Ok so you have all seen them: “8 million tools for web development”, “5 gagillion tools that if you don’t use you are stupid”.

So of course you click on them (after all that is why people write them) and you find out that the tools are for Mac lovers, Ubuntu gurus, or some other niche that you are not a part of. You find a couple of doodads worth looking into, but overall you find yourself disappointed…again. As a .net developer it can be frustrating because it seems the blogiverse thinks you are “eat the paste special” because you don’t use Ruby.

I am here to tell you…you don’t eat glue. You may have chosen to develop .net web apps because your employer is a Microsoft shop and you don’t have a choice, or you chose it because you want an IDE that is actually useful. Either way there are a lot of tools out there for you whether you are a .net novice or ninja.

So here is your list of tools that if you don’t use them as a .net developer then you obviously are a contributor to the “Baby Seal Clubbing Foundation”.

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Have you ever read a book and once it was finished you thought “that book would have been so much better if it was 100 pages shorter”?

Some authors like to “hear their own voice” as it were and don’t know when to stop. There are a lot of web designers/developers who do the same thing. I definitely have fallen into that trap from time to time. You just get so excited by what you are working on that you add a little thing here, another piece of flair over there…before you know it, the point of the design gets lost under a pile of textures.

In recent months you have probably noticed a new trend…the minimalist look. Now when some people hear that term they think “boring”. In some cases they are spot on. If you go too far with it, it can be boring, but it doesn’t have to be. Take a look at A List Apart to see minimalism done right. Its clean, but not boring. Basically instead of using colors and textures to add interest, you make the layout do the heavy lifting of catching the user’s eye. Whitespace can be beautiful when done right.

Design Meltdown calls sites that follow this trend “super clean”. They have a four page showcase of sites built with this technique if you want to see some examples. Some are better than others obviously, but there are some great sites on that list (Protolize, mkdynamic, spacemaker).

I have found myself jumping on that train with some of the things I am building. To me it is just a completely different way of building a site. Instead of thinking of what textures, effects, and dohickies I can add to make the site stand out, I go through a mental process of stripping out everything that takes away from the core of the design. Its like cutting out those unnecessary 150 pages in a novel. Once they are gone, the narrative is crisp and flows the way it is supposed to.

In the design/development world, the final product gives the user a clear, easy way to understand and use the application. In my experience, I have found that it takes a good bit longer than I thought it would. Initially it seems easy and that having a lot of whitespace is enough, but when you take out gradients, shiny-effects, and whatnot, all you are left with is the content. How you make that interesting is what separates the proverbial “men from the boys”.

Rainfall Daffison is a “strategic design consultancy” based in Europe. Their thing is to design sites with a minimalist design and feel. They are quite passionate about it and think you should be too. They have an article that runs through 24 “moments” of minimalism” over the last decade. Its a great article that shows examples of some of the best minimalist sites out there today.

If you are thinking of how to wrap your head around minimalism, its not a bad place to start because you can see how some of the best in the business make it work.

What do you think? Have you jumped on the bandwagon, or do you think it is gonna go the way of the dodo? Did you find it easier or harder to create a super clean site?

Earlier this week I started a series on the old workhorse, .Net Membership that was introduced with ASP.NET 2.0 waaay back in 2005. Why drudge it up? Well, simply put, it is really useful and can save you a lot of development time. Also, it isn’t sexy so it doesn’t get a whole lotta press (like say…Ajax) so I figured this series could serve as a nice “reintroduction”.

The first part of the series introduced the functionality and explained how to set it up for your site. Today I am going to go deep and explain the LoginView control. This is definitely one of the more useful controls developed by Microsoft when it comes to user management and it bears a bit of time to look at it.

In addition to the basics of the control, I will also get into some of its “quirks” so you don’t beat your head against the wall in frustration the first time you use it.

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So with my little CMS client I am building, I have decided to use the .NET Membership functionality that has been a part of .NET since 2.0 (it is also being used in 3.0 in case you were wondering like I was). This isn’t some new fangled javascript library. This is an old workhorse that has been around a while (since 2005) but a lot of developers don’t know much about it. As I worked with it I noticed that it is pretty nice, but it has some funkiness that needs to be worked around. In the end I figured it would be helpful for new and old devs to get the lowdown on this functionality.

