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Internet Presence :: Words that mean much more then 'web site'. A presence on line is about being found. It's about being noticed, and it is about interactivity with your client. |
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Usability Five new links: "Graphics on Link-Rich Home Pages", "Label Placement in Forms", "SAP Design Guild Articles", "Simplicity Demands Difficult Choices", and "Personable 'About Us' Page Lifts Ecommerce Conversions 30 Percent". read more: This weeks accessible web design tip Does your website use a table to place the navigation bar on the left hand side, and the main content on the right? If that is how your site is designed, it is no bad thing; visitors will instantly understand this design 'convention' and won't have to waste time trying to figure out how to get around your site. There is however a problem with this 'standard layout' for people using screen readers. Accessing a website using a screen reader is a 'linear process'; the text that comes first, gets read first - and if the navigation is the first thing on the page - that is what gets read. If your navigation bar contains a lot of links, that can mean a lot of wasted time before a person using a screen reader gets to the content of your page.I was recently reminded of a very elegant 'table hack' , while reading, 'Building Accessible Websites' by Joe Clark (http://www.joeclark.org/), that can help users get around this problem. Instead of coding your table in the conventional manner as in the example below:
read more: Use sitemaps to improve your search engine ranking Which page on your website is the most important page? The product page? The contact page? Or the order page? Whatever it is, the sitemap page is among the most important pages on your website. read more: Usability and Design News: Screen Resolution, Page Layout, Hot Spots Jakob Nielsen and Andy King both have new articles at their sites that cover window resolution, user-friendly website design, and related issues. This important topic is also regularly discussed and debated in Web design and development discussion lists. Below I've highlighted their articles, but be sure to check them out in full, too (links below). (658 words, 9 links, 2 images) read more: Useful Web Design Tips There are many aspects to designing an effective web site. Whether you own a company and are looking for advertise, promote, and sell your products and services, or you just simply want to create a web page that will tell others more about you, you want to be sure people will notice it. That is why effective Web Design is essential to the promotion of yourself, your product, and, of course, your site. read more: Show/Hide Panel in Javascript We are merely playing with a little Javascript and a div tag to make a portion of the page appear or disappear. The code is relatively simple to implement, but does add nice bit of functionality to the page. The button goes into the body of the aspx page and the function goes into the page head. read more: Use HTML attributes, or CSS to set web page colors, but don't use both. Here is a useful tip that I found while browsing the Accessibility Internet Rally 2003 Advanced Training website. Use HTML attributes, or CSS to set web page colors, but don't use both.For example, if you set the background colour in a table cell to black using an HTML attribute (e.g. bgcolor='#000000'), and used CSS to create contrasting white text (style ='color: #FFFFFF') - you will start getting emails from users who surf with style sheets off (or those using browser that don't support style sheets). I haven't came across anyone yet who can read black text on a black background. The tips archive is at: Weekly accessible Web Design Tips.Register for your weekly accessible web design tip. read more: Underwhelmed by WAP - Impressions from the coalface Mike Banahan gives his Impressions of Using WAP/WML'WML is terribly limited in what it will display on the screen, with an extremely restricted set of markup tags supported and a curious `deck of cards' metaphor where each page is considered to consist of a `deck' - individually displayable sub-pages within the whole page itself. The usefulness of the deck/card division is unclear in the tutorials that I have seen so far and I haven't discovered a compelling argument for it yet.'It was Michael Jackson of the The British Computer Society - Newcastle and District Branch Committee who pointed me to the above link. Michael got in touch to ask if I would be willing to speak at one of their future meetings - the topic: 'The Web is ruined, and we - IT professionals - ruined it'.The need for accessible web design training.What I should have said in relation to yesterdays news from the Disability Rights Commission, was that the MCU runs an extremely good Accessible Web Design Training Course. read more: Custom List: Sponsored Links - Weekly Sponsored Links - Weekly  read more:Where Visual Design Meets Usability: Part 2 The second part of my recent interview with User Interface Engineering's Joshua Porter is now live on the UIE site: Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part 2 This set of Q&A focuses more on the design process for Web applications and especially on working with visual hierarchy. Some excerpts: 'Too often, everything on a Web page looks the same and users don’t know where to start. Conversely, everything looks very different and users end up bouncing between elements that are competing for their attention. An effective hierarchy employs just enough meaningful differentiation to walk users through the unique content and actions on a page in a purposeful order.' 