[webdev] Web Design Update: March 19, 2006

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 4, Issue 39, March 19, 2006.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design 
and development.

++ISSUE 39 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: EVENTS.
05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: PHP.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TOOLS.
12: TYPOGRAPHY.
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.

Evaluating Website Accessibility Part 2, Basic Checkpoints
By Roger Johansson.
"This is the second article of three in a series of articles explaining 
how to perform a website accessibility evaluation."
http://tinyurl.com/gqat7

PAS 78: Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites
By Bruce Lawson.
"The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) is an independent body 
established in April 2000 by Act of (United Kingdom) Parliament to stop 
discrimination and promote equality of opportunity for disabled people. 
In April 2004, it conducted a formal investigation into the state of 
web accessibility in the UK, discovering that 81 percent of sites 
failed to uphold the simplest WCAG recommendations (level A). As a 
direct result of this rather shocking finding, the DRC then 
commissioned the British Standards Institute (BSI) to produce Publicly 
Available Specification (PAS) 78, which outlines good practice in 
commissioning websites that are accessible to and usable by disabled 
people."
http://tinyurl.com/evclq

The Financial Benefits of Web Accessibility
By Mel Pedley.
"Web accessibility is often seen as the socially acceptable 'Right 
Thing To Do' but for any company with one eye on it's bank balance, 
this is unlikely to be sufficient reason to invest in a site re-design. 
Ok - so there's also the potential for litigation under the UK 
Disability Discrimination Act but, given that no cases have, as yet, 
been publicly prosecuted, the over-riding corporate attitude seems to 
be 'Let's see what happens'."
http://www.blackwidows.org.uk/wpress/?p=53

Usability and Accessibility Market Worth £115m in 2005
By E-consultancy.com.
"Increased understanding of commercial benefits of usability and 
accessibility to boost UK market spending to almost £150m by the end of 
2006, according to the internet research publisher E-consultancy..."
http://tinyurl.com/g7dsw

Removing Road Blocks to Accessibility
By Peter Abrahams.
"Several recent surveys have shown that the majority of websites are 
not fully accessible. This sorry state of affairs can be explained by 
various road-blocks in the development process..."
http://www.it-analysis.com/business/compliance/content.php?cid=8407

Enable User Customization
By Skills For Access.
"Given that there is such a range in accessibility needs, there's no 
one colour scheme, font style, size or page layout that is 100% 
accessible to 100% of the population. The most effective way of making 
an interface accessible to the widest possible audience is to produce 
it in a way that can be easily changed by someone to suit their own 
access requirements, for example to provide a more readable page for 
someone with dyslexia, or to enlarge the text size for someone with a 
mild visual impairment. People with limited manual dexterity may also 
benefit from the ability to enlarge text, and thus the clickable area 
of text hyperlinks."
http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=92

Optimize for Keyboard Access (and other non-mouse input devices)
By Skills For Access.
"A mouse is often assumed as being essential to control and interact 
with a web resource. Yet some people may have difficulty using a mouse, 
or may be unable to use a mouse and thus use an alternative input 
device such as a switching device, joystick or gesture-recognition 
device. Others may be using a device that does not have a mouse, or are 
using a mouse that doesn't work very well. So to be optimally 
accessible, HTML documents need to be operable without relying on the 
use of a mouse as an input device."
http://www.skillsforaccess.org.uk/howto.php?id=96


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Mollio CSS/HTML Templates
By Pete Ottery.
Mollio is a simple set of html/css templates. The aim was to create a 
set of page templates that use css for layout as well as some sample 
basic content which has also had some css applied. It's definitely a 
work in progress. More sample content and layouts are planned to be 
added. Get involved, suggest and contribute ideas via the Mollio Google 
Group.
http://www.mollio.org/

Understanding CSS and Methods for Hack Management
By Tiffany B. Brown.
Tiffany's  South by Southwest presentation slides.
http://tiffanybbrown.com/sxsw06/index.html

Today's Menu
By Dave Shea.
Dave Shea's 2006 South by Southwest presentation on how to solve 
certain CSS problems.
http://www.mezzoblue.com/presentations/2006/sxsw/css/


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Focus Groups - How to Run Them
By Tim Fidgeon.
"Focus groups are fundamental as an input into any web design decisions 
- find out how to plan and successfully run them."
http://tinyurl.com/hr72j


+04: EVENTS.

