Category: design

Deadly Oversights

I’m a fan of Marcia Yudkin’s Marketing Minute, a free weekly email with a brief marketing idea. This week she talks about judging the potentially award winning sites that are up for this year’s Webby Awards. She says she is amazed by the failures of some of the sites and lists a few of what she terms “deadly oversights:”

  • A hotel that mentions nowhere on the home page where it’s
    located
  • Financial information sites that invite people to sign up
    without saying what members receive or what membership costs
  • Sites for residential complexes that neglect to say when construction will be completed and whether units are
    available
  • An employment firm hiding one digit in its toll-free
    number in the site’s top banner
  • Blogs written in first person without any clue anywhere
    who “I” is

A reminder that the old rule that every web page should answer three questions still is a good one. The three questions are a) where am I? b) where can I go? c) where have I been?

Addendum 12/15/06 A post by another Webby judge today, Meryl Evans, said, “As I review web sites for the Webbys, I’m still seeing the same problems I saw last year, the year before that… repeat.” Wow. With these two judges sounding so discouraged about the quality of the entries, it makes you ponder just how much honor a Webby Award should convey to the winners.

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W3C Accessibility Before and After Demonstration

[Draft] Before and After Demonstration: Overview: “The ‘Before and After Demonstration’ is a multi-page resource suite that shows common accessibility barriers using practical examples. The demonstration consists of an inaccessible Web site, an accessible version of the same site, as well as information about the demonstrated barriers. This demonstration does not attempt to cover every checkpoint of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) nor to provide an exhaustive list of examples but to demonstrate some key aspects of Web accessibility.”

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New Tips for Handheld CSS from Opera

Two new articles at the Opera Dev site are full of good advice for handheld CSS authors.The Phone Factor – Opera Developer Community has information about page design, network speed, processor speed, memory, user interface and document windows. There are helpful design tips for markup, CSS, graphics and JavaScript.

The second article, Designing with Opera Mini in Mind, covers factors that are different about the Opera Mini approach.

Opera’s Dev site has another helpful article, not as new as the two just mentioned, called Making Small Devices Look Great that is full of helpful tips.

Related posts: Testing CSS for Handhelds, Want to Write CSS for a Handheld?

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Eric Meyer and lynda.com team up

The long awaited collaboration between Eric Meyer’s CSS expertise and Lynda Weinmann’s training movies on CD ROM expertise has just published. CSS Site Design is a set of CDs priced at $149.95, which might make you faint if you were thinking book prices, but is pretty standard for CDs. I haven’t seen this yet so I can’t give you a review. I expect a lot from this pair—good CSS and good presentation—and hope to have a chance to review it in-depth at some point.

Create Pages that Fill the Browser with CSS

Zoe Gillenwater has a new free article at Community MX: Create Pages that Fill the Browser with CSS. It’s complete with downloadable files and cross-browser tips.

I’m happy to say that Zoe agreed to be the technical editor for the book I’m currently writing. She’s one of the best CSS brains in the business and I was very happy when she agreed to spend several months making sure my new book is technically correct.

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Is PNG Transparency Really a Big Deal?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is about why it’s a big deal. I’ve been searching the few available resources on PNG transparency lately and I’ve found that most of them are impossibly difficult to understand. But I’m trying. I think I’ve finally figured out why PNG transparency is so longed for, while GIF transparency is regarded as inadequate.

With IE7 about to be released, the future for PNG transparency is suddenly brighter. The possibility of IE7’s release has driven all of us to extremes of relearning, and PNG has been my interest lately.

A GIF can be transparent. True. It uses what is called index transparency. This means that a color is either completely visible (opaque) or completely invisible (transparent.) A PNG can do that, too. But it goes several steps better. A PNG also can handle alpha transparency. This means that up to 254 different colors can be set to varying degrees of transparency in a single image. You can imagine the fancy effects you could get layering a transparent PNG over a background image. Or piling up a bunch of transparent PNGs using z-index to achieve all sorts of interesting effects. Or sliding transparent PNGs over each other with a technique like the sliding doors effect.

I’m shaking my head yes, because I finally figured out what the big deal was all about. I know the great designers have already known this for a long time. Not being a great designer, I just got it. The great designers have whipped up ways to make IE5/6 work with PNG transparency, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t want to, just so they can play with this marvelous toy. Well, I’m on the bandwagon now, and I say this is a big deal!

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