Customized or Scalable?

Custom vs Speed

During my day job I’m confronted on an hourly basis with requests for small improvements that people want to make to the website in order to be more personal. Add “My Account Rep”, only show them content they own, put their name on the page, remember what they last searched, show them the most popular research for the products they own, show them the top rated research in what they own, show non-members a view of what it would look like if they were members, but don’t hide the stuff they don’t have access to, I don’t know, maybe a switch of some sort that you can click to give them the “whole view” (seriously…I don’t even know how in the world to write a spec for that).

There’s a problem with all of these though. Our old site was an example of what happens when you allow unfettered, continual customization, and don’t consider the overall impact that each one of those chips in the scalability wall makes.

The above illustration is a good example of the customization vs speed argument, imagine the teeter toter works like this. When you put something on one side, it lifts the other side up, causing the other side to get more and more out of control.  Everyone at some point in their life has been the one on the top part of the teeter totter, it’s not a lot of fun because the person on the heavy end has all of the control, they decide when you go up, or when you go down. They decide when they’ll just jump off the teeter totter and leave you to slam down hard on your butt and probably fall off.

Out of the gate I’ll tell you that speed’s got it’s work cut out for it. It’s trickier to do than customization. I can customize the crap out of a website in hours, but tweaking the speed requires deep plumbing and hard work.

Every time you add a feature to the customization side of the scale, the speed side gets lighter, and it becomes harder for speed to balance the teeter totter. Eventually you get to a point where poor speed is thrashing and flailing at the top of the teeter totter trying to gain his balance…and he simply can’t.

Well why can Google do it then?

Google’s not much different. Take a look at an iGoogle page with loads of gadgets on it, and watch how slow it loads, compare that to the straight Google home page…also keep in mind that Google has locked up about 90% of North America’s smartest software engineers…and if they can’t figure this out, what chance do us mere mortals have?

The appearance of customization is better than true customization.

First off, I believe greatly in putting more of the customization components on the client side. Cookies are a great way to do this, keep their display name, and some basic customization options in their cookie. Users who refuse customization on their machines simply don’t get customization.  Sorry, but that’s the realities of the internet in 2009. On the server side, you need some pre-assembled components, preferably in XML, HTML, or plain ole text files which use the file system rather than the database.  It’s MUCH easier to scale a file system up than it is a database into a cluster.

Too much customization is a bad thing

No matter how much apparent customization you do, eventually you reach a point where you’re still making database calls for pieces. There’s no hard and fast rule for how many database calls are too many…but you know when you hit it.  Your site’s slow.

You also hit a strange point where you’ve essentially created an infinite number of slightly different sites. While this is appropriate for a site like Google, it’s not great for a site which is trying to convey a single directed message.

Customization vs editorial control

There’s a certain level of editorial control that I expect when I go to a website. I’m figuring that there are people who get paid six figure salaries to show me what’s important, to make certain editorial decisions, and decide that this is their best stuff. Yeah it’s cool when I can add a filter to that content to let me see stuff that I’m most interested in, but when I go to the Globe and Mail’s website or Wired.com, I want to see what their editorial has determined is most important…because even though I’m not all that interested in Bio Tech, maybe today’s biotechnology story is relevant to me in a way I’m not even aware of.

In the end, customization is a good thing, but too much can put blinders on content, and put excessive strain on systems.

Design Trends I Love – Pseudo 3D

Pseudo 3D

There’s a new design meme that’s making the rounds. Websites that have some dimensionality to them. I first really noticed it on Jonathan Snook’s Snook.ca, but recently SlashFilm added some of this, and my new favourite site Mail Chimp has some too.

It adds much needed depth to the web, and is neat because it’s a whole new design trend which appears to have sprung up out of nowhere.
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Search Engine Optimization is Bunk

The Radical Hive Logo

I get about 7 or 8 email spam a week to my domain accounts promising that so-and-so can make my search rankings much higher for only $xxxx.  Of course this stuff is so much snake oil it’s not even funny.  I can help you improve your Search Engine ranking with 10 easy tips.  Best of all, this is completely free!

So, for the robots out there, check this out:

Top 10 Free Search Engine Optimization Tips by Brian Garside

Consider that a preview tip right there.  That title not only improves the ranking for my name, but will also raise the profile of this article in search engines.
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Top 10 WordPress Plugins – Updated

Not available in stores...the WordPress Plugin Bar

For this week’s Web Design Wednesday segment, I’m going to revisit a post I wrote about back in August, but a lot of stuff has changed in the seven months since I first wrote it.  For one thing I’m about 100 times more comfortable in WordPress than I was seven months ago.  For another I’ve totally swapped out my old WordPress Plugins for newer better ones.

