Interesting take on the future of Wired (mag vs. website).
Wired is great print, but if the magazine can’t make money and is shuttered, taking the website down with it, I’m going to be livid. Not that making money online is easy—it’s not, especially without sacrificing your ethics and your voice—but if any mainstream outlet should be able to make the transition, it should be Wired.
I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for all these old brands, because they can’t accept that the work at which they have excelled for years will be just as important when it’s online—and online only.
Reading though the comments provides an even more interesting story and a broader perspective. Comments by several former and current Wiredlings, including a few responses by Chris Anderson who passes blame to corporate (Conde Nast) decision-making.
# tagged: wired
Silently, and with no fanfare, the Wired News redesign of 2002 turned 3 years old a few days ago. I had to search my own site and find the entry, Finally, We’re Live, to confirm the date. I almost let it slip by without even thinking about it. read more
# tagged: wired
There’s a spattering of activity here all of a sudden. Yes, I’ve been busy. And yes, you’ll see even more from me soon. Big things have been in the works for a long time.
Digital Web Magazine just posted another interview for their latest issue, this time, the questions from Craig Saila were directed at me. Read all about why I wrote off CSS as a failed pipedream for so long, what I think about the Wired News design more than a year after our launch, and my sentiments about the end of Webmonkey.
# tagged: css, interview, wired
Last August, I praised Macromedia for its release of Dreamweaver MX 2004 with its broad advances in support for CSS and accessibility. When I want to use a visual editor to crank out a quick HTML comp, sometimes I’ll use Dreamweaver. But for those of you who know me and my working style, you may know I usually prefer to hand-code over using visual editors. That’s just me, and my insane desire to type one character at a time. While I didn’t spend as much time in Dreamweaver during the Wired News redesign, you can bet that its powerful text-editing companion HomeSite saw hours and hours of use once I had a design finalized. (Since it only exists for Windows, HomeSite is the one and only thing I miss now that I’ve switched back to Mac.)
read more
# tagged: css, interview, wired
Seven years ago, yesterday, I packed up everything I owned, left many friends behind in San Diego, and moved to San Francisco, (where I knew absolutely no one) to start my job at HotWired on August 12, 1996. The Creative Director hired me as a junior designer, since I knew very little about design for the Web, despite the fact that I had more print design experience than almost every other designer there at the time. read more
# tagged: personal, wired
Alright, now it’s personal because there’s shame involved. The company I used to work for (Lycos) used a project in which I was originally involved (a redesign of HotBot) as a base for a CSS skinning contest (Hack Hotbot). I don’t care what the internal debates and politics have been between HotBot product management and Lycos Legal, but this situation totally blows: read more
# tagged: wired
No, haven’t yet seen the movie, but considering the constant prodding of friends to do so, I’m likely to see it some day. What I will note, however, is that having (and enjoying) office space in downtown San Francisco seems an ironic luxury, specifically for me. When employed at a normal “job” — where it was expected that I be present in the office at least half the week — I found myself wanting to work from the comfort of home more often than not. read more
# tagged: business, personal, wired
Via Clagnut a few days ago, Richard Rutter summarized some interesting observations and conclusions on the “Upgrade now!” message often seen in the unstyled version of CSS-based designs. Contrary to the current snafu with browser detection scripts over at HotBot, Wired News relies on support of specific CSS methods to hide or display any messages regarding browser capability. View Wired News in a browser such as Netscape 4.x and — as of December 18, 2002 — you’ll see this message at the top of the front door: read more
# tagged: css, web, wired
Ah, I can finally talk about it. It’s so far off everyone’s radar that hardly anyone has noticed yet. Let’s change that.
Another project I had a hand in design directing and pushing to XHTML/CSS (smack in the middle of the Wired News redesign) finally surfaces. Following Wired’s lead, HotBot redesigns and in the process, completely morphs as a new product. [Mostly] table-less CSS-based design that was cranked out in a one-week visit to Boston back in June. The backend took significantly longer, thus the delay. The CSS changed slightly from what I originally authored, creating a few rendering and alignment bugs in various browsers. But you get the basic idea. Aside from very minor visual changes, the design we came up with is still in tact, and represents the harnessed power and attitude HotBot has been known for. read more
# tagged: css, projects, technology, wired
After 6 years, 3 months, 3 days, my employment with Wired comes to an end today. What a ride it’s been.
Jumping back in time, I remember picking up an interest in bulletin boards in ’92 while I was still in college. I started at a marketing design firm named Mentus as an intern during my senior year. In my spare time, I spent countless hours exploring the concept of connected computers and online content using the company’s AOL account. Of course, with a 14.4Kbps WinFax modem, the majority of my time was spent waiting for the next screen to load. read more
# tagged: personal, wired
An interview conducted by CSS guru and standards evangelist, Eric Meyer, covering the ins and outs of the conversion to a standards-based design for Wired News. Read the original article here.
