S5 Presents provides a web-based interface to create and share presentations using the standards-based S5 presentation template. Really a great idea. The owner of the site also shares the full source code for the service if you want to set up your own site for S5 presentations.
I just upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress. This version has much better spam blocking for comments and trackbacks. However, it has a new templating engine which I haven’t had time to adapt to my site template yet. So, I’ll be going with the out of the box theme for a while (which I like, actually) until I have time to tweak it.
Eric Meyer has released a simple standards-based slide show system, or S5 for short. This is a very slick way to create a slide show in HTML. I may give it a shot for the next presentation that I do. What I find very exciting about it is that it should be pretty easy to adapt a bunch of existing tools in order to author S5 presentations. In fact, someone has already created a City Desk template that does so.
The Maryland State Board of Elections web site has made excellent use of CSS and HTML to create a lightweight web design that is completely accessible. The total page weight for the home page is just over 7 kb and the stylesheet is a tad over 4 kb. That should serve them well during the election as their traffic spikes over the next day or so. Having such a small file size for the pages allows them to serve more people more quickly while conserving bandwidth.
I think the content of the site is pretty well designed as well, since it answered my question (what time do the polls open) very prominently on the home page.
Peter van Dijck provides us with a view into the Belgian IA/UX community. He scores intercultural bonus points for a Fons Trompenaars reference!
Jeffrey Zeldman revisits web standards evangelism after some time off the rubber chicken circuit. I guess I’m not reading in the right places but I’ve never had a sense that there were huge rifts in the standards social club (other than RSS of course). I never felt turned off towards adopting standards once I learned about the benefits from reading folks such as Zeldman and Meyer. Maybe the controversy rings loudest to those in the middle of it?
Digital Web Magazine – News – Marry Your Designs:
Good design isn’t just about creating the next version of a site, it’s about roadmapping the next 20 versions and making sure this new one follows that path.
I like that quote a lot.
Jeffrey Veen on Damage in Web Design:
Bad design is based on the arrogant and extremely difficult attempts to modify user behavior. Good design derives innovation from existing user behavior. Guess which one succeeds more often?
Veen points out in the article that trying to modify user behavior will result in the user leaving your site for an alternative or routing around the perceived damage. There is no lid on the bad web design skinner box.
Vast majority of pop-up click-throughs are a mistake:
Rob Stevens, head of business behaviour at Bunnyfoot, said: “Achieving an over-inflated click-through rate might help brands to justify their spend, but they are only deceiving themselves. The brand, which we used in our research study, is not only wasting up to 90% of its budget by paying for unintentional click-throughs, it is also frustrating and deceiving users.”
When the august firm of Bunnyfoot Universality says it’s so, it must be. 🙂 Perhaps a few more studies will be done to confirm this and drive a wooden stake through the heart of pop-up advertising.
Last month Simon Willison wrote a post about how web developers need to move beyond advocating web standards for the sake of being compliant to advocating for best practices in general (which leads to standards adoption anyway).
There are plenty of benefits of re-framing web standards in the larger context of best practice. Firstly, discussions get a lot more interesting – as I’ve just demonstrated, there are enough facets to creating effective sites to keep us talking for years to come. Secondly, wrapping web standards in the larger context of industry best practices makes them a much easier pill to swallow. “Our site doesn’t validate” is a turn-off. “Let’s follow industry best practice” is far more appealing.
The best way I have phrased this in my work is to have “code we can be proud of” on our site. If someone goes to view source on our web pages we should feel proud of the techniques we use and that we are indeed using best practices. During our last redesign that phrase seemed to stick and provides focus to our work.
C. David Gammel, CAE 