Jesse Schibilia

I just finished the framework for the RUSportCuts.org advocacy website.  It desperately needs conent from the individual teams.  It includes a discussion forum so that members of each community can come and talk about their efforts.  I really hope that it gets some exposure.  I have called out to the athletes to tell their communities about it so that we have a unified voice.  I feel that a unified voice is really important in a campaign such as this.

I’m sure many of you have heard about the varsity team sports cuts that will be occuring at the end of the 2007 season at Rutgers. If not, read up. They will be cutting the fencing program that I was a part of for the last five years. Obviously, this weighs heavily on my heart.

The cuts were made across the entire University. No part of our school was safe. I can understand that in tough financial times, the fat has to be cut. But I feel as if Rutgers Athletics made the cuts of entire teams to make the cuts visible. I am sure they could have rearranged the team budgets to have the same affect of cutting six entire sports. Instead, they want to avoid public outcry by saying “Look at poor Rutgers Athletics, they lost six entire teams!” The cuts made add up to 3% of the total Athletics budget ($1.2 million of $38 million). I am sure all of 30 teams would be able to maintain with a 3% budget cut straight across the board for each sport.

The cuts that were made are seen as “strategic” because we are considered to be teams that are less productive. Take one look at the t-shirt I made for Rutgers Fencing this year and tell me that we aren’t productive. We have 86 NCAA individual appearances and 32 All-Americans in 20 years. We brought Rutgers a national sabre champion in 2003. To my knowledge, there have been no other teams at Rutgers with any NCAA championships. So the notion that fencing is not productive is ludicrous.

I registered a domain name to create a website for an advocacy website for the cuts. I have been waiting for data from the rest of the teams so that I can put it together, but I have yet to hear from any of them. I am still trying though, and once it is up, I will post the URL here.

I have been living at home for the last month or so and I am still searching for the right job. I am still looking at several very presitigious firms around New Jersey. Things look very promising, but I hope that I get a job soon because my mother works me like a slave as compensation for living here. So far I have:

• Cleaned the gutters
• Sanded and refinished a rocking chair
• Pressure washed, stained, and sealed the back porch
• Edged around the house
• Spot patched a large stone back into a column
• Cleaned out the garage

The list is sure to go on. If I don’t get a job in IT, I suppose there is always manual labor…

I recently interviewed for a position as a Linux SysAdmin. My experience in Linux is limited. I have only spent about 10 hours on SuSe Linux on my computer at home. I have done a considerable amount of work on LAMP servers and in shell accounts in classes. I think that my inexperience in Linux came across to the interviewers as disinterest.

I contacted some folks at US Fencing about developing a website where athletes coming out of college can connect with individuals (parents or other athletes) in the community who are in a position to offer jobs. The idea stems from my problems trying to find a job without an internship on my resume. The idea was received well by a few of the executives at US Fencing and they want to talk with me further about it. I have to develop a business plan to see if it is sustainable as a non-profit service to the community, but I think that it would be a great project for me to run.

Scott and I just finished our final project for our Information Visualization class. We decided to do a Google Maps Mashup for restaurants around New Brunswick. The final product turned out really nice. Scott did 95% of the javascript and I did 95% of the styling/conceptual stuff. If anyone wants to use what we’ve done and build upon it, feel free. Just make sure to give us our credit.

One thing that we wanted to implement was a scroll back to center feature. After you close an info window, there is a drastic shift away from the markers. If you can figure this out (its pretty easy) let us know.

We haven’t really tested it in IE or Safari, but it works fine in Firefox.

[Discriminating Taste, New Brunswick]

I just finished my first web design project for real money! Admittedly, I was comissioned to do it by my mother, who owns the company, but you have to start somewhere. I am glad I was given the opportunity.

It took the equivalent of about a week to finish. I did five days on-site in Mountain Top, PA with Clint Cummings, the head sales representative. I went every Monday for five weeks, and then did a little bit of tweaking back at my place in New Brunswick.

It’s great to finally have something to put on my resume. I will still have to rely on my accomplishments in fencing to get my foot in the door, but hopefully I will find an employer who sees those accomplishments as the result of years of hard work.

The cool part about it is that I now have some code to start a code library. This layout is fluid, which means it’s good for any size broswer window. You can have it infinitely wide, and pretty close to as small as you want it without losing any of the layout structure. It also comes with fully functional pop-out navigation, based on CSS. And of course, it is standards compliant!

It isn’t very creative aesthetically. This is what the company was aiming for. They didn’t want anything flashy; just strong and well structured. I enjoyed making it this way, because it is a design sense that I am comfortable working in. I aspire to something more creative in the future, however.

