WebDesign Archives - Page 31 of 34

Useful Links: Being Thankful, Fireworks CS4, protect your Mac

15 Things Every Web Developer Should Be Thankful For lists some great things to be thankful for. You can suggest more objects of your gratitude if the list isn’t inclusive enough for you.

Way back in 2005 I published a rant here called Why colleges should stop teaching Fireworks as a primary web design tool. Three years and a lot of Fireworks version releases since then, it appears that Fireworks CS4 is capable of creating web standards based designs. Matt Stow wrote Creating standards-compliant web designs with Fireworks CS4 at the Adobe Developer Center to walk you through the new CSS export feature. If you don’t own Fireworks CS4, you can download the trial copy to see if this new feature is a must-have for you.

In the times they are a-changin’ department, Apple recommends that you install anti-virus software on your Mac. It isn’t the computer security so much as iTunes, QuickTime, and the Safari Web browser. The recommended products are Intego VirusBarrier X5, McAfee VirusScan for Mac, and Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 11 for Macintosh.

Summary of eHow articles for November

Every fall the sandhill cranes return to the Rio Grande bosque and the wetlands along the Rio Grande for wintering. Watching them is a favorite annual activity. This year my Tai Chi instructor suggested we do Tai Chi with the cranes in an Open Space area near the river. A previous Open Space visitor left behind this small toy, which seemed to do Tai Chi with us, at least the lift hands part of the form.

In between several days a week of Tai Chi, I wrote these articles for eHow.

Another great place to observe the sandhill cranes and a multitude of other wintering birds is the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, near Socorro. For those of you not from the southwest, bosque is Spanish for wood or woodland. The term is used here to mean any low-lying area near the Rio Grande, densely forested with cottonwoods and other deciduous trees.

Review: Web Development & Design Foundations with XHTML

by Web Teacher

Web Development and Design Foundations with XHTML (Amazon affiliate link)

★★★★ Web Development & Design Foundations with XHTML (4th Edition) by Terry Felke-Morris is from Addison Wesley (2008). This book is 100% courseware, a complete curriculum with project files, test and discussion questions, careful planning of objectives and learning activities, and resources for students at the Addison Wesley site for the book.

I haven’t seen a book specifically written as a text book for several years, and I was eager to see this one. It’s big (8 1/2 X 11 inches), and heavy. And complete. Very complete. It deals with code, design, ethics, accessibility, best practices and every aspect of design and development. A student who mastered everything in this book would have a good grasp of both past and present web development knowledge.

The “past and present” part of it bothered me at first. I normally don’t see much point in asking students to learn deprecated tags/attributes before they are exposed to current standards. But the way it’s done here works. The approach in this book is that students may have to deal with legacy sites and need to know what they will find there. Once the “legacy” information is explained, current standards follow immediately after. Any exercises and hands-on work at the conclusion of each chapter is done according to modern methods and best practices. Several small web sites are created by the completion of the book.

The book is completey Windows-centric. All instructions are for Windows. Some of the materials provided use .asp and .net functions that would be problematic in Mac labs, although most of the exericses can be easily translated from Windows to Mac.

The book has 14 chapters and a “handbook” at the end that includes XHTML and CSS references, character codes, and a Section 508 reference. Chapters start with basics of XHTML and CSS and move through visual elements, design principles, page layout, tables, forms, e-commerce, JavaScript, multimedia, and basic information on site structure and promotion. There are bonus materials available online for frames and Dreamweaver users.

If you’re teaching in a situation where you are scrutinized for compliance regarding objectives, evaluation, and checkpoints, this book has everything you need. You could feel confident about meeting requirements from “on high” using it.

Summary: Well-planned and complete teaching materials.

Technorati Tags: Web Development & Design Foundations with XHTML, book reviews

Findability: Is your blog as findable as possible?

Everyone has heard of search engine optimization, right? But have you heard of findability? I hadn’t, until recently.

The term “findability” seems to originate with Peter Morville, who published a book called Ambient Findability in 2002. Blogger DonnaM wrote about it in 2004 in Usability testing for findability. Jakob Neilsen wrote about it in 2006 in Use Old Words When Writing for Findability. In 2008, I happened to read Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter and I got very excited about how simple changes to my blog might make it more successful.

In fact, when I wrote Review: Building Findable Websites on my blog, I said,

Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter (New Riders, 2008) is one of those rare books that is so full of good ideas, it makes me enthusiastic about what I can do when I put the book down and go work on my blog or website.

As Walter defines it, findability includes accessibility, usability, information architecture, development, marketing, copywriting, design, and, oh yeah, search engine optimization. Walter continues to try to popularize the concepts, and recently published Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry at A List Apart. He starts right off with the orphan metaphor and works it all the way through:

Once upon a time in a web design agency, there lived a sad little boy named Findability. He was a very good boy with a big heart for helping people…

* find the websites they seek,
* find content within websites, and
* rediscover valuable content they’d found.

He used his arsenal of talent for planning, writing, coding, and analysis to create websites that could connect with a target audience.

