web design & usability

Web design tutorials

Tom Wright — Wed, 7 Mar 2007 14:22:44 -0500

I'm teaching a technical and professional writing course that includes a four-week unit on Web design. We obviously won't be able to go into great depth, but I think it's reasonable to expect the students, at the end of that time, to be familiar with basic design considerations and able to put up a simple Web page. Several tutorials have been mentioned on here, but I haven't seen anything lately. Has anyone been using anything that might be useful for this purpose? Tom

Best and Worst of Web 2.0

cel4145 — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:24:39 -0400

Wired News has published Web 2.0 Winners and Losers. Notably, MySpace is listed as a loser:

They say 100 million users can't be wrong. Well, can't they? Regardless of how popular MySpace is or how many bands, web celebs or stalkers it continues to empower and enable, the social networking site is about as pleasant to look at as last week's cat vomit. The user interface is clunky and counterintuitive. Advertising is ubiquitous and invasive. The garish backgrounds and animated images seem sucked from some terrible time portal that leads straight to the nascent web of 1995. Oh, and auto-launching audio widgets and video players? Don't get me started.

Get a grip, Wired. Web 2.0 is about how the sofware is used to connect people, not just what it looks like. I personally believe that the garish websites are no better than 80's New Wave fashion styles (yuck), and not much better than the early rush of Blogger themes, either. But it is a style that represents an evolution in website "fashion" within a very, very, very large community. Let's give it credit for being what some people like even if it doesn't agree with refined aesthetic values of website design.

Sustainable Design

cel4145 — Thu, 6 Apr 2006 10:15:37 -0400

It's always great when someone in the field creates a valuable teaching resource. Karl Stolley's Sustainable Web Design is an excellent introduction to desigining websites with XHTML and CSS. What I especially like about is that it begins early on with an introduction to markup languages. If writing teachers are going to teach XHTML/CSS in writing for the web and multimedia writing classes, I believe we need to also introduce our students to the general concept of markup languages to prepare them for using XML in the future.

Developing a Facebook/Myspace Bibliography

Bob — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:43:37 -0500

Hi Folks: I'm working with a group who is trying to look objectively at Facebook, Myspace and other social networks to find if there are meaningful lessons about their popularity which we could incorporate into electronic portfolio design for use in higher education. It might well turn out that these spaces are popular with students mainly because their "teachers" aren't there, but we're hopeful that there are some more objective lessons to take away. The first step in our project is to engage in a fairly complete literature survey. We're working on a bibliography, but I didn't want to pass up your collective knowledge -- does anyone know of scholarly work done/being done on Facebook and Myspace specifically that we should not miss?

Web 2.0: The new buzzword in Internet technology

cel4145 — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:36:34 -0400

If you haven't heard of it, you will: Web 2.0. It's exploding into conversations online at the moment. Is it a useful way of describing the way that the web is turning to a distributed environment where users push/pull/share content in communicative acts rather than just visiting static virtual spaces? Or is it just business hype?

from BusinessWeek It's A Whole New Web
MacManus and Porter 's Web 2.0 for Designers
Downes's What E-Learning 2.0 means To You
apophenia: Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization

To me, Web 2.0 is Tim Berners Lee's Semantic Web meets social software.

Open Source Web Design

Clancy — Thu, 1 Sep 2005 00:27:47 -0400

Anyone starting a weblog (or wanting to redesign one) should give Open Source Web Design a look-see. You can browse the designs by date, rating, and number of downloads. Now I'm itching to do a redesign...

Via digg.