'The process of removing what isn’t needed helps the important stuff get seen. Edward Tufte refers to visual noise as “chart junk.” Anything that isn’t adding value is taking away from it. So I’d say be wary of too many visual elements and look for the fewest possible “words” to communicate what you need.' Thanks again to Josh and the UIE team for the interview and look for much more on this topic at my upcoming session at User Interface 11 this October. Tags: visual design, usability, visual communication, process read more: Use favelets to check validation and accessibility of your web pages. This weeks accessible web design tip is to take advantage of the many free favelets available to check validation and accessibility of your web pages.Favelets provide you with a way to run short scripts embedded within bookmarked URLs; the script will act upon the page you currently have in your browser. Scripts are are invoked by choosing the bookmark from you bookmark or favourites menu. This is a powerful feature that you can put to good use when creating and validating your web pages.You can use favelets for many things including: Checking the accessibility of pages. Validating HTML and CSS. Resetting browser screen size (i.e. for checking how a page will look on a screen with a different resolution). Displaying images on a page with their alt attributes. Viewing meta data for a page.And much much more.Ian Lloyd has a good explanation of how to use favelets on his Accessibility-checking favelets page at His tutorial is aimed at Windows users, but if you are a Mac user, or using another platform, I am confident you will be able to work out how to use them from his explanation.Links More useful favelets related to accessibility and validation can be found at:http://validator.w3.org/favelets.htmlhttp://tantek.com/favelets/A search on Google for favelets will also lead you to a huge number of useful favelets. read more: Custom List: The Titans The Titans
read more:Forget about Page Rank. About three times a day I have people ask me “how do I get good Page Rank?” I tell them worrying about page rank on a new website is like weekend jogger thinking about altitude training. read more: Users' Goals Once you've got a statement of purpose you're halfway to being ready to design. The next step is to understand who'll be looking at the page, and why. Hunt, Ben read more: MCU: Accessible Web Design Tip: How to make printable characters between adjacent links invisible. Some older screen readers are unable to distinguish between adjacent links if there is no printable character between them. The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 provides a priority 3 checkpoint to deal with this unfortunate behaviour of older screen readers:10.5 Until user agents (including assistive technologies) render adjacent links distinctly, include non-link, printable characters (surrounded by spaces) between adjacent links. The obvious place on a page where you can find several adjacent links to is on a horizontal navigation bar at the top or bottom of a web page. So how do you adhere to this guideline in situations where displaying a printed character in your navigation bar would upset your beautifully crafted design?This weeks tips shows a technique I have used on the Glasgow West End website (http://www.glasgowwestend.co.uk) to make the printable characters separating links invisible, by making them the same colour as the navigation bar background, postcards read more: This weeks tip: Don't just make headings bold, use header tags I have noticed that many designers are using CSS or font tags to mimic proper HTML Markup. By following this 'non-standard' practice, they are lowering the accessibility of their web pages. For example, headings are being marked up as bold text, rather than as 'real' headings. Visually such styled text may look like a heading, but for web browsers, screen readers, braille readers, and any technology that has to process the page, they are not headings, and are not treated as such. For example, many screen readers make pages more accessible to blind or visually impaired users, by extracting all the headings from the page and presenting them to the user. The user can then decide which bits of the page they are interested in, and jump straight to it. If the page has no headings the usability of a web page for a blind or visually impaired user can drop considerably. There are many reasons why properly 'marking up' web pages improves their accessibility; I discuss more of those reasons in the article: CSS accessibility problems: is markup dead?Register for the weekly MCU accessible web design tip.Is it possible