+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 3, July 13, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 3 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/ New links in these categories: 01: ACCESSIBILITY. 02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: COLOR. 04: DREAMWEAVER. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS. 12: TOOLS. 13: USABILITY. 14: XML. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Forms and interaction By Joe Clark "Without doing anything special at all, typical forms are not very inaccessible. The additions you can make to bring forms up to spec are not onerous." http://joeclark.org/book/sashay/serialization/Chapter12.html Forms and Fields By Peter Rainger "All fields need to be labeled with the text very close to the actual field. Try to match the tab order to the visual layout if possible, but make sure the tabbing order is logical. Forms are most easily presented as stacked fields in a vertical column with the text labels to the left." http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/precept4_b.html Scripts and Applets By Peter Rainger "Provide a means to alternative content (for example the NOSCRIPT tag)." http://www.techdis.ac.uk/seven/precept4_d.html When The Americans With Disabilities Act Goes Online: Application of The ADA to The Internet and the Worldwide Web Position Paper National Council on Disability Lex Frieden, Chairperson "This paper analyzes and answers the critical question: Does the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) apply to commercial and other private sector Web sites, and if so, what does it require." http://www.ncd.gov/newsroom/publications/adainternet.html RNIB brings UK's first action over site accessibility By Jonathan Webdale "The Royal National Institute for the Blind is bringing the UK's first case against companies under the Disability Discrimination Act for failing to make their Web sites accessible to people with visual impairments." http://www.nma.co.uk/nma/story.asp?id=242716 92 Accessibility Audits By Tina Holmboe Tina Holmboe has written her experience with a massive Sweedish government website audit during spring 2003. In the resluts section of her report she summarizes, "It should not come as a surprise to learn that the overall accessibility of government agency websites is abysmal." http://tinyurl.com/g7n4 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Confessions of a CSS convert By Joseph Mathew "It had started as a whim. I needed a new website. It was quite sometime since my first one had died peacefully. Actually, it wasn't that bad while it lasted but neglect and my constant juggling of ongoing projects took its toll. Like everything else in life, things tend to get old. This was going to be different..." http://www.localforeigner.com/index.html About the title pictures By Haiko Hebig. Haiko Hebig demonstrates a clever use of the overflow: hidden property on an an image that reveals more or less of itself based on the width of the browser window. The technique works in Gecko, Opera 7 and IE6. http://www.hebig.org/blog/titlepic.php Fancy Paragraphs With CSS By Nigel Peck "Long pages of text look dull. Often users don't want to trudge through them, and all the time you spent carefully crafting those sentences goes to waste. But with just a few simple CSS tricks we'll discuss here, you can break your pages up so they don't seem as daunting. Even better, you only have to write the code once -- and then you can re-use it across your site as many times as you like." http://tinyurl.com/gjq6 Force Specific Content to Print in Landscape Orientation By Brett Merkey "This handy trick works in IE5.5/Win and newer. It assumes that the default printer orientation is portrait." http://tinyurl.com/gjwh +03: COLOR. Thinking about Web Aesthetics By Lynda Weinman "Lynda Weinman outlines what she sees as the essentials to good web design. She will guide you through color themes, typography, layout design and animation." http://tinyurl.com/fboa +04: DREAMWEAVER. Customizing the Site Window in Dreamweaver By Kim Cavanaugh "Sometimes you need more information at your fingertips than Dreamweaver provides on its own in the Site window. This tutorial shows how to customize the look of the Site columns in the Site window to meet your own needs and the needs of a particular site." http://tinyurl.com/gjx5 dreamweaver-templates By Ian Bicking "These are a few scripts to manipulate Dreamweaver templates from the command line (without Dreamweaver). I made these so I could work with people who use Dreamweaver, without having to purchase or use it myself. These could also potentially be useful for integrating CGI scripts with the over-all look of a site designed with Dreamweaver. They are licensed under the GPL." http://www.colorstudy.com/software/dwt/ +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 'Concurrent' vs. 'Retrospective' Comments By Bob Bailey "There are two ways to have test participants provide verbal observations for testers. They can report incidents when they happen (concurrent), or they can report observations after having completed all tasks (retrospective)..." http://tinyurl.com/fttg +06: EVENTS. User Experience Week August 18-21, 2003 Washington, D.C. U.S.A. http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2003/wdc.php User Interface 8 Conference October 13-16, 2003 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://www.uiconf.com/8/index.html Learning Producer Conference & Expo 2003 November 12-14, 2003 San Francisco, California, U.S.A. http://tinyurl.com/fv2h +07: FLASH. The Problem With Flash... By D. Keith Robinson "The problem here is that, while Flash may be seen as more professional or of higher quality than more simple HTML based sites, the drawbacks in using flash for many of these sites, in the long run, outweigh that perceived quality." http://tinyurl.com/gfcd +08: MISCELLANEOUS. The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams By Jesse James Garrett "It's an attempt to provide a holistic view of web teams, and help web teams figure out how the competencies relate, and perhaps which competencies they lack." http://tinyurl.com/gjptÊ Stakeholder interviews as knowledge mapping By James Robertson "Stakeholder interviews are a very effective way of gaining an understanding of an organisation, and can be considered a form of 'knowledge mapping'" http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_interviews/index.html Achieving Project Management Balance By George Spafford "There