Entries for month: “June 2008”
52 Doodles
I work with a strange cat at Page Design named Kurt. A real oddball guy. Okay, not really… Kurt's pretty normal I guess, if there is such a thing as normal. However his art work is strange, quirky, odd, fun, humorous, and a few other colorful descriptive words. Check out Kurt Kland's website 52 Doodles where he does a doodle a week during our Monday morning meetings when he is supposed to be paying attention.
→ Respond NowTags: Design · General · Inspiration
Free Photoshop Brushes
I spent the weekend decommissioning one of my old web servers. I stumbled upon my very first version of pixeljunkie.org. It was the original site that later became visual28.com. In addition to chuckling while looking over my old designs and poor programing tactics, I ran across some old photoshop brushes that I offered as a free download. They were hugely popular back then so I hope people can still find them useful today. These were originally created in Photoshop 5.5 but I was able import them into Photoshop CS3 just fine. If you find them useful please leave me a comment so I know people are actually reading this blog. So please enjoy them.
Need help installing your new photoshop brushes? Head on over to My Photoshop Brushes and read their tutorial on how to install your new brushes. While your there check out their brushes too as they have some really cool ones!
→ Respond NowTags: Design · Freebies · Photoshop
Basic SEO Tips
I am not an SEO expert but I know a thing or two about good practices. In talking with some young and upcoming web designers this past week at a user group meeting they asked about SEO and what they could do to help their site rank higher. When I started explaining the basics many of them dropped their jaws at how simple it is to overlook the obvious. I thought this would be a great opportunity to point out some basic SEO tips that web designers at any level can do to make their sites rank higher in search engine results.
Use a descriptive title tag. Every page title should explain what the given page is about in 65 characters or less. The homepage, should start with the sites name followed by additional description to explain what users can find on your site. Pages below the homepage should explain what the content is about first. If you still want the sites name visible include it after the page description. For more on this see point 6 in Jakob Neilsen's article "Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design" as he explains it very clearly.
Use the meta description tag. Although many search engines place a low priority on your meta tags, one tag still remains useful. The meta description tag. Craft a well written but short description telling what your site is about. This is used by search engines in search results listings. This too should be very short and to the point.
Keywords in link text. When users and search engines scan your page they are looking for useful trigger words or keywords. When you create a link on your page avoid using the default "Click Here" phrase and instead link text that is relative to the page you are referring.
Markup Order is important. It's no secret that some major search engines will only index your page to a certain point. Placing your content before your sidebar in the markup order will ensure that more of your important information is indexed.
Use proper alt text. Search spiders do not see images so using a good description of your image in the alt text to tell the search engine whet your image is about.
Include a sitemap. In my previous post "Top 20 Most Valuable Websites" I linked to XML-Sitemaps. You can use their service to generate a proper sitemap to upload to your site. Most of the big search engines use this sitemap if it's available to see all the content on your site quickly.
Outside sites with related Information
- http://www.webdesignerwall.com – SEO Guide for Designers
- http://stylizedweb.com – Learn SEO Basics
- http://seo2.0.onreact.com – 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability
- http://www.tommylogic.com – 301 Redirect
With some basic enhancements to your site not only will you make your site search engine friendly, but you will also make it more useful to your visitors in the process. It's a win-win situation.
→ Respond NowTags: General · SEO
Top 20 Most Valuable Websites
I wanted to take a break from the rants on accessibility, and post a top 20 list of the most useful websites that I have found. These are sites that I use all the time and feel their services are incredibly valuable to me, both in my daily workflow, and in my freelance workflow. Top 20 lists appear to be very popular so here is my contribution to the community.
→ Respond NowTags: Design · Freebies · General
List Abuse or Best Practice
I am researching the practical use or abuse of unordered/ordered lists on web pages. I have started using the JAWS screen reader to assist me in producing better solutions for my websites. I have also spent some time surfing other peoples websites with JAWS to get a feel for what works well.
I made an alarming discovery that I felt was not acceptable. It seems that the latest trends for semantic markup is to place the entire website in a huge unordered list. One term to describe this approach is called "divless" and is quoted as:
"DIVless is W3C friendly and was designed to give developers another method to create website layouts in a standards-friendly fashion."
Divless means very piece of content is in a list. Everything from navigation menus, sidebar content, paragraphs, to footers. In my experience this made JAWS read out every list level and nested lists level on a page. This process took a long time to go through. This also had a side effect of causing JAWS to progressively slow down it's speech rate. Items near the bottom of the page were reading back so slow that I stopped the screen reader and went to another site. It was just plain painful.
The argument I read most often in favor of this method is that older browsers understand the unordered list element and therefore render better. I have tested this theory and the older browsers do not support the level of css required to render a layout of this complexity and will simply render a massive list of items that don’t belong in a list.
I feel that the degraded visual appearance of a div based layout looks vastly better to a user of an older browser. It also does not adversely effect a screen readers ability to parse your pages content.
During my research, I found an article that says just about everything I wanted to say in this article. Rather than restating what’s already been said, I urge you to read this article titled "Are Lists Becoming the New Tables?" by Mike Cherim He goes into other issues with this methodology that I had not yet discovered. His argument is better than mine and has more facts to support up his philosophy.
I think that lists are better served to do what they were intended. Make lists. Not replace tables.
So my question to you all. Are divless websites the best method for presenting content? just because it's semantic and validates does that make it more accessible or more usable? Until I can see evidence that points to the contrary, I am in the camp that divs are better suited for markup than a list.
→ Respond NowTags: Accessibility · CSS · usability