for staff to create their own accessible web pages?Yesterday I did a presention at the Glasgow Caledonian University Equality Seminar. In truth, it was more of a exploration of some of the issues than a presentation. I wrote the following assumptions on the white board and we discussed/argued about them:Glasgow Caledonian University is committed to the principle of accessible web design.The majority of Staff will be responsible for publishing and updating their own web pages (perhaps not today, but in the near future).The existing tools for creating web pages (e.g. Frontpage, Dreamweaver) do not produce accessible pages by default.It was quite difficult to get beyond the first 'assumption', which appears to be a controversial statement.Here are the notes I made for the seminar: Is it possible for staff to create their own accessible web pages?Web Standards and accessibility weblogs etcThanks to the Web Standards Project for pointing to this list of accessibility and standards websites. Although I notice that the MCU is not listed. :-( read more: Web Site Design Romania Web Site Design Romania. web design: Low cost web design and development services made by Adalmi in Romania. If you want to obtain a high quality job don't hesitate to contact. . . read more: 10 Realistic Steps to a Faster Web Site From the creator of blummy, this detailed article outlines some great strategies for improving the performance of your Web site. Along with careful design and navigation, fast page load times are a top priority for visitor experience and thus retention. read more: The worst web page The Worst Web Page in the World for June 27, 2006 I like animals (except raccoons and deer), including kangaroos. I don't like this site about kangaroos. The Worst Web Page in the World Technorati tags: webdesign read more: How to increase your sales with the right web page titles The title of a web page is one of the most important elements. Good web page titles can remarkably increase the effectiveness of your website. If you use the right titles, your website can get more targeted visitors. read more: Feb 11, Web Design und Marketing - Die Grundlagen des Internet Was bedeutet Web Design und Marketing wirklich? Was ist ein Web Site Hosting Provider? Was bedeuet ecommerce web design? Hier finden Sie Information... read more: Design Eye for the Usability Guy Design By Fire has a fun Queer Eye inspired design make over for usability guru Jakob Nielsen's boring but practical Guidelines for Visualizing Links. read more: New Home for Web Design Library Web Design Library (WDL), an educational portal with a focus on web design, has moved to a new domain and is now available on www.webdesign.org [PRWEB Nov 11, 2005] read more: Event: UIE Web App Summit  If you’re interested in attending, drop me a note and I’ll send you a conference discount code that saves you money on registration and gets you a free iPod nano. Here's a summary of the presentations I'll be giving at the UIE Web App Summit : Best Practices for Form Design “In the world of Web applications, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. From registration forms that welcome new customers to checkout forms that finalize e-commerce transactions, Web forms frequently broker crucial online interactions. In this session, Luke will walk you through the considerations and best practices of Web form design culled from international usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and over ten years of designing Web applications. He’ll outline how the interaction and visual design of Web forms can make the difference between acquiring a customer and completing a transaction or not.” Web Application Page Hierarchy 'When a potential customer makes it to one of your Web application’s pages, what will they do? Do you want them to sign up, contribute their knowledge, make a purchase, dive deeper into your content? Clearly, these are decisions you don’t want to leave up to chance. In this session, Luke will outline the way people naturally scan Web pages and explain how you can guide users through key content and actions using visual hierarchy to construct meaningful, prioritized page layouts. You’ll be taken through several before and after examples with explanations of how a page’s content was prioritized, why, and how that priority is being communicated to users so they don’t need to rely on chance to use your Web application.” Hope to see some of you there. Tags: forms, Web applications, visual communication, visual design read more: Easy way to separate content from design using PHP A general problem while designing a website is managing design and content. There are simple methods which can be used to separate design pages from content. By separating design from content, you make it easy for yourself (or someone else) to upd... read more: Designed For A Change Article Published During the development of a software product we all make numerous design decisions. Some decisions are done in early stages of development, while analyzing the requirements and gathering the overall architecture of the product. Other design decisions are done during the lower-level design. Finally, even