I’m browsing digg on my iPhone when a story catches my attention. According to the description, it’s a Facebook exchange between two roommates on CollegeHumor called “Who’s Bringing the Microwave?” It has 3,500+ diggs, so I click. Safari opens a new page. It’s a mobile version of CollegeHumor optimized for the iPhone. I scroll down, all the way down, but there’s no mention of a microwave, much less a Facebook conversation. I scroll back up and check the URL. I’m at CollegeHumor.com. Well, that doesn’t help. I close the page and wonder how a developer can do something so stupid.

Go back a few years. The iPhone launches and Apple CEO Steve Jobs believes in an “innovative approach, using Web 2.0-based standards, lets developers create amazing new applications while keeping the iPhone secure and reliable.” Facebook, digg, and Google are quick to jump on the bandwagon. Eventually, Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, Amazon, CollegeHumor, ESPN, Box.net, and many, many more sites create iPhone optimized versions. Some of these sites are great, while others, like CollegeHumor, are just downright annoying.

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I created this design years ago for doDesign and decided to bring it back. Called Code Green, this design is a static HTML template that could be converted into a WordPress theme or used as is. I originally created it in a contest for a coding site, but that didn’t work out, so I released it for free. It’s not one of my best designs, but someone might find it useful. Let me know what you think.

The bottom is with the script.

Google something. Does anything look different? Google recently tweaked the design for their search results to put more focus on ads. The ads, once on the far right, are now closer to the middle of the screen. If you haven’t noticed the ads before, you sure will now. They’re hard to miss.

Why did they do this? Well, the answer is clear. They hope that pushing the ads left will bring more clicks. With monitors becoming wider and wider, ads were going farther and father. Now the ads appear more like results and less like, well, ads.

That’s great for Google, but what about the users? Well, the new design bothered me, so I went to work and put together a quick Greasemonkey script to push back the ads. If you’re on Firefox, install Greasemonkey and then install my script.

Screenshot of Wufoo.com

Honestly, most contact forms suck. No, people don’t want to enter their email twice (in fact, chances are that if they wrote it wrong the first time it will be as wrong the second time — copy and paste won’t fix your email.) People also don’t want to check their inbox for a validation link, decipher an impossible CAPTCHA, or subscribe to your newsletter. Contact forms should be easy, short, and work.

Contact forms can be set up in many ways. Some tutorials explain how to build a “bulletproof contact form,” but, for the average person, detailed tutorial is often not enough. For the WordPress folks out there, there are countless contact form plugins already available. Sure, many, if not all, work with relative ease. Some people, like me, just don’t want to be bothered building and styling a contact form. That’s where Wufoo comes in.
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YouTube, while immensely popular, has always been criticized for being too “messy” or “poorly designed.” It looks like they’ve gone back to the drawing board and redesigned their header (making it more simple and clean.) Looks much nicer in my opinion. Sometimes less is more…

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