Barton's Dissertation Defense

platypus matt — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 20:39:00 -0400

Greetings, humanoids. Today I successfully defended my dissertation, "Dissertations: Past, Present, and Future." Overall, I was pleased with my performance. I was able to pretty much include all but one of my major academic interests in the diss (copyrights, hackers, wikis, new tech, politics, etc.) Anyway, I thought some people might want to hear it, so I made an audio recording of the whole thing and will make it available for you to stream or download. I also have the original PowerPoint presentation here (zipped because of photos). You may be interested in the questions I got asked and some of their responses--I had two scientists present, and their takes on the issues were quite distinct from the English professors in attendance. You also hear Moxley making some "Moxleyisms," though I won't mention my favorites...I think you'll discover which ones I'm talking about if you give it a list! Finally, if you want to read the whole dissertation (though keep in mind it still needs revision), that's available as well. Three of the committee members want to see it again before it goes into the depository, so I have quite a bit of work left to do on it...I was told that this wasn't because it wasn't any good, but rather that they're so interested in my work that they insist on seeing the changes I make. ;-) For sanity's sake, I'll take their word for it!

Redneck Rucksacks

cel4145 — Tue, 1 Feb 2005 23:01:13 -0500

I'll agree with Street Tech:

I don't know what the designers of this site were smoking (moldy barn-hay, apparently), but this is one of the weirdest and most wonderful virtual storefronts I've seen in awhile. I'm not really sure what the connection is between hillbillies and high-tech gadget bags, but who cares?

This is one of those things that has to be experienced to understand, and I'm still not sure why I like it??? Be sure to try the various buttons (use the chain if you press the nerds button). Kudos to the designers at Sputnik Agency for their off-the-wall creative design.

Competition: "Born Digital 1: Illumination"

JohnWalter — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:02:13 -0500

The Institute for the Future of the Book has announced the competition "Born Digital 1: Illumination" which "calls for a reinvention of the illuminated manuscript." They're seeking submissions of a sample illuminated page that demonstrates "the unique possibilities of the digital medium while preserving the classic illuminative relationship between text and image." Grand prize is $1000.

Computers and Composition Special Issue: Multimedia Composition

DaveB — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 05:04:38 -0500

Computers and Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue.

Multimedia Composition: Pedagogies, Production, Possibilities

Guest-edited by David Blakesley and Karl Stolley
Deadline for submissions is May 1, 2005.

Multimedia composition is the craft of inventing, shaping, producing, and delivering text, audio, video, and images purposefully. As a craft (or art), it is a set of skilled practices for integrating content that may appear in various forms—words, sound, moving and still images, even physical objects—all in the interest of communicating, entertaining, or persuading. Producing multimedia used to be the sole province of high-end specialists with expensive technologies. Now, however, the creators of content—authors, designers, artists, musicians—are closer than ever to the means of delivering rich multimedia content to audiences. New technologies have made it possible for people who aren't technical specialists or professionals to compose multimedia. Yet the technical challenges remain significant. The tangible incentives seem disproportionate to our desire for composing and disseminating multimedia. We have yet to articulate a rich theoretical basis that would rationalize teaching multimedia as a new, if not primary, form of composition.

Rhetcomp.com redesign

mattlevy — Sat, 9 Oct 2004 23:11:11 -0400

I have rewritten rhetcomp.com in order to speed up its load time. I would very much appreciate any feedback. For instance, I would like to know if it is still working on all up to date browsers. Thanks and Best, Matthew Levy

Should web usability standards be applied to blogs and wikis?

shale — Thu, 7 Oct 2004 23:07:48 -0400

Clancy's blog entry on Heather James' entry on Wiki navigation (which referred to Mark Hurst's articles on web navigation and was trackbacked to a discussion by Randy Brown, to which I added a nostalgic comment) started me thinking about whether or not we should apply to blogs and wikis the usability standards derived from observing web page users.

Moving Toward Increased Usability with Drupal

cel4145 — Tue, 5 Oct 2004 18:43:02 -0400

Earlier today, I posted about Jeffrey Veen's Making A Better Open Source CMS to drupal.org. In response, Dries has offered 4 hours of his development time for implementing Veen's suggestions for every one hour of consultancy Veen and/or his company spends in reviewing Drupal. This would be good for Drupal users in general, including those of us on Kairosnews. So the question is whether or not this was just an academic critique, or is Veen really interested in improving open source CMS's?

