cents. Thanks!

I got an email this morning from a former Web design student of mine. He was asking for a copy of a document I used to have on my previous design Web site and is long gone. Fortunately, I still have it in my files. And I’ve updated it and posted it here.

This is a sample Request for Proposal (RFP), which is a key beginning stage in planning a Web site design. The RFP helps a designer and his/her client nail down what is wanted in a Web site, as well as what a client’s priorities are. It may bring to mind things that a client hasn’t even considered yet. It gives the designer an opportunity to educate the client about the degree of complexity that can be involved in a Web design project.

Now, I have found that it usually too overwhelming to a client to just be handed the RFP and asked to return it filled out. They sometimes don’t even know what half the questions are about. For example, this company’s RFP leaves a lot to be desired. What it the potential client doesn’t know the difference between a “Template Design” and a “Blog Site”? What if their Web site idea doesn’t seem to fit into any of the available categories? What if they don’t know what “Maintenance” entails?

I recommend you use the sample RFP below as a guide for interviewing a client about their needs. Clients often have questions about each of the questions you ask them. Ask and answer lots of questions. Get it all down. Then you can write a reasonably accurate design brief based on the responses to your interview.

Here is my original Request for Proposal, originally written in about 2003 but updated today for new Web technologies such as social media and mobile devices.

Introduction

Thorough planning of your web site project will save you time and money in the long run. It will improve communication of your needs to designers such as myself. The Request for Proposal questionnaire below gives an overview of many of the considerations when undertaking a web site creation. Your responses to these considerations will help me provide you an accurate project price and schedule, and they will also help me to draw up our Contract for Services.

Company Basics

Please tell me a little about who you are.

1. Descriptions
   1. Brief company description
   2. Brief industry description
   3. Description of competitors and their web sites/marketing collateral
2. Contact Information
   1. Company name  
   2. Company location  
   3. Contact name and title  
   4. Contact phone number  
   5. Contact e-mail address  
   6. Company web site

Next: Project Basics…

microsoft vs. apple vs. adobe vs. yahoo 1996

1996

Microsoft’s is more compact vertically than Apple’s (which is very scrollerific). Microsoft and has a nice header that expands across the top. Apple has a sweet scroll box for choosing alternate country sites. Both Microsoft and Apple have a colored vertical column and a white background for the main text. Adobe blows them both away with a compact layout based on a grid. Too bad the navigation text is super teeny tiny. Instead of a complex table structure, the layout mainly consists of three horizontal images with extensive image maps. Yahoo combines a simple search box with a large directory list and icons for navigation. No-one has adopted CSS yet (the CSS 1 specification was completed this year).

microsoft vs. apple vs. adobe vs. yahoo 1996

1998

Microsoft makes a vast improvement in its layout, but their home page is super link-heavy and the text is very small. Apple’s site has more of a sense of hierarchy, with new product images giving a visitor a quick pathway to the most popular pages. Adobe chooses red text links to match their logo, and the effect is garish. The images are unusual and appealing. Finally, Yahoo tightens up their home page with a double-column directory listing. However, it would take some time to learn what you are supposed to do here. Microsoft has a rudimentary use of CSS for styling text and links, but none of the others do.

microsoft vs. apple vs. adobe vs. yahoo 1998

2000, Web 1.0

Microsoft incorporates more images but the home page is still text- and link-heavy. News and download panels arrive on the right. Apple’s home is essentially the same as in 1998. Now glassy tabbed navigation appears on the top. Adobe gets pretty playful here. Adobe’s organization and hierarchy are the best in the bunch. Yahoo tries to put it all on the home page, and finally starts blocking out areas of content. The use of CSS has not progressed on any of the sites.

microsoft vs. apple vs. adobe vs. yahoo 2000

Coming soon: Part 2…

Evolution

You can look up archives of Web sites with the Wayback Machine at archive.org. Sometimes images weren’t archived completely, so some of the screenshots below have some missing bits.

August 2000
Yes, I used frames and I am ashamed. But, hey it was 2000. I wasn’t even promoting my design work yet. Longest copyright notice ever. This is the earliest version I can find of dawnsbrain.com.

August 2000

January 2001
The Flash splash page with various animations is missing in the archive. Luckily, I have samples of a few of them below. Roll over one of the thumbnails on the left. I had just learned to use Flash.

