Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category
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Names You Can Trust – Steve Krug
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010For a simple, and very useful, Web Design and Usability overview – “Don’t Make Me Think” is the first book to get.
I often suggest specific books, websites, and forums for my students to follow after class. I’ve decided to start a series of posts about these. There are some people who, when I see their name on something, I will always listen to – so this is my “Names you can trust” series.
Today’s name is: Steve Krug. Steve has written many articles and books that are a wonderful resource for web designers and developers. The first book I suggest for beginning web design students is “Don’t Make Me Think” (Amazon has it here).
You can see a sample from the book at http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/dialogbox/usability/
This book is small and an easy read (a perfect airplane book) but has a solid and clear way of introducing usability in web design. After reading his book even the most skittish newbie will have a solid sense of why usability matters and why it’s something that can be added into every design project. This is a good resource for anyone who is interested in how or why usability can be incorporated into design.
Need to scale video for a website?
Sunday, December 5th, 2010In going through my posts and trying to clean up tags and categories I came across a few posts I want to move back to the front again – re-post really. So, a few times a month I will add some comment and re-post some information. – like this…
Putting video on a website is more tedious than hard. There are resources for getting a video onto a page, post, or sidebar but you usually will need to know what the dimensions should be. If you have a large YouTube video that you want in a sidebar, you will need to scale it to keep the correct height/width relationship – if you don’t, you will get distortion.
Try this site – Proportioncalc
Adding a Twitter Feed
Friday, December 3rd, 2010Why I put a twitter feed on my site and a brief tutorial on how (as well as making it validate xhtml strict) –
So, I did it. I created a twitter account and put the feed on the main navigation page of my site. The question of course is WHY?
I have been thinking about how I could both make my site easier for me to update and make it more likely that I will actually post real content and no just throw in links (like I’ve been doing for 98% of the time I’ve been up). I decided I would use the twitter feed to add links as much as possible and would make creating actual posts something that would be at least a paragraph or two.
That’s why I did it – here’s how. If you are using WordPress as the underlying structure for your site (like I am), AND you have widgets available in the template you are using, then adding a tweets section will take you only a few minutes.
Step One – First go to twitter.com and create a new account. Create a tweet so you can see if it works when you add it to you site.
Step Two – I did a search for add twitter to wordpress and found a useful page at quickonlinetips.com. I originally chose Twitter Tools but found it was more than I needed and more of a headache to add. I ended up with the criminally simple Wickett Twitter Widget. If you want to install the plug-in, here is the easiest possible way, do this…
- Go to the plugins page on the backend/administrator side of your wordpress site
- Click the Add New button
- Search for what you want and click the link that says “install”
- Activate the plug-in
It’s literally that easy! I picked one that had no detailed settings page so I was able to add the feed directly into a widget area.
There is a catch! I have a site that uses a valid xhtml strict template. Adding this to my site made the validation cough up two errors. It’s a longer post for another day why this matters to me, but as it does I needed to fix it.
There is a solution! The error are written in a stunningly stupid way and make it seem like the code is missing closing tags – it’s not it’s missing the type attribute in the script tags. Just add type=”text/javascript” in the opening script tag(s) and it should validate fine.
CSS3 Media Queries
Sunday, November 7th, 2010Here are several links on a wonderful feature of CSS3. If you have not had a chance to look at Media Queries and you are either a CSS person or might be making mobile content, check it out.
Looking for decent (but not free) CSS templates?
Monday, October 18th, 2010There is a new one at Project Seven you should check out.
http://www.projectseven.com/products/templates/pagepacks/mirage/index.htm
On Image Maps and Alt Attributes
Friday, October 15th, 2010I am lucky enough to choose what I use in my design work and therefore can avoid using Image Maps on websites. The cons almost always outweigh the pros, though there are some unique cases where nothing else will really do the job. Recently I came across this link on this topic that seemed to be a pretty good overview with coherant examples.
Here it is
The most evil cookie
Thursday, August 5th, 2010I am not usually bothered by cookies and will delete them as I need to but the “special” flash cookies that are hidden from regular cookie control windows are really bugging me.
As fate would have it the lovely and talented Woody from Windows Secrets highlighted just this issue in his latest newsletter.
Here is the link – http://windowssecrets.com/2010/08/05/02-Eliminate-Flash-spawned-zombie-cookies
Try out simple CSS rules – on the w3Schools site
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010Are you curious about CSS? Are you daunted by the idea of setting up a page just to see what “repeat-x” does?
W3Schools.com have the site you need! Try the “Try it yourself buttons” on the CSS Backgrounds page for example.
From the Blog
- WordPress, I both love and hate you
Saturday, April 28th, 2012 - A Learning and Development Professional’s Continuing Education
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 - Photoshop CS6 Sneek Peek #3
Monday, February 13th, 2012