A bit later in the article he sums up findability as,

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

What are some of specific techniques for findability discussed in the book? The book talks about markup strategies, which include web standards, accessbility, and microformats.

In terms of web standards, that means to separate stucture (the (X)HTML) from presentation (the CSS) from behavior (the JavaScript) to create sites that are accessible both humans and machines. Use modern code that follows the rules and check how you’re doing with a validator. Use alt attributes with images, encode characters, use tags that communicate semantically by making page hierarchy clear. There are a number of other markup tips such as which tags are essential and whether or not to use meta tags. Regarding images, get rid of image maps, and if you replace headings with snappy looking images make sure you do it accessibly. Microformats include hCalendar, hCard, hReview, hResume and others. These are nothing more than standardized ways to present certain information with HTML and CSS that the search engines (and a lot of other apps) recognize. I’ve been using hReview on Web Teacher for some time now. I can verify that reviews I write this way make the search engines very happy.

In terms of server-side strategies, the book talks about building file structure, 404 pages, URLS, and server optimization for speed. It discusses naming everything from the domain name to files, folders, and URLs. There’s advice for moving pages or whole domains and how to use redirects and custom file-not-found pages to keep them findable in the new location.

Creating content that drives traffic is another important aspect of findability. Walter says quality content is on topic, fills a niche, conveys passionate interest, is trustworthy, appealing, original and appropriate. There are also many types of content beyond the blog post. You could consider other types of publications such as white papers or articles, links, reviews, recommendations, syndication, and user generated content in comments and forums as part of your content. You can also add RSS feeds from other sources such as Last.fm, Flickr, job sites, events and other worthy feeds to your content.

Of course, most of us here are concerned with blog findability. The strategies include regular posting, linking and trackbacks, original templates, post titles, archives, topics, and special sections on the blog for things like popular posts and recent posts.

Be sure your site has a search feature. If you use Ajax, Flash, audio and video be sure you are not locking out some of your potential readers. If you have a normal web site and not a blog, try to build a mailing list so that you can contact readers and lure them back to the site regularly.

Merely summarizing the high points here created quite an imposing list of things to do. Fortunately, Walter thought through which actions are the most important and beneficial for you. The final chapter in the book tells you how to prioritize the changes you may need to make and helps you tackle them starting with the most useful first.

I happen to know Aarron Walter. We work together on a curriculum project for the Web Standards Project. I contacted him about this article and asked him to identify the two most important things a blogger could do to improve findability. Here’s his response:

1. Customize your permalink structure to include keywords in your URLs. Many blog platforms make it easy to define the structure of each blog post URL. Ideally you want each URL to contain the same keywords as those in your post title.

2. Define your update services. When you publish on your blog, it automatically notifies (called a ping) many tracking services instantly so your content gets indexed by search engines and various other services. Be sure to define which update services your blog should notify. WordPress keeps a comprehensive list of the top updates services at http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services.

Helpful resources for making your blog more findable:
– Aarron Walter’s site: free download of Findability Strategy Checklist
– Findability Checklist
– A Blog Not Limited: Getting Semantic With Microformats, Part 1 the first of a series on microformats by Emily Lewis
– SEO Blog: 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability and Web Standards
– SEO Blog: The 10 Worst Findability Crimes Committed by Web Designers & Developers
– BlogHer: Melanie Nelson’s Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tactics

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Women in Tech: Shelley Powers

This is the first of several interviews with women in technology. Today you’ll learn about Shelley Powers. Shelley is perhaps best known as a writer. Her most recent books are Learning JavaScript and Painting the Web. She’s also a programmer and web developer, and she applies a powerful and logical mind to everything she does.

Q: I looked you up on Amazon and found a list of books you’ve written that includes Learning JavaScript, Painting the Web, Adding Ajax, Learning JavaScript: Add Sparkle and Life to Your Web Pages, Unix Power Tools, Practical RDF, Powerbuilder 5 How-To, Developing Asp Components, Dynamic HTML, Dynamic Web Publishing Unleashed, Javascript How-To: The Definitive Javascript Problem-Solver, and Using Perl For Web Programming.

Wow!

How did you get started on a career as a writer? What was your education and background?

A: I’m a late bloomer educationally. I quit high school when I was 15 and joined a religious cult, Children of God. When I came to my senses and left the group, I went from the frying pan to the fire by marrying, at 16, a man who had learning disabilities and resented the fact that I liked to read. We lived in a house in the country and if it weren’t for the fact that the local library would send books out, and allow you to return them in pre-paid envelopes, I would have had very little to read for two years.

. . . Read the full post at BlogHer.

Summary of eHow articles for September

There a business in Albuquerque called ABQ Jump that is a big building (air conditioned!) full of those huge air-filled toys kids can jump on. It’s crammed with them and the noisy fans that keep them inflated. Here’s one of the little people in my family sliding down a jumper slide.

And here’s what I did on eHow this month.

Web Design Education, again

Two new articles of interest related to education and web design. First, from Maryland Media, is Do Web Designers Need Degrees? Lots of comments, be sure to check them, too. The second is Does Higher Education Produce Web Professionalism at Monday by Noon.