Heather James on Wikis and Usability

Clancy — Tue, 5 Oct 2004 16:18:43 -0400

Heather James addresses the question that many wiki newbies have when they encounter a wiki, a question I too posed a little over a year ago: Once you get to a wiki, what do you do? How do you get around? James has a clear explanation supported by annotations of a couple of articles on usability. What she says makes sense: The usefulness of hierarchical navigation is being called into question because users often don't find the information they're looking for by following the navigation. (Come to think of it, I also mused about this once.) Users often find a given web site by using a search engine, and they don't actually start out by going to the main page and finding the information they want; the search engine takes them directly to the information. As more sites use databases and have their own search tools, it's becoming more common to use those rather than navigation menus. For those whose research interests include usability, this might be a good topic for a think-aloud protocol/non-participant observation usability study. Has anyone done such a usability study of wikis using participants?

CFP: Rhetorically Rethinking Usability

Clancy — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 20:08:08 -0400

Via TechRhet comes this call for papers:

The editors of Rhetorically Rethinking Usability: Theories, Practices, and Methodologies are seeking 15-25 page articles for a collection discussing how usability studies have impacted theory and practice in writing and English studies.

The editors invite submissions from a wide range of topic areas and perspectives. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, usability and its relationship to:

Rhetorical situatedness

Writing practices

Pedagogical/Teaching practices

Distance learning

Hybrid/blended classes

Learning objects

Writing software

Access issues, including language, format, and/or media

Adoption/adaptation of technologies

Critical literacies

Assessment methodologies

Research practices, theories, and methods

Redefining usability and its relationship to rhetoric/writing

Course Design

Basic Web Design

cel4145 — Wed, 1 Sep 2004 09:32:09 -0400

Peter Mentzer over at Wooble Lab has created an excellent Basic Web Design tutorial. It's process oriented and includes Video Demo/Lectures on using Dreamweaver. I highly recommend this resource if you are introducing students to basic web design through Dreamweaver in your classes. Since the course is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0, you can copy the content into your course and maintain mirrors of the videos on your site (attribution and license notice required, of course).

Technology-Training Survey for a Dissertation

rhet — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 12:09:10 -0500

I am looking for participants to help me with survey responses for my dissertation. The online survey asks questions regarding technology training for graduate students, faculty, and new teachers. It also asks how graduate programs incorporate/implement (or not) venues and opportunities for graduate students and new teachers to learn how to use digital technology in the composition classroom. The survey can take as little as 10 minutes (depending on whether you elaborate on your responses) or as long as 30 minutes. Of course elaboration in the text-boxes would be most helpful. Thank you for your help. I am open to any feedback you may offer. Please drop me a line with questions/suggestions: rhet@comcast.net

The survey is located here: Technology Survey
Thank you all for your help and support. Do not forget to click the "SUBMIT" button at the end of the survey.

Tony Atkins
Department of English
Ball State University

Call for Papers: Enculturation

Clancy — Sat, 6 Mar 2004 19:23:00 -0500

Enculturation has come out with a new issue fairly recently (well, since the last time I checked :)). The theme of the special issue is "Rhetoric/Composition: Intersections/Impasses/Differends." I'm not crazy about the three-pop-ups design, or the fact that in the table of contents, we only see authors' names and not titles, but there I go being picky. The issue, as the editors' introduction explains, is about the terms "rhetoric" and "composition"--is "rhetoric" subsumed under "composition"? What are the intersections? Or is rhetoric, as Krista Ratcliffe suggests in her article, "just hiding out"? The editors ask us to continue the conversation:

What Makes a Website Credible? A Two-Week Learning Module

Clancy — Sat, 13 Dec 2003 01:51:00 -0500

BJ Fogg of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University has created a learning module for evaluating the credibility of web sites:

Learning objectives
In this module students will:
• Learn the meaning of credibility and captology – and how they relate to each other.
• Understand why designing websites for credibility is important.
• Become familiar with guidelines for credible website design.
• Learn about research insights relating to Web credibility.

