Architecture is endlessly appealing to me. Houses, in particular, capture my imagination because they are so primal in their utility: They provide us with a safe place to sleep, eat, store food, and raise young’uns.
For the last 90 years in America, home architecture has been dominated by profiteering companies looking to churn out cheaper products for higher margins. Market demand and time constraints are generally at odds with innovation and creativity, and this is precisely why qualified architects are only responsible for a small fraction of American homes.
On one hand, this sucks because it means that most houses in America were conceived and built by people who truly don’t know a damn thing about the art of designing a home.
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As an important player in the Web software space, WordPress wields a powerful influence in the marketplace. When you’re in a position of such importance, it is your responsibility to purvey accurate information and to refrain from projecting ideologies and agendas on a market that is likely to take anything you say at face value.
My work with Thesis has placed me in a similar position, and I understand how much you can affect the psyche of your customers/users with just a few choice words. It’s powerful; it’s amazing; but most of all, it’s humbling.
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A few weeks ago, I started receiving tweets and emails from people who claimed that search results for my site were looking more like a pharmacy than a helpful Web resource. Of course, upon hearing such blasphemy, I immediately opened a new browser tab, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then started Googling myself…and if you think that is some NC-17 material, wait til you see what my search results looked like:
What you don’t see in the picture above is a hacked <title> tag for my home page, but that’s only because I fixed it before realizing I was going to write an article about these shenanigans. Suffice it to say that, before I caught the hack, my site looked more like the best damn antidepressant resource than the best damn blog on the planet. Enough of that, though—let’s dig a little deeper into the WordPress pharma hack and see what it’s all about. [click to continue…]
#I like to solve problems. At this point in my life, I’m focused on solving the fundamental problems of Web design and development through my business, DIYthemes, and my software, Thesis.
One of the most compelling things I’ve learned in the past year, however, is that it’s not good enough to crank out “sufficient” solutions to problems. Truly sustainable answers require a style of thinking that involves patience, perspective, skill, testing, and unbiased criticism. Additionally, it’s crucial to realize that the best solutions we can generate should be reflective of our own human nature—in other words, we must strive to make them as adaptable as we are.
Through my work on Thesis, I’ve begun to see all sorts of new connections that reveal the direction the Web is heading, and I know that I can use these insights to figure out better solutions to the problems I’m already tackling.
Recently, I sat down with Nick Reese from Art of Blog to talk about some of these insights and to share my thoughts heading into 2010. You can check out the original interview on Nick’s site, or you can click here to watch the video in HD on Pearsonified 
