BrainFuel

If you keep up with the flash design industry, you’ve probably noticed a lot of tiny fonts on web sites these days. Apparently there’s this one company that has come up with some really nice fonts that are legible even at small sizes. Check it out! They even have a free font available for download: http://www.ultrafonts.com/

So this morning I wake up and do my normal routine before heading in to the office. On the way to work I say to myself “you know, a nice cafe vanilla would be a great way to start the day.” So I stop at a Coffee Bean (one of my favorite places) to get my coffee.

So I go in and I order my drink and all the while the barista is looking at me like I just walked out of a snowstorm. I didn’t think anything of it at the time thinking she was just odd. So then minutes later I see my reflection in a mirror and low and behold I have dried shaving cream all over my chin. Ugh.

I’m just glad I noticed it before walking into a meeting with a client. Can you imagine the horror? I suppose, if anything, it would be a nice icebreaker.

Ok, on to some sites:

There’s some seriously awesome Flash work going on in this site called HybridWorks. Beyond simple Flash animation, this site is seriously fun to play with. I found the animation seriously beyond what you typically see on a web site these days.

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Mark posted this site for British firm SICL (short for Systems Integration & Cabling Limited). I thought the design was excellent. Very unique and a strong color combination.

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Oh, if you’re interested in politics, and you’re up for some good discussion, Don (our esteemed and highly valued developer) runs a blog called Political Pundit. This month, and running up to the November Presidential elections, he has a class of students from his college class posting regularily. It ensures a wild discussion about political happenings almost every day.

One of our clients gave us a DVD movie they want on their web site and we need some recommendations on software that can rip it to mpeg or equivalent. It can be either Windows or OSX software. Thanks.

I came across this all Flash Hillier Architecture web site today and wanted to share it with everyone. It’s superb in its simplicity and use of a limited color pallet. I liked the way it navigates and feels like a normal web site even though everything is in Flash.

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Christmas is quickly approaching and the folks at 37signals created a handy guide for e-commerce during the holidays. The guide is made up of screenshots from major e-commerce sites showing what others have done during past Christmas seasons.

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There is a new Mozilla web site which is quite nice. It launched last week.

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Genzyme Corporation web site - nice corporate style.

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There’s an awesome free Flash photo-gallery system called SimpleViewer. Alongside of the basic Flash file there are several aftemarket plugins (also free) that automate management of the photos. VERY slick.

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A very nice design for WordPress blog. I like the typefaces especially.

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And this has to be Danny Kaye’s greatest line: The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! – from The Court Jester.

Recently we’ve had several clients, prospects, and partners asking us about building e-commerce web sites. Instead of your typical web store with perhaps two dozen products, they’ve been people looking to peddle tens of thousands of products.

So it’s an interesting thing because immediately you must ask “who is going to add all of those products and what about the product images?” Then you get into all of the different types of products and their associated sub-products or sub options. For example, “if I buy this wheel, can I get it in 17″ rims and can I get this in blue?”

Then you have to look at shipping. Most companies have one or two places they ship from so you can normally come up with a shipping model that will work for the store (and calculate from a known zip code), whether it’s flat rate shipping, or it calculates it using FedEx and UPS calculators. Last week we spoke to a company that wanted to sell 7,000 products (to begin with) and they were all car parts.

The CEO told us that he wanted to be able to expand to 15,000 plus products within a year. Then they told us that they drop ship everything and have 50 or so drop ship locations. Immediately we were thinking about the shipping calculation and the fact that we would need to calculate shipping from dozens of locations. Added to this, many orders would ship separately.

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Mark responded before I had even finished this post (I posted an earlier draft) and the thought came to mind that I’d ask: What are your tips, tricks, and techniques for managing large scale web projects?

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My friend sent me a link to the McMaster-Carr web site and wow, is that ever a huge site. They say they have 410,000 products for sale. Not quite as many as the big guns like Amazon or Buy.com, impressive nevertheless.