during the implementation of the a single component, we are often in position to weight several design options against each other. In the following discussion we will examine one of the common design aspects, which is the source of numerous design dilemmas: should we design the product such that it will be ready for a future change (in the requirements, in technology etc.), or should we settle for a straight forward implementation? When is our product “sufficiently-designed” and when is it “over-designed”? In other words, how can we find the golden path when it comes to designing a software system to be ready for future changes? read more: Modular CSS Whoa! I've been looking for an article on this topic. Except I take it one step further and control which stylesheet modules I'm importing on a page-by-page basis using PHP. Have a look at the source code to this one for a usage example. read more: HTML Scraper 0.1 now available Just wanted to point people to the first public release of my HTML Scraper package. This is a Java/XML-based utility which allows one to 'scrape' an HTML page and generate an XML document with data from that page. The program uses an XML-based rules file to control what data elements to scrape from the page.http://sourceforge.net/projects/htmlscraper/ is the SourceForge project page for the site. There is no specific homepage for the tool yet.Please download and let me know if you find it useful. read more: Custom Web Site Design Custom Web Site Design. web design: Professional web site designer. Go for Custom web site design at affordable price and be unique. Seo services - Vijayinfo. . . read more: GAWDS new web design The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) haver re-designed their website. The design was created by Phil Treble, who won the design competition as part of the launch of the Guild. read more: If you need help, ask an expert! This weeks Accessible web design tip: If you need help, ask an expert!Where do you go when you have a question related to accessible web design? If you are like me, you probably spend too much time searching for, and then browsing through the many good accessible web design websites; hoping that one of them will have the answer to your current question. Search no more - this weeks tip is: if you need help, ask an expert. And you can now do that, by visiting a new discussion forum which is populated by some of the webs' most knowledgeable accessible web design experts. It is called AccessifyForum.com and it has been set up by Nigel Peck of MIS Web Design and Ian Lloyd of Accessify.com.The forum is already a busy 'junction' for experts and beginners alike. So don't 'sit on' that question a minute longer - ask, and you shall receive.The tips archive is at: http://www.mcu.org.uk/weeklytips/ read more: Web Design - The Importance Of Design Simplicity For Business Websites. Search engines don’t care about Web Design. People do. While search engines will not index a website for its great layout, but for the content, people will forget the website that has nothing distinctive about it. No visual impact, no interest! Now, if you are a serious online entrepreneur and want to have a website that sends the right message to the visitors, you must know that there are some web design techniques simply inappropriate for a business website. read more: How many links on each page Directory - Free: How many links on each page . Directory - Free By Nancy from Los Angeles I am building a new directory and was curious how many links should be placed on each page 10 50 or ... read more: Ready to rise again Nearly one year since the last shuttle launch and 3 1/2 years after the Columbia disaster, NASA is primed to return to human space flight Saturday with the liftoff of the Discovery orbiter and its crew of ...[Via Science / Technology - Topix.net]  read more: Parkgoers to get unplugged For nearly 150 years, Central Park has been an urban oasis, a place where harried denizens of the concrete jungle can breathe fresh air, feel grass under their feet, while away an afternoon in the leafy shade.[Via Science / Technology - Topix.net]  read more: May 18, Preise für Corporate Design & Print Design Hier finden Sie eine übersichtliche Zusammenfassung unserer Corporate Design Dienstleistungen und die dazugehörigen Preise. read more: Keep visitors on your website with custom 404 not found pages You've probably seen many "404 not found" pages when surfing the web. A "404 not found" page is the page that comes up when someone tries to access a web page that doesn't exist. Learn how to keep customer on your website with custom 404 not found pages. read more: Pretentious Plaid Pretentious Plaid. web design: database development Website consulting, design, marketing, copywriting, hosting domain names. We specialize in all forms of web design including html, flash, ecommerce and database driven websites. Call us for a free consultation.. . . read more: The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School I had to post this article below. It was simply so spot-on with regards to the cold, hard realities of design work that I would have been in the wrong for now sharing it….
