February 27, 2007
Recently, while training a group of content authors on writing for the web, I had to explain the difference between appearance and semantics. The authors were not techies, so I wanted to avoid talking about HTML, web standards and anything else with a strong eye-glazing potential. That’s when I turned to Microsoft Word…
February 23, 2007
I’ve just posted up my first in a series of blog posts on accessibility over at the IIA blog.
February 22, 2007
(For the next couple weeks, we’ll be guest blogging over at the IIA blog, so most posts will appear both here and there.)
Over at the Vrije University, in Amsterdam, there’s a nice little tutorial on Fitt’s Law. If you haven’t heard it before, Fitt’s Law was established back in 1954, and focuses on the speed of clicking onscreen elements. Anyone in web design should be at least superficially familiar with this law.
February 20, 2007
In this week’s New York Times Magazine cover story, “From 0 to 60 to World Domination“, author Jon Gertner teases apart what makes Toyota “as close to a juggernaut as any corporation in existence”. (I had to look up juggernaut: it means “a huge, powerful and overwhelming force or institution”.)
Being a NY Times magazine article, it’s long but readable, full of small insights, but too subtle to let you come away with one simple conclusion. But more to the point, what exactly does it have to do with designing websites?
February 16, 2007
Apart from all the writing you need to do on a blog, there is a huge amount of additional overhead involved, one of which is managing and moderating comments. You may need to respond to some comments, whereas others are just spam offering instant enlargement or other gratifications of the flesh. Similar to spam by email, if you publish a blog, you may have to spend considerable time moderating comments let alone the time required to respond to the ones that are bona fide. Along with death and taxes, you may have to be stoic enough to accept comment spam is part of the price you pay for having a blog and every now and then whisper the serenity prayer to yourself. Some people don’t bother with comments, it’s too much work. So how do you cope?
February 14, 2007
Following on from my previous post on tracking documents with google analytics, I’ve updated the javascript to now track external links as well as non-html documents
February 13, 2007
Hot from the Google Enterprise blog, Cyrus Mistry, from the Google Enterprise team has just announced that the Intranet Journal has awarded the Google Search Appliance “Product of the year”.
