Late Tuesday afternoon a tweet came through from one of my old Carnegie Mellon School of Design professors, B. Uy, which announced that his design studio, Wall to Wall, had just launched a redesign for the CMU School of Drama.

Note: Before I get into my post I want to say that B. Uy and Wall to Wall are extremely talented and they've won numerous design awards for work that they have done for their clients. Definitely check out their work. Also, B. Uy was a fantastic teacher.

To start, the new School of Drama website looks gorgeous. Seriously, kudos to the designers. It really did need a facelift (sorry, but I couldn't find a "Before" shot on the Way Back Machine so you'll have to take my word for it) It has a bold look with lots of strong imagery. Perfect for a website that is looking to attract young college recruits for a very successful, renowned visual program.

But as a developer I have to look under the hood, so to speak, at the source code. I also want to look at URLs and title tags and the order in which content is loaded. So I fired up Firebug and loaded up http://www.drama.cmu.edu Here's what I saw:

• 50 HTTP requests
• 2.3 MB of content pulled down
  The large size is due to the 4 large image files (2000px x 444px) that need to downloaded
• It takes 3.16 seconds to load
• jQuery 1.3.2 is not minified so it's 117.8 KB and the file is being served locally rather via a CDN like Google which is the recommended method for delivering the library
• Not running the latest version of jQuery 1.4.4. The latest, minified version is 26.5 KB
• No META Description which is bad for indexing and SEO
• Declaring HTML Strict yet there are 44 errors on the home page.
  http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.drama.cmu.edu/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
  1. You have to close your tags if you want to be HTML Strict
  2. ALT text missing from images
• The CSS suffers from a couple of notable issues (Browser specific errors and warnings should be ignored)
  http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.drama.cmu.edu&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=en
  1. Missing units for widths
• 19 accessibility errors
  http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=http://www.drama.cmu.edu&js=2
  
  1. Most due to missing ALT text

A lot of these issues can be fixed easily. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I suspect that these were not seen as important things to take seriously, but as someone who does this every day it's like finding bad grammar, poor design or terrible kerning.

An interesting thing that struck me was the URL structure which is all based on the number in the URL, likely because it's used to pull in the page information from a database. For example check out http://www.drama.cmu.edu/58/news-and-events The number "58" in the URL is the important part. If you change the "58" to "15" you get a 404 error page (which could use a little design attention of its own) http://www.drama.cmu.edu/15/news-and-events
However, the same page can be pulled up using http://www.drama.cmu.edu/58/foobar The "news-and-event" or "foobar" means nothing which will create a mess in the Google Analytics since you can also get to the same page by going to http://www.drama.cmu.edu/58 At the very least, the server should be set up to do 301 Redirects otherwise Google is going to be indexing A LOT of duplicate pages. Using URL Rewrites they could drop the ID all together and just use URLs like http://www.drama.cmu.edu/news-and-events since the site is running on Apache/2.2.3.

Is everybody perfect? No. There are a few issues with our own site and we run a web development company (although most aren't issues so much as the W3C validator isn't updated for certain META tags and Facebook Connect integration. And the CSS validator doesn't like browser specific declarations although they're perfectly harmless and completely acceptable).

This is what we think about when we develop websites for our clients. It's not just the design but also how it's put together that's important. Structure, design, content, accessibility, optimization: these and many more things are what the whole package of web development is about. Our goal is push web development and to get our clients and others interested in the entire process. After all, if we're not the ones pushing the industry then who will?

At Tasty CMS we're strictly Mac people. Perhaps many years ago there was a big difference in price and speed between Macs and PCs but those metrics just aren't true anymore. For the average person who isn't looking to do professional grade video or audio recording and editing, who is surfing the web and listening to music on their MP3 player you can get a Mac for the same price as a PC. Not to mention the resale value of a used Mac is measurably better.

But I'm getting beyond the scope of this post.

If you do have a PC you should be protecting your computer from malware and viruses. And before you get conned into paying a high price year over year for high priced virus software consider using any or all of these great, free alternatives.

First, start with an online Safety Scan of your computer (Vista and Windows 7 users go here). This free scan from Microsoft will check for and remove viruses and improve your PC's performance.

When you've finished running your scan download and run Microsoft Security Essentials. This software promises to provide "real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software".

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.

*Your PC must run genuine Windows to install Microsoft Security Essentials.

Next, download and install Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware software. They offer a free version, which scans for and removes malware when started manually. Run this on a weekly basis to keep yourself protected.

Lastly, check out Avira AntiVir Personal - Free Antivirus. Even though it's free it's still filled with robust features. The program offers a wide selection of scan customization, letting users fully scan both internal and external hard drives, run a preloaded scan or customize a scan. If you want anti-virus software with more features such as automated scheduling and scanning their premium version is worth checking out.

We've officially entered Autumn in Chicago, which means the weather is cold and merciless one day and then the next it's hot and humid. But that's why we love it here! We were very active on Twitter in September and we pulled out some of the choice tweets. You can check out everything we say on Twitter by following us (@TastyCMS).

This video has been making the rounds this past week. It's a commercial, or promotional piece if you will, for Author Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From

One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from?

With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

Beginning with Charles Darwin's first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines.

Most exhilarating is Johnson's conclusion that with today's tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow's great ideas.

We've been noticing a trend that's been gaining traction over the year. It seems that more and more small businesses and entrepreneurs are turning to 3rd-party sites such as Facebook and Twitter to get their message out. They're relying heavily on these services to engage with their clients and to secure new business with potential customers. They're not just relying on them but actually depending on them. Unfortunately, there's a danger in depending on something for your livelihood that is so out of your control.

Everyone knows about Twitter's infamous "Fail Whale", a cutesy image that appears on Twitter's website whenever their service is over capacity which has been pretty frequent. Facebook, on the other hand, has experienced very little downtime for a website that has 500,000,000 registered users that generate a ton of traffic. That was until yesterday afternoon. Folks in the U.S. started experiencing flaky connectivity issues around Noon CDT. The problem continued to persist throughout the afternoon eventually bringing all of Facebook to its proverbial knees. Facebook was down for everyone as evidenced by the number of tweets on Twitter saying as much.

Now, if you look at some of those tweets you'll see a lot of messages similar to the one's that have been posted whenever someone using Twitter experiences the familiar "Fail Whale".

Our advice to businesses and entrepreneurs that are relying too much on Facebook and Twitter is to stop immediately and realize that these sites do not have your business interests in mind. Use these sites as a complement to your existing strategies to get your message out.

The next time you find yourself cursing when their sites go down, take that opportunity strengthen or build up your home base. Make sure you have a website that you can easily contribute to on a consistent basis and you'll rely less on things that can disappear at any time.