Perhaps you knew that Internet Explorer (henceforth IE) is somewhat of a relic, and perhaps you did not. Unfortunately for folk like me (designers & deverlopers), most people don’t and will never. Thus making IE behave properly like other modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.) was always a bit of an ordeal…

The acronym CSS3 is new to no one, at least no one in the web design community that is. It stands for Cascading Style Sheets v3, or in laymens terms, the ability to make a website beautiful without a ton of extra images or Javascript necessary. But this article is neither a in-depth look at the third iteration or what exactly CSS is. It’s just a resounding cheer for the folks who created CSS3Pie and gave us the ability to make IE 6, 7 and 8 act sort of like a modern browser and look like a modern browser.

That’s right, the designer / developer’s bane just got a little less painful to work with. It used to be that you had to create a lengthy separate style sheet with links to a bunch of extraneous images made just for IE. This inevitably made updating a site much more time consuming than it needed to be, as well as slowing down the users experience at the same time. The latter is what is truly important, as page load time is now being factored into search engine rankings, as well as just dictating how 90% of users interpret a website’s experience is the load time.

The best part about CSS3Pie is it’s supremely easy implementation. You just need to call the IE styles (behavior:url(PIE.php);) in any elements that you are defining CSS3 on. *Note, I found the only way to get this to work for me was to position the element (99% of the time just relative), but that was it.

IE 9 is supposed to be a true modern browser, so that is great news. But, as we’ve seen with previous versions of browsers, not everyone updates just because they can or aught to. However, with this amazing, simple fix, designers and developers can lighten their load while also making for a slightly better user experience — it’s a win win. I’ve used it in three projects to date, and don’t plan on ever going back. I’d highly suggest you at least consider it. Unless of course, you are a masochist.

Note: for those working in .Net, we found this was all we needed to add to get it to play nicely:

<%
Response.ContentType="text/x-component"
%>
<!-- #include virtual ="/css/PIE.htc" -->

Today, however, the mobile web can be soooo much more rich, exciting and valuable to users. I emphasize can because most companies still aren’t doing anything to help their customers interact with them in a mobile sense. Sure, you might think that creating a sexy, awesome iPhone is too much, and more importantly, too expensive for your needs. And you’d be right, unless you want to shell out $10k+ that is.

But most companies don’t have any need for a mobile app, they have need for a rich mobile experience on their site itself. Studies have proven that while apps are awesome, they don’t lead to the long-term usage like good mobile websites do. If you need any proof that mobile is the future, then just check out these infographics. oh, also, the future is now, most companies  just don’t realize it.

So what then, we can’t drop $10K on an app or a developer

Not to worry, there are options for businesses to start with and grow from there. First, get your mobile site in order. Think about everything on your site, if you were viewing it on a phone, what would you really care about? What wouldn’t matter?* You’d probably just want the juicy content, not all the fluffy intro stuff and flashy graphics showing you too can use Photoshop (this also means you Flash). Don’t even think about adverts, I mean come on, you respect your customer more than that, right? Chances are, you customer will feel the same way as you do, if you think in an objective way.

Great, now, how to translate this? Head on over to Mobify.me and setup shop. They make this process so easy, and kinda fun to boot. Plus, if you don’t care about your domain or a custom design, they make it free. But if you do, and I’d suggest you do, they can help you out easily there as well for a reasonable fee.

Great, now our site looks superb in my Crackberry, I’m done

Nope, now comes the fun part. Now you need to create content that people want to consume whilst away from their desks. I’ve found that even though I’m a dedicated webee, I don’t have time to read all the content I want to while at a desk. So thanks to Steve Jobs and a few web folks, I can easily do this for most of the content I want to read. Without great content, why would anyone come back to your site? You do want them to come back, right? If you have a business blog, then you probably are already doing this, and kudos to you. If not, it’s never too late (although shame on you a tad). Check out the good folks at Hubspot for myriad resources on this, and almost every other web topic you might want to know more about.

So, you’re killer content is now accessible on your site, now we’re done

Not quite. What about your email folk? Let’s not forget about them either. As recent studies show, 45% of all time on the web (via a smartphone) is spent on email. Yep, you read that right. If you’re email marketing campaigns are not optimized for a mobile experience, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. To get this going, there are a few things to be done.

1) Use a professionally designed AND built email template. HTML email is uber-finicky, so just because a designer can build a website doesn’t mean they can build an effective email. Test, test, and test some more. Use a handy program like Litmusapp to ensure that across the board, your emails look as rad as you intended them to.

2) Use a robust email service provider (ESP). I talk clients every day that don’t do this. I am shocked, and not just because I am a designer and want the most fun system to work with, but also for their reputation as well. Using any modern, robust ESP will allow you to create effective mobile versions of your emails. By this I mean for those aforementioned Crackberry users — most I’ve come across can only see plain-text, and if you’re HTML doesn’t offer them a version to view, you’re dropping the ball big time. If you can’t get this to work, then just simple add a link in your email to an online plain-text version–easy as pie.

One more step–not required–but I think it’s an awesome one

I could write a book on permission marketing, but for this let’s talk on-the-go. I’ve come across the long-dead discussion of how to deal with tradeshow business cards and permission marketing many, many times. Here’s my suggestion –> create a mobile friendly page on your website with a simple form (I’m talking stupidly simple, email address and submit), create a marketing piece with a QR code (with the URI embedded) and voila, no more worries about sales people complaining about lost leads and marketers whining about lack of permission (I’m the latter by the way).