ReUSEIT

cel4145 — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 00:43:00 -0500

The first time I visited Jakob Nielsen's useit.com:useable information technology I remember being impressed with the content, but not with the display. Couldn't a web guru offer a little more eye candy?

Well, seems like I'm not the only one. In the spirit of Zen Gardens, usability fans have put their CSS talents to use in designing a new CSS for Nielsen's site. The winner will be announced tomorrow, and you can see the contestants' contributions. Below is my favorite design, Minimal Use

CFP: IEEE-PCS

Clancy — Sun, 26 Oct 2003 11:05:00 -0500

The deadline for submissions to the Professional Communication Society conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is 15 January 2004. The call for papers is pretty open-ended, but gives examples of topics that fit the conference:

• Planning and implementing content management: Roads traveled and lessons learned

• Adapting rhetorical strategies and document design for international audiences

Steal This Button

cel4145 — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 00:58:00 -0400

This Drupal post displaying an 80x15 Drupal button

sent me to Steal These Buttons, a very large collection of 80x15 buttons. It got me motivated to make one for Kairosnews:

stock.xchng - the leading free stock photo site

cel4145 — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:25:00 -0400

Good resource for web designers looking for royalty free images:

Usability of Wikis

Clancy — Mon, 23 Jun 2003 17:38:00 -0400

One reason I haven't as yet taken an active role in Wiki-ing is that I find Wikis not to be very usable. The only one that is, to me, intuitive is Wikipedia, but Matt's is pretty good too.

CSS: Zen Garden

cel4145 — Thu, 5 Jun 2003 11:11:03 -0400

Just posted this to cyberdash and thought a few people here might be interested, if for no other reason than to see a wide look at the creative range of CSS:

Here's an interesting look at CSS design. Found it through urlgreyhot's post about his submission acceptance to Zen Garden, a CSS design challenge for web designers.

From Zen Garden:

The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external .css file. Yes, really.

Zen Garden goes on to challenge web designers to download the main page and the accompanying CSS file, and, without modifing the HTML, create a new style sheet which demonstrates the creative range of CSS. There are a number of submissions already, each an impressive design skin for the Zen Garden home page. Here are a few:

Google in lieu of site navigation

Clancy — Tue, 20 May 2003 11:29:42 -0400

Have you ever, when on a big Web site (like a university's homepage), been looking for a certain department's page, found the navigation, departmental directory, site map, and search capability on the site to be terrible, and have you at that point decided to just Google it? Or are you at the point at which you Google it in the first place? I've been thinking about the use of Google as a supplement or substitute for time-consuming site navigation. If everyone used Google in such a way, it wouldn't seem that we'd need to pay Web designers and technical communicators, would we? We wouldn't need site navigation at all.

The Uber-WYSIWYG: Sketching a Working Web Site

EMason — Mon, 12 May 2003 18:40:58 -0400

This story from Wired News tells of a project to allow users to create functioning web site prototypes using a graphics tablet or mouse without the need for programming. The project is called Denim and is part of the work of the Group for User Interface Research at UC Berkeley. There's a nice video demo of how it works available at the Denim site and an example of a site sketched in Denim, but more importantly, there's a download available if you want to try it out.

Also associated with this group is the Open Prototyping project, which is an open source environment for developing user interfaces.

ARRG! My retinas are burning!!!!

cel4145 — Fri, 18 Apr 2003 14:05:24 -0400

This post is from a student in my writing about digital culture and electronic communication class. Right now, they are working on creating their own websites, and I thought the Killer Japanese Seizure Robots was a great example, taken to the extreme, of what not to do.

