Expect to be hearing a lot about this in the future.

The latest buzz is that Flash goes HTML5 i.e. the work done in Flash can be imported to HTML5 using the new Creative Suite called Flash CS6 that will work on iPad and iPhone as well as Android and it will also support Windows 8.

A year or so ago, pundits were predicting the death of Flash. That seems unlikely to be the case now. The devil, of course, is in the details. Expect a lot of experimentation over the next few months.

Flash CS6 uses the CreateJS open source framework for the output of animations in Flash. A Flash animation can be exported to the CreateJS framework working within the Canvas element of HTML5 which is being called as the Toolkit for CreateJS. It will help to smooth the transition to the world of JavaScript from ActionScript development. It is thus being predicted that HTML5 has a great future in the world of web development and Web designing.

The New York Times,  the newspaper of all newspapers, chose St. Patrick’s Day to embark on its second attempt to charge for its online content. In Canada, the paywall went into effect March 17. For the rest of the world, the wall goes up March 28.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger said the new digital subscriptions were “an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform.”

The Times has tried to charge for content before. That experiment, known as TimesSelect, proved a bruising lesson for The Grey Lady. Far from making money, the move largely withdrew the paper from online conversations, as bloggers and other opinion makers stopped linking to and writing about stories behind the paywall. The Times quit TimesSelect less than two years later.

If The Times is hoping that things turn out differently this time, it’s going to need an overflowing cupful of St Patrick’s blessings. Felix Salmon in Wired Magazine unpacked the whole subscription deal, and after doing some back-of-the-envelope math, pronounced the whole thing “weird.” Not to mention expensive.

The New York Times paywall cost $40 million to build.

Subscriptions are complex. Your first 20 stories per month are free. As are stories that are linked from off site, such as Facebook, blogs, etc. After that the subscription fee kicks in: $15 per month for unlimited Web access, more if you want to use the smartphone and/or iPhone apps.

“So by my back-of-the-envelope math, the paywall won’t even cover its own development costs for a good two years, and beyond that will never generate enough money to really make a difference to NYTCo revenues,” Salmon said.

But that, in a nutshell, is the fragile state of the journalism world. Even the very best of the very best must make more money from their online ventures. Even if a solid revenue model is not exactly obvious, nor particularly profitable, something must be done to battle the long-term trends, which are clear — revenue from print advertising is falling and unlikely to reverse course; something must cover the shortfalls. If not the Web, then what?

The newspaper world is watching with a sharp eye. Because like California, and the canary in the coal mine, the way of The New York Times foreshadows the direction of the industry as whole.

An Oldie but Goodie from Mr Nielsen: Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

BONUS LINK: Web Pages That Suck

DOUBLE BONUS: Worst Websites of 2010

Wednesday’s site of the day: clientsfromhell.net.

It’s true. We all have our moments, designers and clients alike. Clients tend to want “unprofessional” solutions, like flying text and cutesy animated gifs, while designers often suggest overly elaborate answers to simple design challenges.

But in reading through Clients From Hell, it’s surprising that none of those anecdotes come anywhere close to the horror stories I’ve heard from clients about designers. Those tales are truly stunning.

One recent example: A friend in Thailand last year hired an expat-run Web design shop to build his company’s e-commerce site. After months — months! — of delays, the site still doesn’t work. And the company now wants to bill additional hours to “fix” the problems.

Holy Mackerel!

Or how about designers that go AWOL a week before launch date. Or call their clients vulgar names and insult them to their face.

Yet still there is no http://webdesignersfromhell.net/.

Have you had any particularly egregious run-ins with Web designers?

I can build the Web site, as long as you promise not to ask for flying text.

The average restaurant could probably boost its profits by 20 to 30 percent through better menu design. Maybe even more.

The objective of menu design, of course, is to steer diners away from low-profit dishes and toward higher earning ones. Even if you’re not a restaurant owner — or a menu creator — it’s easy to understand how smart design choices can boost the bottom line.

Good and bad design is not just limited to restaurant menus, however. Smart creative is no less important when it comes to logos, business cards or Web site designs. But in instances of the latter, good and bad design choices are not always as easy to quantify. Their effects, however, are no less profound.

Anatomy of a restaurant menu: the good, the bad and the profitable.

Chris Lake at E Consultancy offers up a stellar list of 25 Web design tragedies. With verve! Some obvious ones:

1. Autosound

2. Popups

Some less obvious:

8. Poor scent trails. Hey, I just want my questions answered, ok? If I can’t find things easily and quickly then I will look elsewhere. Your job is to help people to sniff out the information they need. This is where optimisation and testing comes in.

9. Key information is AWOL. I visited the Hoxton Hotel website recently to find out how much it costs to stay there. After a couple of minutes of hunting around I realised that there were no details on room rates (well, I couldn’t find any). It’s bizarre. Just for the record, there is no way I will click a ‘Book A Room’ button just to see how much a hotel room costs. I’ll just book with The Zetter instead. Make sure the basics are all in place.

And my personal favorite, Number 11!

11. Too much flashing, scrolling shit. If I’m browsing the internet then it’s usually a good sign that I’m not in a nightclub, which is the only environment where I personally tolerate lots of flashing lights. Yes, it can grab the attention, but not in a good way. It smacks of desperation and attention seeking, and is incredibly annoying. There is one notable exception to this rule, which is so crazy and personality-driven that it’s hard to dislike!

If you have a Web site, and you are serious about its success, you should read the whole list.

Closely.

Twice.

Because not only is it funny and well-written, it will save you a stack of cash.

In an article about iPad usability, Jakob Neilsen says this:

For more than a decade, when we ask users for their first impression of (desktop) websites, the most frequently-used word has been “busy.” In contrast, the first impression of many iPad apps is “beautiful.”

Busy, in case you haven’t noticed, is bad. It’s confusing. Unfocused. And leaves the user without a clear idea of where to concentrate his or her attention. E-commerce designers discovered long ago that 2-column Web page designs produced significantly more sales than 3-column designs. Eye-tracking studies, which suggest that viewers tend to ignore the third column anyway, reinforce this notion. Far from giving users more information, junking up the page with every last tidbit of information is not only wasteful, it’s almost guaranteed to drive users away with a bomb cloud of information overload. That’s not what you want.

The Web site for Pagoda Rocks Boutique Guesthouse in Sihanoukville recently launched. The word guesthouse often carries budget connotations. But Pagoda Rocks is far more an upmarket  get-away than a mid-range flop-house. Many of the guesthouse rooms are actually standalone bungalows, with air-con, hot water and ocean views.

From a Web design standpoint, I riffed a lot on what the guesthouse’s local print designer had done, and used a little jQuery for nifty photo presentation. Like every Web site, it’s still a work in progress, but so far, it’s coming together nicely.

Visit: Pagoda Rocks Boutique Guesthouse

This week’s simple wisdom from Jakob Neilsen, godfather of Web usability:

A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait.

Preach it, brother.