Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
Another good article from .net. This one is The Future of CSS Layouts. This one isn’t quite so enthusiastic about @media queries as some of the articles you may have been reading lately.
100% of colleges and universities are using social media at eduGuru.
danah boyd, who often makes more sense than anyone else, speaks out on “real name” policies in “Real Name” Policies are an Abuse of Power.
Motion 2011: motion is known for bringing together the brightest and most creative minds in the motion graphics, visual effects {VFX}, and animation industries. This year is no exception.
Environments for Humans has some great conferences scheduled. You get top experts and you don’t have to leave home to attend.
Style Twitter posts on your site with CSS3. Nice tutorial at .net magazine.
Understanding HTML5 Semantics is at Adobe Dev. Helpful connection linking sectioning elements to the document outline. For example,
Remember, when an element is being used simply for styling purposes or as a convenience for scripting, a div should still be used. The section element is not that generic. It is defining a portion of your page that should create a new section of the outline of the page.
Jared Smith wrote an excellent WebAIM article talking about how Accessiblity and SEO are moving closer and closer together in their goals and techniques. He talks about a variety of things, including HTML5 and SEO. Look at Jared’s list of similarities (links are to WebAIM articles):
The list of accessibility and SEO practices that are closely in alignment include:
- Using proper alternative text for images
- Providing a clear and proper heading structure and avoiding empty headings
- Providing descriptive link text (i.e., avoiding “click here”)
- Ensuring page titles are descriptive, yet succinct
- Not relying on JavaScript for things that don’t need it
- Avoiding mouse dependent interaction
- Using standard web formats when possible
- Providing transcripts and captions for video
- Identifying the language of pages and page content
- Allowing multiple ways of finding content (e.g., search, a site map, table of contents, clear navigation, etc.)
- Using text instead of images when possible
- Providing useful links to related and relevant resources
- Ensuring URLs are human readable and logical
- Presenting a clear and consistent navigation and page structure
- Avoiding CSS and other stylistic markup to present content or meaning
- Defining abbreviations and acronyms
Of course content is king, in both accessibility and SEO.
Teaching Creative Writing with Programming at ReadWriteWeb is one of the most creative teaching ideas I’ve seen in years.
Adobe Launches HTML5 Web Animations Tool is the announcement at Mashable. The tool is called Edge and is free right now because Adobe wants testers and feedback. The tool uses only HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Stephanie Sullivan Rewis tweeted another article about Edge.
Adobe’s Edge summarized on MacWorld: http://srewis.me/p79ij4 #html5 #css3
Stef. Sullivan Rewis
stefsull
It turns out that this story was a hoax. Mashable and BBC News have both confirmed it.
Sorry to have fallen for the story along with everyone else. But, I have to say, hoax or no hoax, if it shamed even one person into upgrading from IE 6 to a newer browser . . .
The headline on Mashable was IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers [STUDY]. According to Mashable, it was actually a pretty big study: 101,326 people divided into groups according to which browser they use. That was correlated with the average IQ of the users.
It turns out that all those Internet Explorer for Dummies books weren’t just part of the Dummies series. Yep. All the extra smart people are using Opera. And the longer you stick with IE, the comparatively dumber you get. Or, as the study concludes, “individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers.”
Here’s a chart of the data collected in the study.
The press release from Canadian company AptiQuant who did the study suggests,
Internet Explorer has traditionally been considered a pain in the back for web developers. Any IT company involved in web development will acknowledge the fact that millions of man hours are wasted each year to make otherwise perfectly functional websites work in Internet Explorer, because of its lack of compatibility with web standards. The continuous use of older versions of IE by millions of people around the world has often haunted web developers. This trend not only makes their job tougher, but has also pulled back innovation by at least a decade. But with the results of this study, IT companies worldwide will start to take a new look on the time and money they spend on supporting older browsers.
The study, titled “Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage” is available as a downloadable PDF document.
A lot of people were quick to step up and say they’d been using Opera (or Chrome) for a long time. I’m going to ignore them. Let’s get some other reactions.
Oh, so many jokes here. > Study: IE users have lower IQ: http://on.mash.to/pNEwdD (@mashable) #browsers #web #w2p
Tanya Snook
spydergrrl
Hate to laugh, but I am! 😉 / RT @mashable: IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers [STUDY] – http://44d.co/fupm
Stephanie Wonderlin
swonderlin
A recent study confirms what we’ve known for ages: IE6 users are stupid 😛 http://t.co/Sd9uVYE Also, @Opera users are the smartest (!)