And yes, I agree with them. I think my retinas would burn if I looked at the robots for too long :)

The Psychology of Navigation

cel4145 — Fri, 17 Jan 2003 11:52:20 -0500

Jesse James Garrett explains that

The visual treatment of the link can communicate quite a bit about its content. Bold and red shout,

Usabilty Testing -- Quick Tips for Designing Tests

Dennis G. Jerz — Tue, 31 Dec 2002 09:41:19 -0500
Usability Testing: Quick Tips for Designing Tests
The following excerpt shows how not to conduct a usability test: "I've worked hard on this document; can you help me meet my deadline?
Please tell me what you like about it -- I'll feel so affirmed and flattered.
If you get stuck, or hesitate, I will tell you what to do, so we can get through this testing faster.
If you start making any serious suggestions, my face will cloud over with a look of pain, since I don't want to hear anything but praise."
The document contains eight tips I've collected after watching my technical writing students. Any suggestions? -- Dennis G. Jerz

Library Terms Evaluated in Usability Tests and Other Studies

cel4145 — Sat, 28 Dec 2002 11:19:40 -0500
John Kupersmith, a reference librarian with the University of California Berkeley, has put together a table of usability studies of library websites. In his best practices for libraries, Kupersmith suggests that libraries "emphasize alternatives to the library catalog, by prominently placing links such as Find Articles."

I'm wondering if we should be moving away from discipline specific jargon in the name of usability? While it certainly might make the web resources slightly easier to use, at the same time, users will not learn the basic terminology of the discourse community. On the other hand, it's exciting to see that web usability concerns are creating a discourse space which mediates barriers to entry by those unfamiliar with the terminology of a specific discourse.

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002

Dennis G. Jerz — Mon, 23 Dec 2002 08:03:05 -0500
Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002
"As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002." -- Jakob Nielsen

Quibble: Stating that "websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users" is misleading, since none of the "mistakes" is really new. Still, I did particularly like Nielsen's complaint about companies that place marketing propaganda in FAQ pages.

Professional usability testing and return on investment

Dennis G. Jerz — Mon, 23 Dec 2002 08:02:36 -0500
Does anybody out there teach usability testing? Does this community of webloggers and academics need to know about the difference between performing usability testing and simply asking users what they think about a web page?

Professional Usabilty Engineers vs. Guru Seminars (Charles L. Mauro)
"Professional usability engineering and testing is a well-established development discipline that has been used extensively to create some of our most successful military and commercial systems. With the maturation of the web as a delivery model for information and E-Commerce, the formal science of usability will become increasingly important. This paper discusses the return on investment (ROI) implications of integrating formal usability testing methods into web development projects.

Muggles, Programmers, and Usability

mecran01 — Wed, 11 Dec 2002 16:03:48 -0500
Mark Bernstein responds to Jakob "useit.com" Neilsen's typically conservative rant about web design comparing users to the "muggles" of Harry Potter's world.
Mark Bernstein: Dec0201 First, inconvenience and evil are not indistinguishable. Poor usability is chiefly a matter of inconvenience: making things take a little longer, making users take unnecessary steps. It's not nice, but there are worse things. Let's keep some perspective.
More substantially, conforming to 'expected behavior' is not the mark of a varied, rich, and sophisticated intellectual life. The urge to insist that expressive media conform to the imperatives of expectation and efficiency has had a sorry history in the past century or so. Usability is nice, but conformity is conformity.
Finally, to regard users as Muggles is, I think, fundamentally wrong. In fact, Rowling's "ethical" wizards are, if you take them seriously, mere cowards. Why do they hide magic from the Muggles? Yes, some Muggles are small-minded, mean, ignorant, and superstitious: does this relieve the ethical wizard from an obligation to treat muggles with decent respect? Where were the ethical Wizards in 1938-45? What are they doing about AIDS, global warming, hunger?
Bernstein is doing a lot of writing about putting the "architecture" back into "information architecture." Good stuff.