For another thing, I’ve learned how to build my own plugins.

So this is my latest and most updatedest listing of best plugins for WordPress.  These are all what I consider “manditory” for a new WordPress install.
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To hell with IE 6

IE 6 burns in the deepest darkest fires of hell

On February 16th 2001 Jeffery Zeldman posted an article called “To Hell with Bad Browsers” on A List Apart.  It was an eye opening experience for me, and was the piece of the puzzle to why accessibility and standards compliant websites were a must have going forward.  The title was memorable enough that it’s stuck with me all this time.

At the time I had just finished up the launch of TSNMAX, and the CEO of Bell Globe Media, Lib Gibson, was giving me a list of all of the problems that TSNMAX had with Netscape 4.7, which was her sole browser of choice.  The browser was dead in the water at the time, and the “To Hell With Bad Browsers” article gave me a ton of ammunition.

Fast Forward seven years, and we’re in the same boat, except this time with IE 6.  I hope that this treatise can be used by other developers to convince their bosses that it’s time to kill IE 6 in the corporate world.
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Some cool web links I'm reading

Here’s a bunch of web links I’ve been looking at this week.

How to Add Drop Shadows to Menus or Windows with CSS
This one looks cool as I consider ways of improving my various sites and consider how to make stuff a little more graphical while still being semantic and clean.

UI is the Killer Feature
Yeah it is! You can’t have usability without a user, and you can’t have a user interface without considering usability.

Panic – Coda one window web development
This looks really cool, but it’s Mac Only, and it’s not really for me.

How to use WordPress as a Truly Customized CMS (Multiple Headers, Footers, Sidebars and more!)
This is great, I love WordPress, and I’d love to use it as a more full fledged CMS for other sites. This shows you just how to do that.

To Hell with Bad Browsers
I’m writing an article on why people should abandon IE 6, and move on to IE 7 at the very least. It’s based in a large part on Jeffery Zeldman’s awesome article here.

Top 10 WordPress Plugins

Not available in stores...the WordPress Plugin Bar

It’s Web Design Wednesdays, and this week I’m going to focus on WordPress.

I’ve been using WordPress for a few months now, and I’ve pretty much settled on a few plugins that I love and which will be on my “default install” for any other sites I make.  There are a couple of plugins on this list that I’m not currently using, but I have them earmarked for other sites.

There are two specific examples; I’m not posting comics here, so there’s not much sense for the ComicPress plugin.  I’m not selling stuff, so there’s not much sense in having the WP eCommerce plugin installed, but they’re both really cool plugins that I’ve played with.
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How to build the site of your dreams

This is something new I’m going to try. Website Wednesdays, I’m going to try to write a bi-weekly column on websites and web usability every other Wednesday where I’ll talk about some of the challenges in developing modern websites.

I thought of a half dozen catchy titles for this post, but really it comes down to one thing. Usability. A usable website is a good website. The more usable your website, the more better a user’s experience will be with it, and the more successful it will be in the long run.
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Secret project part 1: Hosting

I’m working on a new little side project which I should be able to announce next week at some point. My plan is to create a Web 2.0 Digg style site and do it in under 20 hours from start to finish. This whole venture will be detailed here on RadicalHive, but I won’t let anyone know WHAT the project is until I’m done it. It is vaguely related to All New Comics, but different enough that it’s going to live on its own enviornment.

I have the technology down, this site will be using PHP and mySQL, and I want it to be able to handle large traffic loads with relatively little downtime. I have already selected a content management solution for it, and I’ve started creating the basic template for HOW the site will look (complete with ads and such).  - UPDATED July 1st @ 9:24pm!
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How I switched to WordPress

I’m still working my way through a ton of small issues with my new site, but I’m really happy with what I’ve got so far, and where I am right now compared to where the site was a couple of weeks ago. At this point I’m done with the small fiddles and I’m actually creating content in WordPress quite happily!

It’s taken me the better part of a month to get to where I am right now. I’ve imported nearly eight years of content from two separate publishing tools, creating and modifying categories and content types over from the previous systems. I’m also in the process of importing nearly 600 comments from the past three years (via the old HeadsDown Chronicology powered blog).
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