XTech 2006: Building Web 2.0
May 16-19, 2006.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://xtech06.usefulinc.com/

Coverage of SXSW 2006
This page has links to South by Southwest conference video coverage and 
podcasts.
http://2006.sxsw.com/coverage/


+05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Change Architecture: Bringing IA to the Business Domain
By Bob Goodman.
"As information architects, we are not just architecting information; 
we are using information to architect change. Bob Goodman shows us how 
we can use business and management techniques to help us be more 
effective agents of change."
http://tinyurl.com/j9tla

Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them
By Donna Maurer.
"Information-seeking behavior varies from situation to situation. Donna 
Mauer explores different ways in which users look for information and 
offers tactics for accommodating them."
http://tinyurl.com/fwjsq


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

DOM Scripting: Unobtrusive JavaScript at Its Best
By Lee Underwood.
"In the world of JavaScript programming, the language is especially 
powerful when interacting with Web pages using the Document Object 
Model (DOM). If you've ever wanted to learn the basics of DOM 
scripting, have a look at this review."
http://www.webreference.com/reviews/dom_scripting/

Tip: Using CSS and Dynamic Classes to Avoid Loops
By Chris Heilmann.
"Adding one dynamic class might spare you a lot of JavaScript looping."
http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=257

Introduction to JavaScript (ETech 2006 Tutorial)
By Phil Windley.
Phil Windley blogs a number of useful JavaScript tips from Simon 
Willison's ETech session.
http://www.windley.com/archives/2006/03/introduction_to.shtml

JavaScript Arrays: Copying, Transferring and Merging
By Jagadish Chaterjee.
This series of articles mainly concentrates on working with JavaScript 
arrays. This is the third article in the series. It mainly concentrates 
on working with multiple arrays effectively.
http://tinyurl.com/jzqaf


+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

SxSW Notes: WaSP Annual General Meeting
By Stuart Colville.
"JZ (Jeffery Zeldman): Welcome to the WASP first annual meeting. I left 
the wasp in 2002/2003, it's been in very good hands since then. In 
1998, a bunch of us founded the Web Standards Project (Steve Champeon 
Dori Smith Chris Kaminski), as we were upset about incompatibilities 
between browsers. Not realizing 90% of the benefits, but just out of 
wanting to code different versions for different browsers. Glenn was 
the face of the WASP. Posture towards companies - Microsoft - was 
aggressive. I guess it was like just being 14 years old: we wanted to 
stick our fingers up and scream at the world..."
http://tinyurl.com/ew9ej

The Next Web?
By Simon St. Laurent.
"Simon St. Laurent steps up to ask which of the competing visions for 
the next stage of the Web's development have borne fruit, including the 
latest contender: Web 2.0 and AJAX."
http://tinyurl.com/p75sn


+08: NAVIGATION.

A Study of Website Navigation Methods
Thomas S. Tullis, Ellen Connor, Lori LeDoux, Ann Chadwick-Dias, Marty 
True, and Michael Catani.
"In the midst of a project during which we overhauled an internal 
website, we ran into some issues in deciding on a navigation method for 
the redesigned website. We want to share with you our approach to 
selecting an appropriate navigation method for the site. Our client 
favored a style that we predicted would create usability issues; we 
favored a style that the client wasn't overly fond of. Therefore, we 
decided to conduct a usability study and let users choose for us!"
http://tinyurl.com/bhdq7

When You Need to Localize and Categorize
By Christian Donner.
"The creation of a localization taxonomy can become a significant piece 
of an entire CMS implementation project, particularly when your 
regional offices are in control of their local taxonomies and want to 
serve local customers in the best way. As you have seen, the concepts 
available for simple application localization are insufficient for the 
localization of complex international content. To get it right, you 
must be prepared for a substantial amount of analysis and the price tag 
that comes with it."
http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/141-Localization

Websites Reflect True Face of an Organization
By Gerry McGovern.
"The technical writers could find the content really quickly. That's 
because they understood the labyrinthine structure that was used to 
organize the product groups. In fact, this structure was logical if 
looked at from the point of view of the organization. The structure 
that works well to organize internal activities is rarely the structure 
that will make life easy for the customer. Complexity never really goes 
away. It just gets shifted around. Staff in a particular section get to 
know and be comfortable with a particular structure. It becomes easy 
for them. For them to create a structure that is customer-focused 
requires a lot of work and effort. It's like this: making life simple 
for the customer usually means making life more complex for the 
producer."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2006/nt-2006-03-13-customer-centric.htm

SxSW Notes: Web Standards and Search Engines: Searching for Common 
Ground
By Stuart Colville.
"MH (Molly E Holzschlag): As someone who advocates standards and 
semantic markup it's intriguing to me that in using html semantically 
this helps search engines find content..."
http://tinyurl.com/g94m5

The Case For Search Analytics
By Hurol Inan.
This is an excerpt chapter of the e-book 'Search Analytics, A Guide to 
Analyzing and Optimizing Website Search Engines'. The chapter begins, 
"Do you know your website's top 20 or 100 keywords? They are more 
important than you probably think. McDonald's restaurants, for example, 
began offering a healthy menu after enough people asked for it at the 
counter. They would almost certainly have done the same if they had 
noticed the keyword phrase 'healthy options' entered regularly on the 
company's website..."
http://www.hurolinan.com/books/searchanalytics/preview.htm


+09: PHP.

