Musings on: ColdFusion, Fusebox, Cascading Style Sheets and Accessibility http://www.shayna.com/ Gone are the days that web sites were launched with great fanfare and even greater dread. The roll out of an entirely re-designed, re-architected site seems dead. So if we no longer are supposed to do major overhauled re-launches what do we do? Jared Spool of the User Interface Engineering tells us. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=144 2006-08-09T04:00:00--05:00 Recently I've gotten turned onto Usability Views, its an aggregation web site that links to over 11,000 articles on Usability, Accessibility, Information Architecture, and Human Computer Interaction. The site itself is pretty basic, but the information it contains? Priceless http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=126 2006-06-14T07:45:00--05:00 A new Pew study on cell phone usage is out, showing that younger people, and minorities are tending to use their cell phones as mini-PC's using them to do everything from listening to MP3's to playing games to (gasp!) surfing the Net. (Pages 5 and 6 of the PDF report) What does this mean for us as developers? Maybe not much now if our sites might not be aimed at those demographics, but as this population ages, our web sites had better be able to be surfed easily with a cell phone. This means streamlined content and, you guessed it, xHTML and CSS. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=121 2006-06-07T07:40:00--05:00 According to Jakob Nielson, users tend to use an F-shaped pattern when reading web sites. First scanning horizontally along the top and then down the left hand side and finally another horizontal pass along the middle. Since this roughly correlates to most web layouts (header and main nav on top, another navigational device on the left and content in the middle), the question that comes to my mind is, is this a natural occurrence, or have we just trained our users to read web pages this way? http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=109 2006-04-26T08:00:00--05:00 Back in the day, Browser Support used to mean that you either supported Netscape or you supported Internet Explorer. Meaning that your web site worked on either one or the other really well and either worked poorly or not at all in the other. Somewhere along the line Browser support began to mean that our site needed to look exactly the same way on every browser out there. In "Graded Browser Support", Nate Koechly, a Senior Web Developer with Yahoo, lays out the notion of supporting all browsers, with "progressive enhancement". As opposed to what we in the web world, usually use which is "graceful degradation". An interesting read and one I fully intend to capitalize on. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=105 2006-04-20T08:35:00--05:00 Similar to my story about my online buying fiasco at Lowe's the other week, is 5 Ways To Make Sure That Users Abandon Your Forms. I really wonder how and why people do this. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=99 2006-04-12T06:30:00--05:00 So I decide to buy a propane grill to go on my deck. I've looked around and the BBQ Grillware 42,000 btu has good reviews and is very good price wise. I've been looking at this grill since I moved in, but was hoping for a sale. Well there is no sale and Lowe's is the exclusive distributor of this grill. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=87 2006-03-28T07:00:00--05:00 While going through old bookmarks the other day, I came across this article from Fast Company, entitled, "The Beauty of Simplicity". It features information on the story behind Google's home page, and how most customers value ease of use. It also describes how creating something both simple, easy to use and compelling is not that easy. Its a good read and also says a lot that we as web professionals need to take to heart. http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=86 2006-03-24T06:00:00--05:00 Michael Bernard of Internetworking has published an article titled, "Examining User Expectations of the Location of Web Objects". Its an interesting article relating to a study of where users expect to find specific types of links. Admittedly some of the expectations of the users are because we as designers have habitually placed our links in the same places. But there is something very compelling about consistency http://www.shayna.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.display_entry&id=63 2004-02-24T08:36:29--05:00