(Translated into: Japanese)
# tagged: css, wired
Last week’s redesign of Wired News included significant visual changes to the interface. The push toward XHMTL and CSS is certainly a big deal. But as a designer, I also love delving into visual details, especially as they impact the user experience. In addition to the usability testing we conducted on WN prototypes a month or two ago, there’s another excellent mechanism for measuring and determining the experience our users have with the site. It’s called user feedback, and we get a ton of it for free via a multi-use Contact Form on the site. read more
# tagged: css, web, wired
The high profile Wired News redesign has attracted a lot of attention, primarily because of the Web standards we’re using, and the effort we’re making at keeping our code compliant and error-free. However, daily editorial additions continue to allow XHTML validation errors to sneak into the Wired News markup. The most frequent culprits are the ampersands (&) which separate name/value pairs in URL query strings, or which commonly appear in our English language in company names like AT&T or slang acronyms like R&D. Section C.12. of the XHTML 1.0 specification effectively explains why these symbols need special treatment. read more
# tagged: technology, validation, web, wired
In reading some of the feedback pouring in since the Wired News redesign, some of my confidence that we did the right thing initially began to erode away. The launch was somewhat anti-climactic. The press release looked like a misfire because we didn’t get the site launched as scheduled on Wednesday night. Within just an hour of pushing the site live on Thursday evening, (around 10pm pacific time) we had 4 messages from users who were irate and frustrated with the new changes, promising never to return. read more
# tagged: wired
After a day’s worth of “almost there” blog entries and email messages [xhtml validation], I now proudly announce that Wired News is there. Our developers and engineers who hunted through multiple Vignette components to find the errors and destroy them deserve all the credit. Brilliant job comrades!
# tagged: validation, web, wired
I’ve also been in touch about the redesign and working closely with Eric Meyer for the past few months. He’s been a tremendous source of encouragement and inspiration along the way. He powerfully adds:
“… the really important stuff all happened behind the scenes. Using no tables to lay out the page, but instead applying CSS to XHTML, the site is a stunning example of how standards can be made to work today.”
Wow, even as I write this, an engineer just yelled across the room that that article about the redesign is currently the number one topic on BlogDex, and rapidly climbing on Daypop (both index thousands of weblogs and report back the most popular topics of the day). Hail to the bloggers of the world — they actually get it because they’ve been doing it.
# tagged: people, web, wired
Just after wrapping up my last post, I started looking around to see if any buzz about the WN launch had hit the Web yet. Ahem… I don’t think this one will sneak under too many radars. Jeffrey Zeldman just dedicated a huge amount of space to the redesign in today’s Daily Report. In a perfect answer to the “what’s the big deal?” questions I just asked, he writes: read more
# tagged: people, web, wired
At long last, the Wired News redesign is visible to the world. We launched the site around 10pm PDT time last night. And what a relief it is. Despite numerous setbacks, delays, bugs, and technical difficulties, we pushed through to the other side and found success. Are all of the bugs and errors fixed? No. But the major problems which were keeping us from launching last night have been solved. And now it’s live for all to see. read more
# tagged: css, projects, wired
Since our failed attempt at pushing the Wired redesign live last night, our engineers and developers have been working like crazy to figure out what went wrong. The errors never showed up in our development environment, but only manifested themselves once we started pushing the site to the live front end servers. The press release already went out this morning, and seems to have created more chaos inside the company than any attention or curiosity outside our walls. I can’t express how frustrating this additional delay is, especially when we were orignally supposed to launch 2 weeks ago. But life goes on, and we’ll get the site out eventually. Rumor has it that we may still try to get the new site up sometime today. Fingers crossed
# tagged: projects, wired
The Wired News redesign was scheduled to go live in the wee hours of the morning today. Technical difficulties started popping up as we were pushing everything to the live servers around 2am. Fragments were disappearing, images weren’t working, Unfortunately for us, a press release was already queued up to hit the wire first thing this morning, announcing the new design and all the benefits it brings. They had even included some great quotes from Eric Meyer. The press release put us in a very difficult position, because the design couldn’t stay live with all the bugs. If the release hadn’t gone out, we could have postponed the launch without too much attention. At 3am, we were forced to decide to roll back to the old design until the problems could be investigated and solved, regardless of the fact the press release was going out to the world a few hours later.
Bummer! We’ll get it up soon though.
# tagged: wired
