Tracey Shaw
Late last year we decided to try a little experiment and hire a co-op student for a 4 month term in the UE group. Turns out it was an awesome experience and we have had so much success with our first co-op student that we have extended his term to 8 months and hired a second!
In January we hired Kurtis Beard as a Junior Designer and at the beginning of this month we were pleased to welcome Ben Ng to the team as a Junior Information Architect for the summer term. Both students come to us from SFU’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology program. If any of you are considering hiring a co-op student I would highly recommend it.
The process is surprisingly simple:
- Find a school that offers a program that compliments the skills you need in your organization.
- Post a position with the co-op office (be sure to tailor it to students, you can’t expect them to have loads of client experience with specific technologies).
- Review the incoming resumes and determine your first cut for initial interviews - we prefer applicants with an online portfolio.
- Provide an assignment for the students to present at the second interview - this gives you a feel for the kind of work they can do and also gives them a good idea of the kind of work you want them to do.
- If you are lucky and you find the right fit, you simply notify the co-op office that you wish to make an offer. Assuming you made a good impression with the student they will be keen to accept!
SFU dedicates an entire page to the benefits of hiring a co-op student (new perspectives, ready & eager to work, cost effective, future hiring potential etc..) and I would have to say it’s pretty bang on. One thing to note is that you have to be prepared to move fast, the good students gets snapped up early!
Kathleen Moynahan
Surf over to I Love Typography and play The Rather Difficult Font Game. It’s challenging, and fun too. I love to see the different font faces and it’s very satisfying to get one right! If you are Very Good, you might make it to the top of the list on the Rather Impressive Hall Of Fame.
(I think I need to play a few more times!)
Jasvir Shukla
There’s been a lot of talk lately of extending websites out from the browser (Silverlight, Expression Blend, Adobe AIR) and recently I found about Mozilla Prism. Mozilla is now at the point where they are releasing a new prototype that splits a website out of Firefox and installs it as a separate application on the desktop. (Go to this blog post to find out more, and scroll about halfway down the page to see a screenshot of the menu item in Firefox).
The user experience of this is interesting – it’s a one click operation from the browser with nothing to install, nothing to wait for - it’s just all part of the browser with a desktop icon. If it all works as described, it’s much simpler than other options out there.
This will be an interesting space to watch, and I’m starting to think about how the websites we build today are going to change into much richer applications in the future, where a user can choose how and where they want to run them.
Scott Baldwin
As web development moves towards richer user experiences leveraging JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, CSS, Flex, etc. site visitors (such as people using older browsers or even search engine robots) can end up with a site that is inaccessible. Worth considering in your design and implementation planning is what your pages will look like when these rich elements are enabled and disabled and the pros/cons of page coding techniques such as graceful degradation or progressive enhancement. Afterall, it might just be the difference between a person being able to interact with your content/functionality or a search engine being able to index your site content.
If you’ve never seen progressive enhancement in action, it’s worth a peek at the North Shore Credit Union site.
Inspired by an article on Progressive Enhancement and SEO we identified some problems with how search engines were indexing content on the home page of their site. The page utilizes a content switcher widget which allowed a large amount of content to fit into a smaller visible area. Prior to the change each ‘tab’ of the widget changed to the next on mouseover using JavaScript. Each tab was also setup to work when the user did not have JavaScript enabled by adding a query string to the URL that would show that tabs content (e.g. ?widget=1). While this allowed the widget to work for visitors with and without JavaScript enabled, search engine robots had trouble indexing the site. Some search engines would index the root level page (e.g. /index.jsp) as well as each of the variant pages that were using the query string. This would result in the home page being indexed multiple times and page rank split among those pages — or depending on the search engine robot and its ability to execute javascript — some content not being indexed on the page at all.
After a few mockups and some code changes we eliminated the query strings (and the indexing issues) providing a page that is still accessible to visitors with or without Javascript enabled while also exposing to search engines additional content that can help increase keyword density and organic search relevancy. Check out the changes (home page, product page, product landing page and tabbed content page). You can view the progressive enhancement in action by turning off JavaScript on your browser.
Nick Bouton
Just wanted to post a quick note relaying an excellent blog post I came across yesterday by Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb:
Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies
Habañero has already been employing semantic markup such as the hCard and hCalendar microformats for several recent projects, so this is especially relevant to our business.
The addition of semantic information to web documents is an important evolution of how meta-information is both stored and accessed on the web; it’s looming large as a major trend for 2008, especially considering Yahoo!’s recent announcement of support for indexing of semantic markup. Yesterday, Yahoo! Europe pushed out 26.5 million microformats in the hListing classified ad listing format, which is a major step in the process.
In his article, Alex explores much of the hype and fuss behind the semantic web, and how it will be important to everyone in the near future. It’s definitely worth a read.
