Monday, June 21, 2004

CSS from the Ground Up

A very good introduction tutorial on Cascading Style Sheets by Joe Gillespie.

Why Switch to XHTML?

Lee Underwood offers his insights as to why you might want to consider XHTML.

The End-All Guide to Small-Screen Web-Dev

Nothing is more fun than seeing your Web page nestled nicely into a teeny tiny handheld screen; and nothing is more excruciatingly horrendous than trying to figure out how to get it there. Heidi Pollock offers a helping hand.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Inspirational web site

From time to time, WebTopia will point to a web site that is inspirational in design, layout, content, and overall presentation. Today we point you to Future Systems.This is a company that deals wth architectural and design practice producing highly original work.

Checking Your Site for Cross-Browser Compatibility

How to Check Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine (Cross-Browser Compatibility Checking)
by Christopher Heng.

Meta Tags

There are a lot of meta tags to use, and while they all serve some purpose, simply adding all of them to your site doesn't improve your search engine placement. Instead, having a lot of extraneous tags can slow down your page loading, and some search engines might penalize you for "spamdexing".

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Quick Guide on Website Assessment and Evaluation

A full site assessment and evaluation uses multi-evaluators and incorporates two testing procedures:

1. A site assessment survey to provide an overview of initial impressions of the site.

2. A modified version of the heuristic evaluation procedure, originally developed by Jakob Nielsen, to identify and rate the severity of core usability problems.

Outline of the evaluation process used by Web Usability.

In Defense of Scope Creep

Hal Helms covers the term 'scope creep'. It's the term we use in projects that identifies what happens when the porch light goes on in the customers head, thus discovering what they really want.

Art Direction and the Web

Stephen Hay's article is to introduce readers to the principles and techniques of the art director — which relate closely to web design — and show how these can influence the overall effect of a website.

Tackling Usability Gotchas in Large-scale Site Redesigns

Jeffrey Zeldman's article discusses how he addressed usability problems when working on the ALA 3.0 redesign.

Ten Questions for Dan Cederholm

Dan Cederholm is an award-winning web designer and author living in Salem, Massachusetts. As principal of SimpleBits, Dan's design and development consulting firm, he brings years of experience in designing and building sites with web standards. Dan is well known for his redesigns of Fast Company and Inc.com using standards-compliant methods, while pushing the limits of CSS.