So what is Membership? Basically it is MS’s way of getting rid of the tedious stuff that is part of every functional website. Stuff like creating and managing users, logging in and out, user roles, etc. How do they get rid of it? Basically they have built a system of database goodies and server controls that do most of the heavy lifting for you. Notice I said most…

Over the next few days I will go over what it is, why I chose to use it, and how to get it to be useful for your app. Today’s goal is to give you an overview of the functionality and explain how to get it up and running on your site. Read the rest of this entry »

Smashing Magazine has a great list of usability problems that are pervasive on some of the biggest sites.

Personally the whole “Popup to get content” drives me batty. You usually see this on full flash sites (movie sites are the worst), but it is used by lazy designers everywhere…

At the end of the article they have a nice checklist to keep in mind while you are designing new sites. Here is a slimmed down version…

1. You don’t use pop-ups.
2. You don’t change users’ window size.
3. You don’t use too small font sizes.
4. You don’t have unclear link text.
5. You don’t have dead links.
6. You have at most one animation per page.
7. You make it easy to contact you.
8. Your links open in the same window.

Definitely worth a look.

So yesterday I was a bit bored and headed on over to the Sitepoint Marketplace. If you have never been there it is pretty interesting to see what is up for sale. Basically they are an auction site selling full websites, domain names, templates etc.

Personally I always peruse the established websites section to see what is up for grabs. While reading several of the listings I noticed that a good part of the sites are just a couple of months old. Sure there are exceptions, but I was really amazed to see how many sites were barely off the ground, much less successful. The really strange thing is, some of the sites are sold for a pretty good amount of money (several thousand dollars in some cases).

Does this seem weird to anyone? After building and working on this site since April I know that it is tough to find an audience on the web nowadays. So how do sites one and two months old get enough traffic/customers to warrant such a price? Are they buying their traffic? Do they know something I don’t on how to attract people (always possible)?

Another thing I noticed is there is a good bit of turnaround. You will see a site for sale and in the post the owner will say “I bought this site from Sitepoint a few weeks ago…”. Huh? Why buy the site if you are just going to sell it again right away? How can you get your money back much less turn a profit? Its not like a few weeks is gonna show that you have caused a major turnaround and your site is the new “it” thing. Again, I must be missing something

Its kinda like watching an infomercial at 2 in the morning. You are bleary eyed and those knives that cut like a lightsaber are calling to you. You almost pick up the phone, but you finally wake up enough to ask yourself “when do I need to cut a coke can in half then slice a tomato?”. You sigh, put the phone down, and finally mosey on off to bed.

To me Sitepoint is a similar temptation…there is an “established” site out there. If you sell your vintage Battlestar Galactica collection you can probably come up with the money. It looks like a no brainer because the current owner says they make so much money every day that they have to sell it for fear of drowning in cash. You really start thinking about it…then you realize that you have no experience in dog grooming supplies nor do you really want any. You sigh, move away from the keyboard, and mosey on over to your Xbox.

So has anyone ever taken the plunge and bought one of these sites? How did it work out for you. Did you make the money you hoped? Would you do it again? Inquiring minds want to know…

I love ask a ninja. It is seriously one of the funniest things on the net. My favorite are the “omnibuses” that they have from time to time.

If you are a fan, then you might be interested to know that .net Magazine has an interview with the creators of the show. Its short and sweet, but it does answer some of the questions I had been wondering (like if they are making some serious cash off of the program).

It is nice to see “regular people” making it big on the net and getting to do what they love. Very cool stuff.

Man it has been too long…its been crazy on the homefront and it has kept me away from writing. For the regular readers, I apologize for slipping away. Onto the task at hand…

Recently, a commenter asked…how does Yahoo! Reset CSS fit in with Blueprint and Tripoli?

The answer is quite snugly really. I have talked about Tripoli and Blueprint in the past, so I figure that you have a grasp on those guys. So what about Yahoo!?

