+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 43, April 16, 2004. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 43 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 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. DRC web investigation finds many public websites 'impossible' for disabled people to use By The Disability Rights Commission "Many disabled people find it impossible to book a holiday, open a bank account or buy theatre tickets online, an investigation by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) into web access will reveal today." http://www.drc-gb.org/newsroom/newsdetails.asp?id=633§ion=1 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Statement on Web Access Report from UK Disability Rights Commission By Judy Brewer "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offers the following comments as an initial response to the Web Access Report released 14 April 2004 by the UK Disabilities Rights Commission. The DRC Report explores the state of Web site accessibility and usability in the UK, and in some sections makes recommendations regarding work done by W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)." http://www.w3.org/2004/04/wai-drc-statement.html Captioning Web Multimedia: An Overview of Technologies, Resources, and Tools By Jared Smith "Captions are text versions of the spoken word. Captions allow Web audio and video to be both perceivable to those who do not have access to audio and understandable to a wider audience. Though captioning is primarily intended for those who cannot receive the benefit of audio, it has been found to greatly help those who can hear the audio, those who may not be fluent in the language in which the audio is presented, or those who may have learning/cognitive impairments..." http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2004/proceedings/202.htm Web accessibility for deaf people: Adding captions or providing transcripts isn't always enough By Jim Byrne "Writing simple language and short sentences can help to make information more accessible to Sign Language users." http://www.mcu.org.uk/show.php?contentid=86 Web Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization By Carmen Mardiros "This particular paper targets search engine optimizers and site owners, in fact, a large percentage of people who have influence over how accessible content is. It gives them the right incentive to use the W3C guidelines more widely." http://tinyurl.com/2vd9z +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS TEMPLATES By intensivstation.ch "Alle templtes sind in XHTML 1.0 und CSS2" http://intensivstation.ch/css/template.php CSS Rollover Buttons By Paul O'Brien and Gavin Benda "There are many different button-rollover tutorials available on the web, some JavaScript and some CSS, but none of the ones I have seen yet match that of the Trifecta button. Let's start with what makes the CSS rollover Trifecta button different from the many other rollovers you may have already seen..." http://www.search-this.com/website_design/css_rollover_buttons.asp +03: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual By David Sawyer McFarland This is a sample chapter on templates. http://tinyurl.com/24ly2 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Getting the Right Measure of Usability By David Travis "As usability professionals, we're in agreement that usability testing in general is a Good Thing. But we've seen an interesting debate recently discussing the relative merits and demerits of different approaches to usability testing. Should we use discount, qualitative methods or more formal, quantitative methods?" http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1567.asp +05: EVENTS. Accessibility in Practice Conference June 23, 2004 University of Central Lancashire Preston, United Kingdom http://www.uclan.ac.uk/ldu/events/aip/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Card sorting: a definitive guide By Donna Maurer and Todd Warfel "Card sorting is a great, reliable, inexpensive method for finding patterns in how users would expect to find content or functionality." http://tinyurl.com/yr4f2 Information Architecture: A Rose by Any Other Name... By Lynn Stott "Let's hope that our complicity with the broader effort to narrow and define information architecture's field of practice is merely a misguided application of the IA's penchant to organize and categorize anything within reach." http://tinyurl.com/2hrq9 +07: JAVASCRIPT. Don't use client side includes! By Simon Willison "While JavaScript includes may reduce the load on your server slightly and may even increase page loading times due to additional client-side caching, the cons far outweigh the pros..." http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=162032 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Making guidelines part of the team By Tanya Rabourn "Guidelines. We seem to have a love-hate relationship with them. At the same time we construct them, we worry they'll come back to haunt us. How did guidelines get such a bad reputation?" http://tinyurl.com/3grpa +09: NAVIGATION. The myth of navigation By Andrei Herasimchuk http://www.designbyfire.com/000075.html +10: PHP. Designing search engine friendly PHP pages By stargeek.com "PHP pages have a reputation of being more difficult (or at least different) to SEO than static HTML pages. Here is an overview of the major issues encountered when trying to make PHP scripts rank well. While this focuses on PHP much of it is still relevant to dynamic pages in general." http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. W3C Web Standards By Justin Cook In this article Justin Cook provides an introduction to standards. http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/W3C-Web-Standards/ Use Structural Markup By Andrew B. King "Ah, the wonders of web standards The oft-cited separation, the lifting of your spirit knowing that you're helping the semantic web evolve. The sheer joy of CSS. Adopting purely structural markup for your XHTML ensures a longer shelf life and faster pages. Written properly, structural markup can eliminate unnecessary classes by targeting content with CSS selectors." http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/structure/ +12: TOOLS. Spooky Girlfriend By Carl Durbridge "Spooky Girlfriend is an interactive web page creator that spits out a valid XHTML web page that is also tableless. All the positioning is taken care of by our friend CSS. It's aimed at folk who want to make Kosher web pages..." http://www.theimposter.org/tools/spooky/ +13: USABILITY. What They Didn't Teach Me in Design and Usability School By Scott Berkun "As I understand it the trouble is that many usability engineers come from experimental psychology or research backgrounds, and they've received no training or encouragement towards a more pragmatic view of their contributions. There are many ways to keep scientific integrity intact, while still offering subjective contributions to design choices. It starts by remembering that skills (and usability methods) are the means, not the ends. It's the result that really matter to customers. Who cares what research method was used or what the margin of error of the survey was if the result is a better product? Never fixate or obsess about the skills, unless you're certain that they really impact the quality of the decisions or the final design." http://www.uiweb.com/issues/issue31.htm The Red Herring of Usability ROI By Scott Hirsch "Like all of Rosenberg's observant myths, the misguided belief that statements like these can be made (and more importantly believed!) is the great red herring of usability ROI research. Let's rid ourselves of these top-down, macro-level assertions and get down to the real work of analyzing specific usability interventions at the project level. Only through rigorous and in-depth analysis can larger patterns emerge and applications be developed." http://tinyurl.com/37cfs The Three Core Principles of Great Web Design By Gerry McGovern "The essence of a website is self-service. There are three core things that self-service needs to get right: convenience, speed, and price. Convenience means task achievement with minimum effort. Speed means that you get in and out of a website as quickly as possible. People are cheap on the Web." http://tinyurl.com/yrvqk +14: XML. HTML Comes of Age: XHTML By Don Kiely "You know your HTML and you've got the hang of XML. Why not try XHTML? John will go through how to use Extensible HTML and its benefits. Let's get the bad news out of the way right up front: Ladies and gentlemen, the wild and wooly days of the Web are over and done. Those of you who have learned to get away with all of the HTML tricks that fool browsers into doing your bidding are going to be very sad. But those of you who embrace XML and its demand for rigid adherence to structure will flourish in the New Web." http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/HTML/HTML-Comes-of-Age-XHTML/ [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. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist The Web Design Reference Site also has a RSS 2.0 feed for site updates. + 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.]