Just over a year ago, I posted this update over at my wife’s blog about my son’s delivery and since then he’s been a real trooper and continues to fill our lives with much joy and laughter. Today, my wife and I are all set to welcome our second child with the same amount of enthusiasm and anxiety as our first born.

Yesterday morning, Michelle experienced some close contractions and decided to get checked up at the hospital. We dropped Brandon and Ratih off at my parent’s place, before heading to Pantai Medical Centre to have her contractions monitored expecting a false alarm—as by then her contractions has pretty much subsided to almost nothing. After monitoring for about an hour, the nurse conducted a routine examination and discovered that Mich’s cervix has dilated to about 4-5cm—which as far as procedure goes—is about as committed to labour as you can get (a fully dilated cervix is about 10cm). The doctor promptly had her admitted to the hospital and we’re to be ready for delivery—three weeks ahead of schedule!

However our girl is not quite ready to be booted out of mother’s womb as Mich’s contractions fizzled into nought. Our doctor asked us if we were ready to burst the water bag, but we thought we’d let mother and child settle down for the night at the hospital and see how the labour progresses. Baby seems rather comfortable to remain inside for the time being.

So, here I am back home to clean up a bit and to get a few more things for Michelle. I’ll probably try to catch a short nap before heading back to the hospital. The apartment is very quiet without everyone around. It makes me realize just how much I miss Michelle and Brandon, even though it’s only for a short while. Really looking forward to bringing everyone home and welcoming my baby girl to the family.

P.S. Shout out to my dear friend, Min Yen. For your sagely advice concerning our iffy situation. Thank you!

Whenever I start a new website project, whether for a corporate or marketing a product, I’ve found myself frequently falling back to the same basic site pattern and then branching the site from there. Much of my work is then spent convincing clients to rename and compose standard sections of their site for what they really are, instead of coming out with overly-creative titles (like titling the “About Us” page, “old pond, a frog jumps, the sound of water”) or using obscure images in a misguided bid to make their site attractive in a sea of competitors. I’ve often had to employ the usual reasons to persuade them otherwise, search engine optimization concerns, better usability and accessibility for the majority—which means not making your visitors confuzzled about which blob or dot to click to get certain information from your site.

So, if you’re currently in the process of developing your own website or revamping an existing one for yourself or your business, here are some pointers for your home page—the very first page your users or customers see when they visit your website. Sometimes the voiceless victim of the dreaded splash page. Stake yourself in the spleen if you’re:

• still using a Flash-based landing page for your site
• have asked a designer to provide one for you
• or if you’re the prick web designer who proposed and managed to convince your client to have one.

The home page I’m referring to is NOT the asinine, flashy presentation which forces me (and the rest of your customers) to mute the volume and hunt frantically for the “Skip Intro” link or button (stake yourself again if your splash page doesn’t have such a link). Your home page is important. In case that didn’t quite sink in—your site’s home page is the most fucking important page in your website.

The most common trend is to have the home page occupy the root directory of your site—typically the index file at the root of your web directory. This means, your homepage is accessed via http://www.yourdomain.com/. Other variations are to employ some way (from web server redirection to CMS specific configurations) to relocate the homepage elsewhere. Common home page variations are home, main, front, welcome and landing. What this means is when users visit http://www.yourdomain.com/ in their browser, they’re automatically redirected (preferably with an error 301 in the HTML headers) to http://www.yourdomain.com/home for example.

These pages may have file extensions or not (e.g. htm, html, php, asp and jsp just to name a few common ones), I recommend not having file extensions as part of your site’s url, which can be done using mod_rewrite (the easier way) if your web server is Apache-based or by having an elaborate directory structure with index files in them—just do it the web server way to save yourself a lot of grief. Most modern CMS or web site frameworks will have this feature built-in (commonly called nice urls or clean urls). If you’re looking for more information, this Google search is a good place to start.

An analogy for the home page is that of a magazine cover or the front page of a newspaper—you want to draw attention of your visitors to key areas of your site and highlight popular pages. If you’re selling something with your site, consider the home page as the first impression to your potential buyers and you want to provide as much relevant information about your products and services from the get go. A good marketing strategy is to use the home page for highlighting special promotions and one time offers.

Two key differences to remember when using the magazine or newspaper analogy on your site which defines the web medium apart from print—and you should never take for granted—are the instant navigation functionality provided by hyper-links, and the ability to search. Hyper-links can be broadly categorized into two types:

• persistent links, such as your main site navigation menus, footer links and side-bar menus
• and transient links, such as hyper-links within your page content.