According to the Yahoo! crew:

The foundational YUI Reset CSS file removes and neutralizes the inconsistent default styling of HTML elements, creating a level playing field across A-grade browsers and providing a sound foundation upon which you can explicitly declare your intentions.

To take out all the big words, this basically means that it takes out all the funkiness that the most common browsers automatically put into all of their rendering. In other words, you get a clean slate in which to build your own funkiness. Cool.

So how does this stack up? Well, its purpose is just about the same as Tripoli’s purpose. Neither are frameworks in and of themselves. Instead they just clear everything out. In order to make things look the same across browsers the Yahoo! guys have created their own base CSS which then sits on top of the now defunkified reset (much like Tripoli does).

If you want to go a step further and start encroaching on Blueprint’s territory, you can implement Yahoo! Grids CSS. The grid’s job is to setup some markup that will layout your page for you. Like I mentioned in my overview of Blueprint, this can make things get ugly really quickly. When you have classes like “yui-t3″, you have, in my opinion, crossed the line from helpful to painful. There are uses for such CSS, but in all honesty, I think I would build this complex CSS from scratch.

The YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) really is a kind of “one stop shop” for just about everything web related it seems. It may not be the best implementation of everything, but overall they do a great job and, more importantly, they provide great documentation.

So there ya have it. Hope that helps anyone who was a bit confused.

Thanks for the question “mike from ohio”!

So the stats are in for the month of August, and it was…by far…the best month this little blog has ever had. My side scroller series seemed to have gotten a lot of attention. Another big performers was the pretty popups article from July.

After I released the side scroller series the developer’s site DZone grabbed it and ran giving a boost of over 1,000 hits throughout the month. So thanks DZone!

The site gotta few digs now and then, but not enough to matter. I have found that my traffic primarily comes from google searches from designers/developers looking for a tutorial of some type. In my opinion this is the best kind of visitor because when they find me, I know I can provide them some value. Visits from the social sites are great, but I notice that there are a lot of “hit and runs” that come from those sites. My goal is still to create a community for designers and developers so a hit and run doesn’t add a lot to that.

With that said, in between the runners, the social sites do attract some great people here that visit, learn, and contribute. The more of these we have, the better the community will be.

So how good was August? Well, according to Mint, here are my stats.

Total Visits: 8,420
Unique Visits: 4,060

This averages out to be about 130 people a day. Now, you take out the bump from DZone and this was still an amazing month. The average daily traffic Monday - Friday is around 230 or so which is a huge increase compared to any other month. This average has been holding steady for about 3 weeks now so that is pretty exciting. My initial goal is 1,000 visits a day so I am still a ways off, but it is fun to watch the site and community grow.

With feedburner I am averaging just about 70 for the month of August (69 to be exact). I get about 800 or so hits from the feed every day. That is awesome, but I am not sure what constitutes a hit when it comes to RSS (anyone?).

Will September be better? I have no idea really…if I keep the same averages we have for the last few weeks then it will be close. Only time will tell…

Have you ever wondered that? Is there some “web cabal” that sits in their beanbag chairs with indirect lighting overhead and thinks…”lets make things shiny”…and then for the next 6 months every site looks like it is under a pane of glass.

The question hit me when I was looking at Smashing Magazine’s new list of all the logos that use leaves. I mean seriously…there are like 20 different logos that somehow incorporate a leaf in the design. How in the world?

Realistically I know how it happens. Someone makes a cool site or logo and then one designer sees it, then another, and another and finally you have a forest of little leaf icons all over the world.

What is interesting to think about is there are probably a dozen people in the “web world” that create something new and then there are about a million others who copy and expand upon the idea. Don’t you want to be one of those dozen? How cool would that be? To be the guy (or gal) that decided that was behind the “wet and shiny” look that took the design world by storm.

Now I say that would be cool, but honestly, it would take some serious cojones to be that person because for every iPod you think up, you have 100 Newtons that get ridiculed.

Still it would be a lot of fun when you do make your iPod…

So here is a question. What if you were one of the lucky few who has enough clout to really push the next thing in the world of web design? What would your next thing be?