Scripts.Indisguise.Org - a hobbyist's blog and scripts archive

I’ve always liked themes and website skins, the type where visitors can change the look of a website using a switcher. I even made a script for it. I think they’re a fabulous tool for making a website interactive, and giving users the power of choosing how they want to experience the website in question. This is most useful and prevalent in forums and boards, where users are many and varied: some prefer reading in dark environments, and some prefer lighter ones.

But of late I’ve been thinking that theming and skinning websites isn’t all that great, especially viewed in certain conditions. To clarify: I’m talking about a theme or skin being more than a color-only difference between themes/skins.

I realized that one of the drawbacks for me is the false sense of “interactivity” in the website. Understand, the websites I’ve skinned are all smallish fansites and fanlistings, containing minimal updates. Skinning has become one of the most popular “interactive” features of a fanlisting. Unfortunately, it’s lulled me into feeling that it’s “enough”. Which is a bad place to be for anyone who owns a website. More content and other forms of interactivity should be the focus; there are plenty of other ways to do that.

It’s lulled me into keeping old layouts around. I’m ashamed to say a couple of them are half-assed layouts that are there because the more skins there are, the nicer the website is! And, why skin a website when you only have two skins? So keep them all and give the users choice. Uhm, wrong tactic there. Skin retirement should be done semi-regularly, to keep layouts fresh and up-to-date.

I also can’t help but feel that there has to be some brand dilution there somewhere, unless skinning is carefully managed, of course. You have a subset of users using one skin, another subset using another, and unless these skins are quite similar (like the really nifty Day/Night skins I’ve seen crop up recently) the users of skin 1 will tend to approach the website differently from users of skin 2. Websites who’ll have these problems will probably be few and far between, but I can’t help but feel that this is a valid concern.

I certainly feel that skinning is one aspect of website interactivity that one should take a look at when planning a website, but shouldn’t be taken lightly. It adds a bit more complexity to managing the website and the users of the website, but when done well, it’s a fun feature for visitors. I still can’t get over the Day/Night skins some websites use; if it would work for one of my websites, I’m soooo there! ;)

But for now, I’m steering clear of skinning until I’ve real reason to use it.

I flew home to the Philippines on Thursday for the Developers’ Evening with Yahoo! Philippines (which I blogged about here), and met quite a number of Philippine web developers and chatted up a couple of friends in the web industry.

The event is basically a networking session with Philippine developers, with a bit of overview on what YDN is: a free resource for web developers that contains not just information, documentation, and tutorials on the various APIs Yahoo! has, but also a couple of tools and articles to help developers (like YUI <3).

There were lots of shop talk, which was definitely fun and a lot more of the same would be fabulous. :D I’ve never really attended networking sessions before, as I’m generally a bit of an introvert when it comes to approaching people and introducing myself, but the night went quite well and I had a great time. I hope everyone else who was part of it felt the same. :)

As I had a pretty busy week last week due to the event preparations and travel, I hadn’t been able to work on last week’s Frontend Friday! Sorry about that, but I promise I’ll have something this week, and will also prep for next week’s FF (I will be Internet-less next week (save for when I’m at the office) due to moving out!).

Alex asked in last week’s Frontend Friday:

I just wanted to know how you decide how much AJAX is too much AJAX? You don’t seem to use much (if any) on this website.

It’s a good question, but the answer isn’t too straightforward: it will always depend on a large number of factors. For me, an indication of a developer/team getting too AJAX-happy would be when the site becomes unusable when JavaScript is turned off or isn’t working. For example,

1. a website that loads all (or most) of its content via AJAX, therefore rendering the page content-less without JavaScript; or
2. a website whose navigation is inaccessible without JavaScript.

JavaScript should enhance websites and applications, no doubt about that. Most, if not all, of the well-loved web apps of today are due to the snazzy-ness of AJAX. But we can’t always rely on JavaScript being present: even if users have it turned on, spotty connections and unexpected data returns can result in JavaScript being pretty much nonexistent. Progressive enhancement and/or graceful degradation should be important when working with JavaScript–whether or not you’re doing asynchronous calls or not.

However, like I said, the answer isn’t straightforward. Some applications really do rely on the existence of JavaScript, and for good reasons. Graceful degradation can be prohibitively difficult when you’re dealing with some specialized web applications, like mail: Yahoo! Mail and GMail come to mind. User interactions with both of these are so fine-tuned and uses a lot of convoluted interlocking parts, and degrading gracefully would be a pain. That’s why both apps have a no-JavaScript version as well (Mail Classic and Basic HTML view, respectively).

As for the second part of the question–no, Indiscripts doesn’t use any AJAX :) Mostly because I don’t see a need for it, or the “need” to use AJAX is lower than the time I have budgeted for designing and coding up my tech blog ;)

For this week, I’m doing a free-for-all: if you have something you’re curious about in terms of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, post your question in the comments and I’ll cover your question in future Frontend Fridays. Nothing is “too simple”, so feel free to post questions (please try to keep clear of Enthusiast-only questions though! ;) ).

The reason for this (rather abrupt) post is that due to my rather freaky schedule this week (I’m moving by end of the month, and we’re hopefully signing a tenancy agreement this coming Monday, finally), I wasn’t able to prepare for this week’s Frontend Friday. I had a draft in the works but unfortunately, it needs more research than I have time for this week.

Let me know in the comments! :)

A List Apart has another survey for people in the web industry, specifically for people who make websites. Last year, they launched a similar survey, focusing on finding out common job titles, salaries, and work situations in the field; and this year’s survey aims to correct mistakes in the one made last year:

This year’s survey corrects many of last year’s mistakes, with more detailed and numerous questions for freelance contractors and owners of (or partners in) small web businesses. There are also better international categories, and many other improvements recommended by those who took the survey last year.

I took it. Have you taken it already?