Click Here or Full Story

cel4145 — Thu, 5 Dec 2002 16:07:36 -0500
Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman has a couple of posts this week which discuss common linking practices and usability.

In 'Click here': Needless words, Ashby-Kuhlman suggests that the "click here" link is an archaic link expression still used by major media sites that had its place when the web was young, but no longer:

Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components

cel4145 — Thu, 19 Sep 2002 20:29:03 -0400
FLASHVOODOO.COM has posted a list of three Flash media WYSIWYGs. I particularly liked the first two and was imagining that it would be great to have these applications built into some courseware platforms, such as the discussion board input fields in Blackboard. Or into text input fields on OWLs for students to submit their texts.

According to the post, Flash MX is enabling more advanced web applications. If this is the just the first examples of the types of apps that Flash MX will enable, I look forward to seeing where it takes the web in the next year or two.

99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete

cel4145 — Thu, 5 Sep 2002 12:44:52 -0400
Here's a lengthy article advocating W3C compliance in web design, while pointing out that sloppy html coding and IE only designs have made most of the web noncompliant.

My only concern about the piece is that it equally condemns IE and Mozilla together. Yet, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, Mozilla is much closer to W3C standards than IE. And, the Mozilla developers are working hard toward reaching comliance with every new release. Meanwhile, it behooves Microsoft not to ever completely adopt W3C standards as long as they hold the dominant market share.

Maybe designers should adopt a Mozilla/Netscape only attitude, instead of IE only.

Web Site Design

cel4145 — Mon, 19 Aug 2002 10:51:51 -0400
BTexact Technologies has an indepth web design tutorial which focuses not on html, but rather usabilty concerns. The tutorial covers a wide range of topics such as navigation bars, backgrounds and images, text input forms, and multimedia.

Affordances, Conventions and Design

cel4145 — Tue, 13 Aug 2002 20:23:40 -0400
I'm intrigued by Don Norman's two essays defining "affordances, " "conventions" and "perceived affordances" in graphical usability design. What caught my attention is that Norman explains how a designer must take into account not only the physical constraints during design, but also the cultural conventions that determine what actions users perceive that they may take.

Affordances and Design

Affordance, Conventions and Design

Making the Physical Environment Interactive

cel4145 — Tue, 6 Aug 2002 21:54:13 -0400
In his newest Alertbox post, Jakob Nielsen writes that "tiny motors and sensors will make physical objects interactive and create a renaissance for gestural user interfaces. As interface design moves from the screen to the material world, the need for simple, easy to use designs will only increase."

Now, personally I think Nielsen is reaching here, for speech recognition will be the next thing in computer interface, but maybe those of you have seen Spielberg's Minority Report will disagree (incidentally, there's an interesting discussion at BoingBoing--The UI in Minority Report is goofy).

3-D Web Standards

JamesInman — Thu, 25 Jul 2002 02:08:55 -0400
From ZDNet UK: Industry standards for 3-D on the Internet are close to international agreement, with the release of a working draft for the key specification.

Full story.

Editor's Note: The new language will be called X3D, extensible markup language, which "could follow VRML 97 in becoming an ISO standard by 2004." What do Kairosnews readers think? Some people love the bells and whistles; others can't stand them. It seems Flash and Shockwave were It for a while, but then people got annoyed and clicked on "Skip Intro." Is it going to take broadband for folks to get into fancy 3D graphics?

Usability, Conferences, and GUI's

cel4145 — Wed, 17 Jul 2002 03:57:00 -0400
Since I didn't find any news which caught my eye this morning, I thought I'd share a couple of articles from my current online reading interest: the subject of usability.

The first piece is Attendee-Centered Conference Design by Meg Hourihan, longtime blogger (see megnut.com) and co-creator of Blogger. Meg discusses her ideas about "User-Centered Conference Design" based on her experience as a presenter.