Lea Verou
LeaVerou
Now there is proof: IE Users Have Lower IQ Than Users of Other Web Browsers http://t.co/tWhWfhS
Lisa S. Johnson
xmoms
i wasnt going to share this, as to not to offend any IE users, but i realized they are prob. too stupid to read it anyway http://j.mp/qGmwc8
Jeff Tierney
jeffreytierney
Well that explains so much! bahahahahahaha http://mashable.com/2011/07/29/internet-explorer-iq/ #idontuseIE #imsmart
Elaine Young
ejyoung67
Like Elaine, I was ROFLMAO when I first read this. For someone like me who makes web sites, IE has been the archenemy for a long time. AptiQuant didn’t make the study to amuse us, however. They were looking for information to help convince corporate decision makers who support older versions of Internet Explorer that it was a bad business decision and that they should move their companies on to something more modern. Kudos to AptiQuant if that is the effect of the study.
What was your reaction? Give us your best IE joke.
Cross posted at BlogHer.
With the unavoidable presence of mobile devices and social networking, 2011 saw some major changes in the way websites are designed. In order to have any presence in the new online experience, web designers have embraced a number of changes, but here are four trends that won’t be going away any time soon.
Image Credit: familymwr
Today’s web designers have to create sites that work easily with mobile devices. More and more people are relying on their smart phones to navigate the Internet. The explosion of apps has also forced a change in the way websites work. Users no longer have to navigate browsers to get exactly where they want to be.
Since Apple holds a large part of the mobile app market, it makes sense that fewer and fewer web designs are incorporating Flash. It’s a tool whose time has past. It may look cool, but it tends to be a time suck. After all, if people are browsing on the go, then, well… they’re on the go! Flash is potentially too time consuming, thus making websites easy to navigate away from, due to impatience.
It’s online suicide to not incorporate social media into a web design. Whether it’s simply putting Facebook, Twitter and RSS buttons in a prominent place on the homepage or whether it’s actually incorporating a Twitter feed, websites with plenty of traffic are those designed to make social networking a fluid part of their design.
The web designer has to also make sure that the website is valuable when the various social media outlets direct visitors back to the actual web page. Although Facebook is the “it” site of the moment, social media sites that do a better job of assimilating themselves into private websites are youtube.com and flickr.com. Both sites allow the users to easily place code into another website so that visuals can be easily accessed.
With the trend towards social media taking hold, SEO is even more important in web design. Basically, the content has to be very high quality, and it has to be something visitors will want to share. Without good Search Engine Optimization tactics, websites will simply fall off Google’s top two pages of search results.
Websites need to have good image content, and about 300 words per page. The words have to be quality content. That means the web designer or the client needs to brush up on fourth grade grammar.
Back to mobile computing. Mobile devices work with a touch-screen design. If the new web designs don’t incorporate this into the site, then the visitor will leave immediately. Therefore, whatever web building tool the designer is using has to provide up-to-date coding options.
Since most of these shifts are centered on mobile computing and the new changes in SEO rules, most web masters and designers can expect them to dominate designs for awhile. Fast, visual, easy to navigate and full of meaningful content will be the primary components of the most popular websites in 2012 and beyond. For the do-it-yourself web builder, look for templates that help optimize the new design trends. Joomla.com and WordPress.org are two good examples of web design sites that will help people keep their websites contemporary.
This is a guest post by Rodney Warner from the Denver Web Design Company Connective Web Design.
We were talking a while back about Google+ allowing for an “other” option among the gender checkbox choices. Now a group called All Out is trying to get Facebook to do a similar thing. Their PR on the petition drive for Facebook linked to this two spirits map, which is quite interesting.
Knowbility and Loop11 have created AccessWorks Testing Portal. Marketers and developers can see pages as people with disabilities do and can get access to users with disabilities for tests. And users with disabilities can get paid to participate in remote accessibility testing. Congratulations to Knowbility and Loop11 for creating and developing this valuable testing portal.
The latest on browser support for HTML5 forms. From wufoo.
Avoiding Common HTML5 Mistakes from HTML5 Doctor.
Reading is Easier on Safari with Lion – Here’s Why from Mac Tips talks about several new features in Lion.
Use Dropbox to Test Your Website Locally from Digital Inspiration is sure a lot less expensive than Browser Cam.
Bet you never thought you’d see Bloom’s Taxonomy mentioned on A List Apart, but here it is. The UX of Learning.