July 2001
I have no idea how I expected people to contact me. There were no links on this page while I redesigned the site (which apparently took a few months). Just some self-promotional verbiage.

July 2001

February 2002
I still like these goofy creatures I used for the navigation. I made some decent glass buttons for the left edge, but the text formatting is so lame. When you rolled over the text, you got a JavaScript image swap in the right-hand box. This is the first appearance of a Dawn’s Brain logo.

February 2002

September 2002
What was I thinking? This looks so formal and bland. At least I was learning how to tighten up the layout, and the logo looks better. I think this is when I started using X-Cart as a way to generate my portfolio. X-Cart was not a bad solution, and I used it for several years in this manner.

September 2002

November 2002
This is a small improvement. I added images of recent work above the introductory text.

November 2002

February 2004
Finally a return to color, with an aquatic theme. I really love animals. I took those photos as Monterey Aquarium, I think. This was about the time I also fell in love with the combination of orange and green.

February 2004

December 2005
I was really falling in love with 50′s modern design motifs. I finally came up with my favorite logo design for Dawn’s Brain: the retro “dbd”. This was my first Web design done completely with CSS positioning rather than tables.

December 2005

August 2006
This was when I went into teaching full-time and put my freelance career on hold. The banner image is missing here but it looked pretty much like the current banner. I swapped the X-cart portfolio for my first WordPress blog.

August 2006

BluLob.com
I’m hoping that the archive eventually shows my earlier attempts here at blulob.com. I failed to archive the screenshots myself. The Wayback Machine says that it takes about 6 months for the archives to appear after they have been collected, so I’ll be checking back with them in September. In the meantime, here’s what blulob.com looks like today, May 2, 2009:

May 2, 2009

For years, I have worked with blogging software like WordPress and shopping cart software like X-Cart. For much of that time I have been intimidated by the prospect of developing an online community. They seem to be an order of magnitude more complex than anything I’ve worked with before. That has changed.

I spent the earlier part of this past week at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. I learned many things there, and got some great visual introductions to 3D motion graphics. But the most paradigm-shifting (please forgive me the cliche) experience I had was a 3-hour seminar on Wednesday.

The seminar was entitled “Emerging Web 3.0 Technologies You Need To Know”, and it was presented by Todd Marks and Vince Buscemi of MindGrub. These guys were great. I took seven pages of notes on my laptop. I’ll talk about many of the things I learned there in future posts, but for now I am completely energized to build my own online community.

These days, people aren’t satisfied with simply reading a Web page. They want to comment on it, rate it, Tweet it, and blog about it. They want to generate their own content on your Web site. I recommend you embrace this. The free user-created content not only builds your site traffic and your page ranking in search engines, it helps build rapport with your visitors.

Todd and Vince introduced us to KickApps.com and Ning.com, both of which provide ready-to-go online communities that are somewhat customizable.

I purchased two books at the show, Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action by Robert Hoekman Jr., and Online Communities Handbook: Building your business and brand on the Web by Anna Buss and Nancy Strauss. These two books are fantastic. They really helped me see the potential in creating a social networking site.

When I got home, I looked into KickApps for a couple of hours. You run your community on their servers and simply point your domain name to your affiliate location there. This is known as Software as a Service (SaaS). They run ads on your community site, but you can pay them so that you can remove their ads and place your own and make a little moolah. I do want to make some moolah. I was uncomfortable with not running the software on my own host. I feared I couldn’t really get at the source code like I am used to. And I had no idea how much they might charge to strip their ads out and run my own.

Then I found this article:

Dolphin vs phpFox vs Joomla vs Drupal vs Ning vs Kickapps for Your Social Networking Site by “Codernaut”

This article was a god-send. It helped me see that although Drupal has a steep learning curve, it’s free, has great online support in the form of other Drupal users, and is extremely customizable. I had heard of Drupal before but thought it was essentially the same as WordPress. Wrong.

I’m willing to learn how to build my Drupal community from the basic installation up. Hey, I’ve found there’s a strong demand for Drupal designers at eLance.com. Luckily, my Web host WestHost let me automatically install the Drupal core (the installation itself probably was not too hard anyway), and I am working from there. The quantumcritics.com article above helped me figure out which add-on modules I needed to acquire and install as a next step. I did much of this, but I am still overwhelmed but the complexity of this monster. I haven’t even started customizing the look and feel yet.

