I just launched a site that I’ve been working on for a couple months for KnowledgeWorks Foundation, a new initiative called Ohio Education Matters. The site sets out to inform the public about the state of education in Ohio, and to a lesser degree, the rest of the country.

My duties included designing the site, as well as setting up the Drupal 6 instance that makes up the meat and potatoes of the site.  Some aspects of Drupal were less than ideal for what the site needed, but it all worked out in the end.

Check it out, and enjoy!

I’ve been reading up a bit on Python lately, which is a pretty popular high-level programming language used for a variety of applications – including web and desktop apps.  It’s used extensively in a lot of Linux applications, and Google utilizes Python in a lot of their work.  The performance of the language seems to be a key selling point, as does its refreshingly simple syntax.  Naturally, I’m curious about using the Django framework in my own work.

This doesn’t mean I’m leaving PHP in the dust – I still use it extensively at work, with no plans of stopping anytime soon – but I just have a feeling this is a language I would like to work in. Python’s syntax is similar to Ruby’s (at least at first glance), and from what I’ve read it outperforms Rails by quite a bit.

The project that I’m going to cut my Django teeth on is my wife and I’s blog: www.rustyandben.com. I talked briefly about overhauling the site a few months ago, but some other higher priority projects came up. I’m getting to the point now, however, where I can start working on it again. I’ll be re-designing and developing from scratch (obviously maintaining all data), so it makes the perfect opportunity to try out Django. I’ll be upgrading my Media Temple hosting to a virtual dedicated server so that I can have root-level access in order to install whatever software I want. This, in turn, will allow me to try out a couple other technologies I’ve been wanting to check out: SQLite (a lightweight flat-file database system) and Lighttpd (a lightweight and fast HTTP server). More on those as I assess their feasibility.

I’ll be posting about all this again soon, as I’m planning on writing a series of posts about the creation of the site.

This is definitely not a new topic, but I’m going to throw my two cents in anyway. Enterprise software, those expensive packages costing upwards of $20,000 or more, are considered a necessity by many big business operations. CRM, project management, and stats tracking tools are some of the big ones that come to mind immediately. When you’re running a complex system with lots of users, you need powerful tools that let you do all the things that the higher-ups deem necessary, and that’s fine.

The problem as I see it, is in the design of the software itself – and by the way, when I say design, I mean more than just the look and feel. Design is so much more, but that’s a topic for another post. There are two parts to the design problem: the visual design, and what is commonly known as “feature creep”, and they’re very closely related. The visual design part of the problem is a direct result of being low on the totem pole. The top priority is almost always new features.

One of the most basic principles of good design is to keep simple things simple, and to not over-complicate already complex systems. Enterprise software packages seem to typically over-complicate things by integrating as many new features as possible in order to please the customer base and get them to upgrade and continue paying for support. This feature creep is what makes the design completely secondary. I’m sure the manufacturers have good intentions at first, thinking that they’ll upgrade and tweak the design, but inevitably people will just want more features, and those trump the design in order to keep the money coming in. Some of you might be asking, why do you care so much about the design, all that matters are the features, and if it works? Well, here’s my opinion on the design: some people get it and some don’t. Intuitive, visually appealing software is going to make me enjoy using your product a little more, hopefully making me more productive and relying on your product. Some companies get this right, like 37signals. They make simple, easy-to-use software that’s a joy to use because of its slick visual design and intuitive functionality. I use a couple of their products and I love them. (Side note: We’re a little too large an organization to be able to use the 37signals products at work, and they don’t quite meet all our requirements). Anyway, I think the long term benefits of designing your product better are greater than just throwing every possible feature into your product that you can.

Another aspect of enterprise software that is slightly annoying to me is how a lot of them seem to try and make their product look like a Microsoft product. Yes, yes, I understand that making it look like this way will make most business users a little more comfortable, because they are likely already using products that look similar to it. But damn if it’s not annoying.

So, at the end of the day, you’ve got software that you can live with, but you don’t really enjoy using it. It seems like it shouldn’t have to be this way. Why can’t you spend the time to make your product a joy to use, testing it with real users, and then concentrate on adding more features.

Meh, it makes sense in my head, at least.