Careful planning of the above links means your users will be able get to information they need on your site intuitively and quickly. When they don’t find what they want in the initial three clicks, they’ll use your site’s search—if you have one. If they still don’t find what they want, they’ll leave (for your competitors site).

One caveat, unless your site has heroin content (like blurry exclusive pictures of, I don’t know, Megan Fox and Keira Knightley making out in the nude with tongue), then you can have the crappiest site in the universe and people will still flock over in droves and endure every horrid Flash-based splash page and pop-up window you want to throw at them.

Trend-wise, other things to include on your home page are:

• your primary contact details, such as a phone number, email or postal address
• a list of recent news headlines or excerpts from the company blog—if you have one
• updated stock prices and trading code(s) if your company is listed
• downloadable company fact-sheet, in PDF format, because most venture capitalists and investors WON’T visit your website, they usually get their personal assistant or secretary to prepare a print out of potential acquisitions to read while island hopping the Maldives in their Cessna
• and samples of recent work, customer testimonials or case study to start the confidence building process.

Things to AVOID:

• site visitor counters, they add no value whatsoever to your site except maybe make you feel better about the size of your penis
• Google AdSense or any other pay-per-click advertising on a company website, it’s cheap and your competitors could end up advertising on your site, how convenient
• link thumbnail previews, basically when you hover your cursor over a link, a window appears showing a thumbnail image of the page it links to—these are so annoying it’s against my religion to name or link the site which offers this crap
• music player with a choice of soothing elevator music, hidden or otherwise, unless you’re selling music on your site then please ensure that the player is highly visible so that it can be muted or stopped
• huge picture of your awesome management team (or any other fun pictures from the last company retreat) which has not been scaled down properly from it’s 7.1 mega-pixel size because you don’t have Photoshop and you’re too cheap to pay the web designer to resize the photos for you
• a live chat box, because your site is not selling Viagra, Cialis or any other erectile dysfunctional medication discreetly
• a ka-billion links to all your employees’ blogs and MySpace profile, all six thousand of your partners’ and affiliates’ crappy websites, Google, Yahoo and sites selling Viagra and Cialis, discreetly (this practice is incidentally called a link farm and typically flushes your Google PageRank down the toilet)
• or anything that makes your web site look remotely like a page from MySpace.

Finally, another important thing to take note of is to check your website address with either www or without. For example, visit your website by using the URL http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com. Both addresses should point to the same page. Ideally, one should redirect to the other to prevent Google from indexing the same site twice—which Google might penalize your site (for more information see no-www.org or yes-www.org). I’ve seen sites where the non-www URL points to their site’s ISP back-end (cPanel or Plesk login), a blank or error page, or in the worse case, redirects to some other website.

There’s also no harm in testing your site using random sub-domains, like http://whatever.yourdomain.com, just to make sure your web server has been configured to handle the URL correctly. Some hosts might have configured some sub-domains for your site such as http://mail.yourdomain.com, for you domain’s web mail, or http://admin.yourdomain.com as your site’s back-end interface. If you don’t plan to use any of these services, you should turn them off or ask your host to remove them.

Malaysia will be holding its 12th general election this coming Saturday (March 8) and I’ll be casting my ballot for the opposition party—whoever it may be PKR candidate, Hee Loy Sian. Here are my five reasons why:

1. I still see buses, lorries, trucks and other heavy machinery on our residential roads spewing thick black exhaust with impunity. I want to see stricter regulation on emissions for all vehicles because I don’t want petroleum by-products in my lungs.
2. Roads around Petaling Jaya are still riddled with hazardous potholes and ditches. The long running joke of having resurfaced roads prior to elections no longer applies here. The turn-round time for these roads to deteriorate back to their rally-like state happens quickly due to the above mentioned heavy machinery using these roads. Oh, and the constant layer-cake resurfacing technique has turned manholes into potholes, so it’s all not really helping the situation. I want better manage roads—and since I’m wishing, it wouldn’t hurt to have all our roads more pedestrian friendly either.
3. The food court in the building where I work is called the gas-chamber by my peers because it’s a smoking area. They have a small no smoking room for the minority—very considerate. I’m also quite sure the toilets in our building are designated no smoking areas but the smokers don’t care because they are the majority after all. KL Sentral is definitely a huge designated no smoking area—but only inside. Which makes everywhere outside the terminal a designated smoking area, which once more, our fag loving majority utilizes fully—usually huffing and puffing away in clusters around all the entrances. All this makes being a non-smoker in Malaysia a moot point. We all might as well take up the habit, at least we’ll be inhaling our own filtered smoke. Just goes to show how serious our country’s anti-smoking campaigns really are. I want genuine anti-smoking initiatives and the culture of the non-smoking minority turned around.
4. Our public transport system can be improved. I don’t want any more locally produced, cheaper cars. We need better taxis, buses and trains—most developed nations get this, why not us?
5. Our internet is crap. Our neighbour can get 10Mbps in their home connection. The most we can get is 4Mbps. I want this gap closed.