I’m keeping the Web address and topic of my new venture under my hat for now, but I will be working on it feverishly for the next month or so. Then I will invite Beta members to help me test it and build some initial content.

Now I’m off to Borders to buy a copy of About Drupal from O’Reilly Media. Good Sunday reading.

I’ll be heading to the NAB Show in Las Vegas on Sunday, staying through Wednesday. One of the seminars I plan to attend is called, “Emerging Web 3.0 Technologies You Need To Know”.

When I saw that seminar title, I thought sheesh I’m still trying to figure out what Web 2.0 encompasses. It turns out that a lot of people are still doing that. Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, once said “I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.”

This is a great article that attempts to define the differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. It even offers what Web 4.0 and beyond may look like:

“How Web 3.0 Will Work” on howstuffworks.com

Here’s a quick summary I compiled of the suggested distinctions:

Web 1.0 Sites

(1992 – 2001)
“Web 1.0″ refers retroactively to the time between when the World Wide Web was first released in 1992, and when the “dot-com bubble” burst in 2001.

• Static. Pages contain information that might be useful, but that does not change regularly.
• Not interactive. Visitors can visit, but cannot impact or contribute to, the site.
• Proprietary. Companies develop software applications that users can download, but the users can’t see how the application works or change it.

Web 2.0 Sites

(2002 – 2011?)
Purportedly begun in 2002, the term “Web 2.0″ was coined by Dale Dougherty (of O’Reilly Media) and Craig Cline (of Seybold Publications) in 2004.

• Dynamic. The site content is always changing and worth multiple visits. Example: a blog that owners can frequently update.
• Interactive. Visitors can contribute to the site. Example: wikis and Amazon.com’s customer reviews.
• Open source. The source code for the program is freely available, and users can see how the application works and make modifications or even build new applications based on earlier programs. Example: the Firefox browser provides developers with all the tools they need to create new Firefox applications.

Another major innovation of Web 2.0 is social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Technorati also make connections between people and information, and rely on large groups of people to create content. In addition, the concept of a semantic Web is building.

Web 3.0 Sites

(2012 – 2021?)
Web 3.0 is expected to take the concept of the semantic Web and build a sort of gigantic database of interconnecting information. Quoting the article “How Web 3.0 Will Work” linked above:

Internet experts think Web 3.0 is going to be like having a personal assistant who knows practically everything about you and can access all the information on the Internet to answer any question.

They give the following scenario:

Let’s say that you’re thinking about going on a vacation. You want to go someplace warm and tropical. You have set aside a budget of $3,000 for your trip. You want a nice place to stay, but you don’t want it to take up too much of your budget. You also want a good deal on a flight.

With the Web technology currently available to you, you’d have to do a lot of research to find the best vacation options. You’d need to research potential destinations and decide which one is right for you. You might visit two or three discount travel sites and compare rates for flights and hotel rooms. You’d spend a lot of your time looking through results on various search engine results pages. The entire process could take several hours.

According to some Internet experts, with Web 3.0 you’ll be able to sit back and let the Internet do all the work for you. You could use a search service and narrow the parameters of your search. The browser program then gathers, analyzes and presents the data to you in a way that makes comparison a snap. It can do this because Web 3.0 will be able to understand information on the Web.

Web 4.0 Sites

(2022 and beyond?)
And here’s what some experts envision after Web 3.0 is fully developed:

• Aesthetics and usability. Focus will return to the front end of Web sites after Web 3.0 reinvents the back end. Designers will be able to take advantage of new advanced capabilities of Web 3.0 browsers.
• 3D. The Web will evolve into a three-dimensional environment: the Web could become a digital landscape that incorporates the illusion of depth.
• Artificial intelligence. Some people believe the Web will be able to think by distributing the workload across thousands of computers and referencing deep ontologies.
• Mobility. Everything from watches to television sets to clothing will connect to the Internet. Users will have a constant connection to the Web.
• Blending. The Web will merge with other forms of entertainment until all distinctions between the forms of media are lost. Radio programs, television shows and feature films will rely on the Web as a delivery system.