Direct and Related Links for 'The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School' read more: How to make your pages validate when they include urls with ampersands in them. At some point you will run your web page through the W3C validator and get the error, 'unknown entity section'; this is due to the presence of ampersands (&'s) in page link urls. The validator assumes that this is an error because it expects an ampersand to be the beginning of an entity.I had this very problem myself when creating the weblog links for my own CMS. For me the solution was simple; I just get the CMS script to turn all ampersands into their equivalent entities. Unfortunately it is slightly more work to manually replace all ampersands in a page, but if you want your page to validate it is a chore you will need to attend to:For all urls in web pages that contain ampersands, i.e., replace each ampersand (&) in urls embedded within your pages, with the equivalent entity &. Another validation problems solved. read more: Arguments for flexible webpage layouts Some notes: why are flexible web page layouts a good idea?1. The web is not print.From Evolt.org article 'Liquid design for the web'.'One of the greatest advantages of the web is something that your average dedicated print designer or software developer can't get their arms around. The idea that it's a fluid medium, that information can be experienced in as many ways as there are users....' '..On the web, all that goes out the window. Users could be running anything from a text-to-speech browser to the latest version of Internet Explorer with JavaScript disabled. Their systems can be anything from the newest version of BeOS to an old Amiga. And monitors can range from old 14-inch bricks running 16 colors at 640x480 to the latest flat panel running at 32-bit and 1,600x2,000 pixels. Ultimately, the user has control, and no matter how much the designer or developer wants to wrest that control, it just can't be done.' http://www.evolt.org/article/Liquid_Design_for_the_Web/20/15177/From 'The Web Style Guide' 2nd Edition'The Web is a flexible medium designed to accommodate different types of users and a variety of display devices. Unlike a printed document, which is 'fixed' in its medium, the look of a Web page depends on such elements as the display size, resolution, and color settings, the height and width of the browser window, software preferences such as link and background color settings, and available fonts. Indeed, there is no way to have complete control over the design of a Web page. The best approach, then, is to embrace the medium and design flexible pages that are legible and accessible to all users.' http://www.webstyleguide.com/page/layout.htmlFrom the same book/website:'It is possible to create flexible layout tables that resize gracefully without sacrificing the integrity of your design, but if you are turning to layout tables for precision you will need to use fixed-width layout tables.' http://www.webstyleguide.com/page/fixed-flex.htmlFrom the article 'Accessible Web Design - Liquid Design - A Step Forward To Making Web Sites Accessible"For web designers the monitor screen does not have fixed width or height because these variables change, at times in unpredictable ways. People might have larger buttons, toolbars such as Yahoo or Google, they open the Favorites page on the left, they have a double task bar and so on. Therefore the width and height of the screen is different from user to user. Liquid design means that the web site adapts itself to the available space, the same way water takes the shape of the glass it is in. http://www.oyster-web.co.uk/liquid-design.html2. Flexible web design increases accessibility.From the World Wide Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines 'Themes of Accessible Design'. 2.1 Ensuring Graceful Transformation:'Create documents that do not rely on one type of hardware. Pages should be usable by people without mice, with small screens, low resolution screens, black and white screens, no screens, with only voice or text output, etc.'Checkpoint 3.4 Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values (this is a Priority 2 checkpoint.) (Note, in relation to the above guideline: fixed layouts require the use of absolute unit values; pages using fixed layouts would not pass WAI level 2 accessibility tests.)Flexible layouts are good for accessibility because they will help to accommodate end users preferences and needs, e.g. small low resolution screens, users who require large type (fixed layouts can make it difficult to display large type in a usable way).3. The arguments for or against flexible layouts, are not necessarily related to whether or not the site fulfills its purpose. Sites that use flexible layouts don't have to compromise on aesthetics. The critical decisions about how the site looks, are not necessarily determined by whether it should be accessible or not. In other