Bergen Machine dot com

Target Corp. is being sued by a blind college student at UC Berkeley. He filed the lawsuit because Target’s website lacks even basic accessibility provisions like alt-text, which screen reading software relies on to help blind individuals navigate the web.

A cursory glance at the site’s source code reveals that it is not even in compliance with WAI Priority 1 standards, the lowest level of basic requirements for accessibility compliance. I see a lot of people complaining that web standards restricts creativity (yeah, if you don’t take the time to learn CSS, just look at CSS Zen Garden). It is easier to comply with accessibility laws using web standards, but for those who can’t be creative with CSS and Javascript, it can also be done with proprietary methods like Flash. For large e-commerce website such as Target, however, Flash does not make sense because of the tremendous bandwidth it incurs.

This is good news and good publicity for web standards! It will scare other large websites into doing it the right way, or face class-action lawsuits over accessibility. This should create more jobs for people who understand and who, furthermore, promote web standards.

If you have never used campusfood.com to order food from your local campus eateries then you won’t be able to fully relate to this post. The interface used to be bulky and not very informative. They really have revamped the entire site. The new code is streamlined! I write this as I eat a falafel and hummus platter from Neubie’s…yum!

As a new user enters the site, he or she is presented with a much improved start page. The usability has increased such that the users’ attention is directed to important tasks for each stage of the order. They use instruction images with arrows attached to show the user what needs to be done next. An arrow, while simple, can do a lot for a website’s efficiency. I am partial to this simplified task instruction method. By presenting users with a streamlined task set for the things that they want to get accomplished - in this case, get food delivered - the following is achieved:

1. Efficiency of the implementation is increased: Simplifying a design hopefully means less overhead. There will be less information being relayed between the server and the client, effectively reducing bandwidth.
2. The user doesn’t get frustrated: You want to fix all your bugs and streamline the task sets with the following thought in mind: users should be able to get in and accomplish what they want to get done as quickly as possible. If a user gets frustrated, it translates into lost revenue for campusfood.com just because of a poor interface.
3. The user enjoys their experience: When a user looks at an interface and sees an inviting method to get their task completed, and then they can easily complete their task, they will be more likely to use it again. This translates into more repeat business for Campusfood.

So instead of taking you on a page-by-page review of Campusfood, let me just highlight a few things that they did that I liked:

• More user information is presented to the user. The first thing that I noticed when I logged on is that I can see my last several orders with the restaurants. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but the mere fact that the company is allowing users to access their own data on the web is trendsetting for a small company like this.
• User information is presented in simple terms. One of the best things that Amazon ever did was adding ownership to the account page link. So instead of a link that merely reads ‘Account Information’, you would instead see ‘My Account’. This is a subtle, but important difference. Another example is instead of something to the effect of ‘Package Tracking’, you would see a link in your account information that reads ‘Where’s My Stuff?’ Taking business operations and putting them into common, everyday, Joe-six-pack language is an effective measure to making the user experience more enjoyable. Campusfood does this on the new design (My Account, My Campus, My Fridge, etc.)
• The CSS is bright and playful, yet clean. This is very hard for me to do. My style sheets generally come out on the verge of ‘doctor’s office sanitary’. I can’t stand ugly styles with unecessary and seemingly misplaced elements. The crew that worked on this, however, kept it clean enough for me and managed to have some fun with it too.
• The visual cues are spectacular. See the screenshot below of the restaurants in my area. Note the method they took to show you that the restaurant is closed. This wasn’t in the previous version; I think the restaurant just got removed from this list when they closed for the night.
• Also see in the screenshot that when I am logged in, there is a button at the bottom that reads “Tell your friends” with a graphic of two cans tied together a la The Little Rascals. This button takes you to a quick and easy form where you can let your friends know about your great experience with the website. This means more revenue for Campusfood!

The design is ten times better than the previous one. The crew is entirely in-house as per my correspondence with the feedback rep. It’s good to see that web design crews are paying attention to the user experience as a way to generate more revenue. Congrats guys.

I found an article by Allesandro Fulciniti that goes down web design memory lane of 2005. Fulciniti, an Italian web designer, posted this English translation of his original article over at web-graphics.com. You will find some great resources on JavaScript, CSS, web standards, accessibility, etc.; all of the best of 2005. A great read for any designer who has been in a coma since January 1, 2005.

If you read Italian, the original article is posted at blog.html.it.

Of particular interest to me is the moo.fx effect library. It is only 3 Kb and gives you some pretty snazzy visuals. Now I just need something on which to try it out.

Edit: I found a similar article on 456 Berea Street. They go over their top articles of 2005. This is a great blog and has some priceless information for designers. If you’re not reading it, you should be.