Or rather, design is not just a pretty picture.

It’s direction. It’s credibility establishment. It’s communication. And it initializes all functionality on the site by getting users to take action. — to click, to scroll, to fill out a form, or purchase a product. Without a well-thought-out design, it doesn’t matter how robust and bullet-proof the back-end functionality is; users will never make it far enough to experience any of the programming features. This, coupled with the fact that your site’s design is your business’ first impression, makes design one of the most important features of your online presence.

Read on to find out how good design initiates user action.

The latest updates to the Official Santana iPhone Application have been submitted to Apple, so if you haven’t downloaded this killer app to your iPhone or iPod Touch yet, now’s your chance! The app features videos and exclusive content that you can’t get on the Santana.com web site. It’s free and it’s a must-have for [...]

Franklin + Gower, a Los Angeles-based clothier, came to us looking for solutions, both design and e-commerce. The client already had a logo — as well as design sensibility and a sense of the look & feel they were going for. The rest, as they say, is GUI history. Implementing lots of slick AJAX and [...]

So I wrote an iPhone application for a client using v2.2.1 of the iPhone SDK. (The client did not want to go OS v3.0 yet.) I needed to give a user the capability of taking and uploading a picture with the built-in camera or uploading a picture from the photo library on the phone. Seems [...]

About a month ago, WebSight Design released our first iPhone application, (http://itunes.com/app/Santana), for the musician Carlos Santana. I thought it might be interesting and maybe even helpful for others iPhone developers if I listed some of my experiences with building this application. I figure I would describe the application (features, etc…), and illustrate some of [...]

I was really excited by the news of the new iPhone OS v3.0 announced last week. Copy-and-Paste aside, there are a lot of less-talked-about features that I find pretty cool and crucial to the advancement of the platform:
Peer-to-Peer Connectivity over Bluetooth
This is a feature that I thought seemed so obvious to have baked in. With [...]

I’ve recently *really* been getting into Cocoa development for both the MacOSX and the iPhone. Can I just say that Cocoa, (especially Cocoa Touch), ROCKS!!! I am in the middle of building a soon-to-be-published app for the Apple App Store. I forgot how much I loved writing C code. Objective-C is really a nice, simple [...]

To add a chrooted FTP user outside of Plesk properly, you need to:
Create the user with the home directory as the root of what they can access
Give the user a password
Make their primary group psacln
Add them to the psaserv group as well
# useradd username -d /var/www/html/website/slideshow/
# passwd username
Enter new password for username
# usermod -g psacln [...]

I ran into an issue today on an Ubuntu server running Apache 2 where the server already had an SSL certificate for ‘www.domain.com’ and the client wanted to add a second one for ’sub.domain.com’.  I added a new IP to the server, set up the virtual site, and generated the CSR and ordered and installed the cert [...]

At WebSight Design we try to remain technology-agnostic. (The right tool or language for the job.) Having said that, we are primarily a PHP shop. However, with the launch of the Google App Engine, we’ve been looking seriously at Python. In recent years, I have become a big fan of development frameworks so to aide [...]