words, accessible sites can be as fabulous looking, or as bad looking, as inaccessible sitesThat is not to say there are not design 'constraint's, as demonstrated in my first point, i.e. the design must be appropriate to the communication medium. Examples of sites that use flexible layouts: http://www.einfach-fuer-alle.de/ (A German accessibility portal). http://www.stopdesign.com/ (flexible page layout, and uses CSS and XHTML) http://www.markme.com/accessibility/ (uses flexible width tables) http://devedge.netscape.com/ (Uses HTML 4.01 and CSS for layout, and it would only take a couple to tweaks to make it fully WAI level 2 accessible) http://www.movabletype.org/ (flexible layout, a couple of small changes would make this accessible to level 2) http://www.alltheweb.com/ (uses a combination of flexible tables and CSS, only needs a couple of changes to make it level 2 accessible) http://www.wired.com/ http://www.alistapart.com/index.html http://www.alltheweb.com/ (uses a combination of flexible tables and CSS) http://www.digital-web.com/new/ http://www.zeldman.com/ read more: Internet hackers fleece man of R26 000 By Candice Bailey and Dianne Hawker A Cape Town businessman has been added to a growing list of Internet bank users who have lost money to fraudsters who hack into their accounts.[Via Science / Technology - Topix.net]  read more: 100 Years of Grace Hopper theodp writes "Grab your COBOL Coding Forms and head on over to comp.lang.cobol, kids! Yesterday was Grace Hopper's 100th birthday, and many are still singing the praises of her Common Business-Oriented Language."[Via Slashdot]  read more: Free Clip Art Role In Your Graphic Design And Web Design Clip art is basically pre-made images that can be used to design any media. Of course, you can also create your own images instead of using clip art as clip art is something everyone has access to. However, the advantage with clip art is that you don’t have to spend time creating images to place on the website. You just have to get these clip art software that are available on the internet. read more: BBC Episodes Legally Available Via Peer To Peer Kript writes "According to the BBC they are going to make a number of their shows available on the Azureus network. A number of old favorites will be available such as Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and even Little Britain."[Via Slashdot]  read more: Five Common Scams That Target Job Hunters Paid work is the bait for schemes that lead many people into financial and legal trouble. Here's how to spot them, plus examples of some common schemes.[Via CareerJournal.com]  read more: Useful Tips for Effective Web Design Here are some essential web design tips that every web site should follow. Design your web site by following these tips and I guarantee that visitors will have a great first impression of your site. read more: web page designClick web page design to go to MMK TechnologiesSEARCH RSS NEWS USING THE WORDS BELOW web page design | ecommerce shopping cart | shopping store ASP | sell online | sell products | products to sell online | web technology | website builders | web site builder | bradenton web design | florida web design | bradenton website design | protect MP3 | keep video from being copied | sarasota web design | secure upload video | web programming | cgi programming | net hosting | net development | flash design | flash programming | cool flash | action script | flash database programming | flash graphics | graphics design | graphics disign | flash disign | web disign | web design | website design | internet marketing | web marketing | web site marketing | programming | web sites designer | web designs | internet design | programming developer | website marketing | web development | marketing internet | web sites designing | site designs | sites designs | internet designer | internet designs | e-commerce store | web development | web site development | design webs | internet site marketing | internet hosting | internet host | web hosting | web host | sell on the internet | sell on the web | e-commerce store | internet development | webdesign | florida web site design | website development | ecommerce store | sell online | affiliate program | asp web store | marketing program | marketing software | submission software | asp programmer | cgi store | perl store | internet store | database programmer | internet database | online marketing | ecommerce software | streaming media | video streaming | secure video streams | media streams | audio streaming | MP3 security | avi security | Windows Media Security | protect video | secure web cam | webcam security | video piracy | media piracy | windows media player security | secure media | protect audio | video stream protection | MMKTechnologies | MMK Technologies | prevent audio theft | prevent video theft | web page design | (c) Copyright 2005 MMK Technologies.
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