There’s no doubt that the National Front will win this election again. Honestly, the opposition hasn’t impressed me either—not when their rallying mantra is “deny BN two-thirds majority”. That’s the best they can muster? Just aspire to be a political hindrance to the ruling party? That’s not really Change We Can Believe In is it?

So who are you voting for this coming election and why?

Hephaestus is very close to completion! I’ve managed to find some time to finish up the archive/category listing page, search results and 404 page. I’m quite satisfied with how the entire design concept turned out. Two details about this theme which I like:

• Random Gravatar images for people who don’t have one—what are Gravatars you ask? It’s quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on Gravatar enabled sites (blurb straight from their site). Want one? Sign up here, it’s free!
• Random musings when search returns no results. Try searching for some random terms to get some quotes.

A few more things to do: page navigation, widgets support and IE6/7 CSS hacks. After that I’ll probably spend some time tidying up the theme before releasing it into the wild.

After chipping at it for nearly a week between work and parental responsibilities, I think I’ve made sufficient progress on the theme to take it out for a test run. Since my blog is still new and shiny, I’ve refrained from adding too many widgets and what-nots from the 1,398 1,456 1,637 1,917 available—for now anyway. Over time, I intend to gradually extend the site only when there’s a need (and after I’ve amassed significantly more posts to leverage).

The theme is called Hephaestus, after the Greek god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals and metallurgy, and fire—concepts which I based the theme on (not too strongly, however). Along with the name, I also had a laundry-list of guiding principles which I wanted to follow—most of which are just personal standards I’ve adopted over the years for my line of work, others are just things I’ve always wanted to try out but never had the chance to impress upon clients to use for their projects owing to various business considerations.

I won’t ramble about that list today, but I will briefly mention that Hephaestus employs a fluid-width layout and has rounded corners, two design elements which I’ve used before but never together. The current implementation for rounded corners that I’m using is not one I’m particularly fond of—too many divs, but I’m stuck with it until browsers start implementing CSS3. Overall it’s been fun working on this theme. I would also like to disclose that Hephaestus is by no means an original design as it blatantly steals cues from many other sites (had a look at CNN lately?) whose design and UI patterns I’ve oft-used as inspiration for projects and now mashed together to create this piece.

As I said earlier, the theme is still half-baked. The archives and search page hasn’t been built yet, so don’t try searching through all of my two posts with the search form on top—you won’t find anything. I promise to tie up these loose-ends quickly and eventually Just a few more things to wrap up and I’ll release this WordPress theme for public download if there is enough interest for it.

Ten years of building my career exclusively on the internet, I’ve finally mustered enough momentum to publish my own weblog. I yielded to personal pride to offer my own back whence I’ve taken much from—the vast expanse (and collective hive-mind) of the massive blogsphere because honestly, you wouldn’t be too impressed by a so-called web developer who doesn’t have his own website right? Therefore, I think the time is about ripe for me to walk the talk, or in this case, blog the talk—before people call my bluff.

It took me bloody long enough to get here from the early starry-eyed dot-com days to evangelizing about W3C standards today (however I’m libertarian—not fanatical—and won’t bend over backwards to fit a square peg in a round hole—not without the right equipment anyway), ironically flogging blogs and wikis to various companies and organizations from Australia to backwater Malaysia. Despite which, I still feel all new and virginal about this whole blogging thing—it’s one thing to build blogs and websites for clients (and my wife, Michelle) in the last decade. It is another thing altogether to be rolling my own.

So, ready or not (mostly not, I’m still working on the site’s theme), this is it. My blogging début in no-less dramatic timing than the very first day of the new year. In time to come, I hope to share with you insights from my web and design-related field and maybe occasional vignettes from my life as a young parent thriving in Malaysia. Hopefully, in the process you might glean something useful from me and I’ll also get to know you, my soon-to-be subservient fans discerning reader, a little bit better.