Just as technology advances every minute of every day, so does the mobile experience. Or at least, so it can if given the proper foundation. Don’t miss out on any more business than you already have by not be ready. I didn’t even get into all the location-based goodness that can be had with a proper mobile site, perhaps another time though.

*As on a desktop website, having a giant logo does not translate not into ROI.

There’s a long standing, unwritten rule* that just because you CAN do something, doesn’t necessarily mean that you SHOULD do that something–i.e., just because I have a voice and sing to myself, doesn’t mean I should do so in public. Just because great sites like Typekit.com & Google Web Fonts make a whole slew of new typefaces available to the web, doesn’t mean that everyone should go and start using new ones because they are just that–new and shiny.

What it was like before

For a long time, web designers were a bit hand-cuffed with their designs simply because web fonts were sooo limiting. Basically designers would choose serif or sans serif and briefly expand from there → Georgia, Palatino or Times for a serif family, and Verdana, Arial or Helvetica for a sans serif family. To a designer well versed in typography (define), this would seem appalling, but that was the harsh truth. And we dealt with it. Some better than others of course. Another example of not doing something just because is how people use the internet as a whole. It’s great in theory: with a little bit of gumshoe, any Tom, Dick or Harry can create a website. And thus we got some amazing sites, and some bad, bad, and badder sites.

For us designers who know a thing or two about typography, we did the best with what we could, and a lot of designers made a lot of amazing websites with amazing typography.

However, for all those people who just think they are designers, they have even less actual working experience with typography (as opposed to design in general). So limiting their options for web typography was, for all intense purposes, a good thing, albeit not the real reason this issue existed. When all you have to think about is 10 to 20 typefaces, combining both serif and sans serif, then the poor experiences that could be created were quasi-limited, emphasis on quasi. However, now with around 500+ options (based on Typekit.com library available as of today + Google Web Fonts), the limitations have been drastically reduced, and thus the chance for even more awful typography has increased exponentially.

But let’s not lose all hope; the world is full of great resources for all to use and learn (on the interwebs & in school). It’s just educating people about why they should learn a bit more, and then getting them to learn the basics. Typography is a very intense and scientific study, so I am not suggesting that everyone need a degree in this field—I am more just suggesting that before delving into ANY kind of design, be it web or print, they take the time to understand the basics of whatever they were doing.

So what now?

Thus, is there an onus these new sites providing more fonts to stress the basics of learning typography before going off the deep end? Of course not, but making more of a push to drive newbies to learn when to use certain typefaces and when not to might not be a bad idea. That sounds like an idea for a new site, methinks.

Perhaps I am being too premature in my worry, and most likely, people will still do whatever they think is best for their ‘designs,’ so this is more of just a rant than anything else. Hopefully, though, these new advances will spark more interest in the ideals of typography than just ‘Ooh look, I can use the same fonts that I can in Powerpoint, yippie!’

Only time will tell though.

* Okay, maybe it’s written somewhere, but for arguments sake let’s say it’s just an unwritten rule. Also, an update: I just came across this horrific addition to web- & email-safe fonts, this is EXACTLY what I was afraid of.

Photo: http://www.jamitworks.com/ProcessFolder/WSD3

I recently was working with a client and as far as I could tell all was going smoothly–the back and forth was going well, the design comps were all progressing smoothly.

Or, at least, I should say that I thought they were.

We had a meeting with them earlier this week and, while there was nothing drastically missing in our lines of communication, there was one thing that struck me as being off. The client had mentioned that the wireframes (define) that she sent me were not meant to be a guideline for the design, but rather a guideline for the business purposes that needed to be solved.

Wow–that’s some high level stuff there. Not that I felt they were wrong and I was right, or that I thought they felt the same way–the thing that I was interested in was that something that I thought was pretty industry standard, was obviously not. I’ve always used wireframes for getting upper level buy-in for overall content layout, and as a basis for where the design should flow from. What she was understanding their purpose to be was different. Not wrong, just different.

Seems that she wanted me to take this and run off a few comps that solved their business needs in a few different ways–not necessarily just different schemes, but semi-different layouts altogether. This is what confused me–the value to me of a wireframe (theoretically) is that they break down the overall layout of a website into an easily digestible visual that all levels (especially C-level folk) can buy into. Now to me, if we’re going to present a wireframe to these people, but then come back with something that doesn’t fit into the visual that we showed them, that is going to cause an issue. Thus, what the client was proposing just seemed a bit out of order to me, but it get me thinking, and that this might be a nice new way to work, at least with certain clients.

What we decided on was that whenever they had internal meetings and would be producing their own wireframes, I’d take these and in turn re-purpose them into two or three different layout wireframes, rather than start fleshing anything out. This way they could see a few options and wouldn’t get billed for ideas that might not work for their needs.

It also added a flag (or something like that, not sure how to describe it) in my head that just because I know a word, and assume that it’s widely accepted, doesn’t make it so. Communication is not only critical to a successful relationship, it’s also critical for a project moving smoothly and making sure that everyone gets what they need, and that the product is as best as it possibly can be.

Any tips or suggestions for this sort of thing you’ve run into with client work–we’d love to hear it. Think on.