Iterators in the Simplest Sense: An Accessible Implementation in PHP 4
By Alejandro Gervasio.
"In this first article of a series, Alejandro Gervasio explains the 
core concepts of Iterators in PHP, concentrating most of his efforts on 
the subject's practical side."
http://tinyurl.com/enxap


+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

The Buzz is Black
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
"On March 13, 2006 at SxSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, WaSP unveils a 
redesigned site..."
http://www.webstandards.org/2006/03/13/the-buzz-is-black/

Opera 9.0 Fully Passes ACID2 Test
By Rob Malda.
"Rytis writes 'Opera has just become the second browser after Safari to 
be able to pass completely the famous ACID2 test. Mark Wilton-Jones is 
running a little article on the history of the Opera and ACID tests. Of 
course, it includes a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the nice happy face 
saying "Hello world!'."
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/12/1416222

SxSW Notes: How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards
By Stuart Colville.
"Web developers the world over understand the benefits that 
standards-based development provide, but how do you get management or a 
client to understand as well? A small band of committed geeks got AOL 
and Time Inc. to embrace Web standards, not only in the Development 
organization, but also throughout the company - including Design and 
Senior Management. Come learn how they did it, and how you can do it 
too..."
http://tinyurl.com/mn4jk


+11: TOOLS.

GrayBit
By Jona Fenocchi and Mike Cherim.
"GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually 
convert any full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the 
purpose of visually testing the page's perceived contrast."
http://graybit.com


+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

Don't Letterspace the Lower Case Without a Reason
By Richard Rutter.
"A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic 
Goudy liked to say. The reason for not letterspacing lower case is that 
it hampers legibility. But there are some lowercase alphabets to which 
this principle doesn't apply. Moderate letterspacing can make a face 
such as lowercase Univers bold condensed more legible rather than less."
http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Motion/2.1.7/


+13: USABILITY.

The Truth About Google's So-Called 'Simplicity'
By Donald A. Norman.
"The truth about Google? It isn't simple...I am sick and tired of 
hearing people praise its clean, elegant look."
http://www.uigarden.net/english/the-truth-about-googles-so-called-simplicity

Introducing User-Centered Design
By Free Usability Advice.
"Question: I am the only Information Architect plus Designer in an IT 
Solutions company. I am also fresh out of college. How can I introduce 
some processes to work with the programmers / coders who are working on 
Enterprise Solutions?"
http://tinyurl.com/nfbj4

5 Ways To Make Sure That Users Abandon Your Forms
By Eric G. Myers.
"All I wanted to do was schedule a service appointment for my car. As 
many of you will recall, I will avoid talking to a human if I can when 
engaging in these types of tasks. So, I did what ever red-blooded Geek 
would do and I went to the dealership's web site. Please don't write me 
to tell me what an idiot I am for taking my car to the dealer for 
service. This particular dealer (which shall remain nameless because 
I'm going to dog them in a minute) actually has a fabulous grip on 
customer experience. In person."
http://tinyurl.com/zo4y9

Selling Usability
By Jeff Atwood.
"...You may have trouble selling usability improvements - but I don't 
think you'd have any trouble selling a three to five fold increase in 
sign-up rates."
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000539.html


+14: XML.

Serving XHTML With the Correct Mime type using PHP
By Neil Crosby.
"A lot of websites nowadays make sure that they validate to XHTML 1.0 
or 1.1 standards. At least, they think they do. The sad fact is, that 
unless the correct mime type is being used, no browser will actually 
process your carefully put together XHTML as XHTML. Instead, it's 
treated as tag soup, just as if you'd used any other doc type to 
identify your page..."
http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mimetypes


[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).

As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the 
accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) guidelines.  Please let me know 
if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN 
guideline information please visit:
http://www.headstar.com/ten


+ SIGN OFF.

Until next time,

Laura L. Carlson
Information Technology Systems and Services
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, MN U.S.A. 55812-3009
mailto:lcarlson at d.umn.edu


[Issue ends.]