In AskTog: First Principles, human interaction designer Bruce Tognazzini discusses basic usability principles for GUI design. Since one might see a web page is an extension of the GUI through the browser, merging the user's desktop with an interface created by someone else, the principles here seem useful for thinking about constructing web sites as well.

User Empowerment and the Fun Factor

Clancy — Thu, 11 Jul 2002 21:12:04 -0400
"Summary: Designs that engage and empower users increase their enjoyment and encourage them to explore websites in-depth. Once we achieve ease of use, we'll need additional usability methods to further strengthen joy of use."

Joy of use. What do Kairosnews readers think of this? Not just Jakob Nielsen's article, but the general idea of a digital aesthetic. Do you think graphic design will ever really get into the canon of fine art? That anyone will get Stendhal syndrome by looking at a beautiful image on a screen?

From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for July 7, 2002.

House Makes Resolutions in XML

cel4145 — Thu, 4 Jul 2002 17:44:48 -0400
ITtoolbox Security reports that the House of Representatives is moving to code bills in XML beginning the first of 2003. Their explanation of why this is significant is exactly why XML was created: "Current House output is searchable only by bill numbers or keywords, but in XML it would be searchable by titles, names, tables, subheadings and other components. A folder of XML documents essentially becomes a database searchable by browser. "

More information, as well as sample government xml files, available at xml.house.gov.

Improving Web Page Loading

cel4145 — Sun, 23 Jun 2002 21:00:03 -0400
Speaking on the subject of usability, this essay from IBM's website explains that nesting tables unnecessarily can affect the speed at which a page is rendered and what is rendered first. Some good tips here for web designers.

Trust Is in the Details

cel4145 — Sat, 22 Jun 2002 09:52:08 -0400
From Cyberatlas:

"Web site designers take heed: Internet users are paying attention to the details. A study of 1,649 online users, primarily from the United States and Finland, conducted by Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and sponsored by Makovsky & Company, revealed that little things, such as misspellings, could be detrimental to a site's credibility."

Web Accessiblog

cel4145 — Fri, 14 Jun 2002 07:57:22 -0400
Joe Clark's "Weblog of articles and sites dealing with the topic of Web accessibility": http://www.joeclark.org/accessiblog/

Clark also has a blog of his writing/publishing process for his book, Building Accessible Websites.

Reading McLuhan

jrice — Fri, 3 May 2002 09:21:50 -0400
From the article by Melanie McBride: "If there's a message of the 'for dummies' age it's that nothing is beyond our grasp. And our desire to believe this is reinforced by trends like usability, which privilege economy over elucidation. No one anticipated it all better than Marshall McLuhan, who whittled big insights into sound bites in order to engage an audience beyond the lecture halls of the University of Toronto [. . .]"

http://www.mindjack.com/feature/mcluhan.html

Text-friendly Authoring

mecran01 — Fri, 31 Aug 2001 01:35:34 -0400
Let me start by trying to dispel a common misunderstanding. "Text-friendly authoring" isn't in the least about eviscerating your web documents by cutting out all the other media such as images, sound, executable code etc. On the contrary: the intention is to use the appropriate media for each purpose, and to use them to the full; but to avoid those other media getting in the way for readers who cannot use them. Nor is it about creating a complete additional text-only version of your site: that might, very occasionally, be justified, but I don't recall meeting a situation where I would have chosen that approach myself, and have reviewed quite a number of examples of other authors doing this where I came to the conclusion that their approach had been misguided [1].

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/

Web Publishing with XML

mecran01 — Mon, 7 May 2001 23:53:33 -0400
Online media conferences are rife with talk of XML. Industry pundits proclaim how well it slices, dices and tenderizes your cherished Web sites. The term adorns headlines in all the weekly rags on the boss's desk, but no one can figure out how to translate the gloss into something of substance for your online presence. It seems to be everything to everyone -- but what is it?

Online Journalism Review