are many factors that go into a successful project. So many, in fact, that no single factor alone makes projects successful." http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/cio/article.php/2230551 +09: NAVIGATION. Mystery Meat Navigation By Vincent Flanders "There's a new style of confusing navigation that is becoming popular and it's based on Javascript rollovers and it's confusing and risks alienating your customers." http://www.fixingyourwebsite.com/mysterymeat.html +10: PHP. SauSurePay By Jon T Stokkeland "A PHP Class with functions for submitting requests and decoding responses with SurePays merchant gateway service. Current version supports: Standard Credit Card and TeleCheck requests: Surepay request DTD v1.0 --> pp.request, pp.auth, pp.address, pp.ordertext, pp.creditcard, pp.telecheck, pp.identification, pp.lineitem, pp.option." http://surepay.sauen.com/ +11: STANDARDS. The New Path By Douglas Bowman Doug Bowman (the man behind the Wired.com redesign) has led the redesign of Adaptive Path website in what is truly a stunning piece of work under the hood. This is an excellent example of great design coupled with web standards, structured markup and CSS. http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/07/09/the_new_path.html +12: TOOLS. SiteReportCard By SiteReportCard.com "SiteReportCard provides free website analysis and optimization reports." http://sitereportcard.com/ FEED Validator By Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby Here is a new RSS validator. "This is a validator for syndicated feeds. It works with RSS 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, and 2.0. It also validates Pie feeds." http://feeds.archive.org/validator/ +13: USABILITY. Start measuring the cost and value of your content By Gerry McGovern "Frederick W. Taylor, in his book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), wrote about how waste in activity was a greater problem than material waste. He wrote about planning, organizing, training, management and measurement, as ways to address the problem. Today, we require a new form of Taylorism; one that addresses efficiency in content publishing." http://tinyurl.com/g7gc The Gradual Graying of the Internet... By Kath Straub and Susan Weinschenk "A significant effort is currently directed toward the challenges of creating effective Web designs for older individuals..." http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/jun03.asp#susan What Would Amazon.com do? By Vincent Flanders "It's an important question because Amazon.com has probably spent more time and money researching what works and doesn't work on a Web site than anyone. If you don't see a Web design technique on Amazon.com, you probably should follow their guidelines and not use it on your site." http://www.fixingyourwebsite.com/amazon.html Everything you need to know about Web design my father taught me in 1964 By Vincent Flanders "Too many Web designers get confused about what type of site they're creating ...If you're creating a site that's for a media company (movie, music, etc.), fashion company, art school -- sites where there's no accountability for the bottom line, then it's ok to use 'wild and crazy' design techniques. As Lou Reed would say, 'It's a temporary thing.' This type of design is not supposed to be serious and last forever. Have fun...If you're creating a real Web site for a real company, you have to choose a design that's not quite as exciting. Something more responsible and restrained. Something dependable." http://www.fixingyourwebsite.com/everything.html +14: XML. RSS: The Next Killer App For Education By Mary Harrsch "Research news, learning modules, position vacancies, awards and achievements, significant donationsÑanything that is dynamic in nature and would be of interest to a particular audience can benefit from RSS technology. Web designers can review and select news feeds for customized news portals, enabling students, faculty members, and staff to stay abreast of discoveries and developments in their particular areas of interest." http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=2010 The Vanishing Image: XHTML 2 Migration Issues By Mark Pilgrim "I am not the world's greatest XHTML 2.0 fan. I initially gave up on it completely because of its intentional (and, in some cases, seemingly spiteful) backward incompatibility with XHTML 1. I was convinced that developers would need a migration path in order to adopt it, and there was no such migration path. This series is, in part, my own attempt to see how big a problem this backward incompatibility really is." http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/02/dive.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/accessibility Association Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/associations Book Listings. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/books Cascading Style Sheets Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/css Color Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/color Dreamweaver Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/dreamweaver Evaluation & Testing Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/testing Event Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/events Flash Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/flash Information Architecture Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/architecture JavaScript Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/javascript Miscellaneous Web Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/misc Navigation Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/navigation PHP Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/php Sites & Blogs Listing. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/sites Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/standards Tool Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/tools Typography Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/type Usability Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/usability XML Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/xml [Section two ends.] ++END NOTES. + SUBSCRIPTION INFO. WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription only. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist + TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN) STANDARD. As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN Standard information please visit: http://www.headstar.com/ten + SIGNATURE. Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]