A2 Codesigner » Web Development

The UX Web Summit

Nathan — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:50:41 +0000

Attending the UX Web Summit today was a great refresher on the topic of User Experience. The web conference hosted by Environments for Humans was the first I have attended and won’t be the last. The conference covered User Experience at every stage of the development process, from the original concept down to the final design. Majority of the techniques covered at the conference are all taught at Washtenaw Community College in the Internet Professional Program (my alma mater). Some new techniques that caught my eye were the use of Page Descriptions Diagrams and Content Strategy, both brought up by Nick Finck of BlueFlavor.com. Two techniques that I will most definitely add to my arsenal of Usability Research.

Overall I enjoyed the conference and the great presenters who all have years experience working for successful companies. Instead of having the users experience in the back of my mind during some stages of development it will be at the front during every stage of the development process.

CSS3 Overview

Nathan — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:15:03 +0000

Even though we all know the sluggish pace of the W3C and the cross browser compatitibility issues, web sites all over are starting to use these new styling properties. Majority of the ones being used are the cool ones and are of course propietary using the -moz for Firefox and -webkit for Safari properties. Luckily the presentation gracefully degrades with inferior browsers. Properties such as rounded corners border-radius:, text-shadow:, border-image:, and box-shadow are becoming very popular.

It will still be a few years before we can all adopt some of the more useful CSS3 properties and functionality such as column: for sturdy multi-column layouts. Clearing floats and positioning issues will be a thing of the past. Media queries which allow you to pass different style sheets based on the browsers screen size. Extremely useful for growing number of mobile internet users as well as users with large monitors at higher resolutions.

There are already some great resources available if you feel like using some CSS3 on your new websites or start practicing for future reference.

CSS3 Introduction. A great article by Design Shack introducing the basics of of CSS3.

CSS3.info. One stop shop for everything about CSS3. A list of all the properties, examples, browser compatibility, and selector test for your browser.

CSS3 Cheat Sheet. PDF (123K) created by Smashing Magazine.

Of course the W3C has their working draft on the CSS3 specs but as usual it’s cryptic and isn’t to useful. So have some fun writing invalid code for the future.

5 Useful Firefox Add ons for up and coming Web Developers

Nathan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:43:19 +0000

I have found all of these add ons very useful for developing web sites and inspecting other developers web sites. I am also assuming that all the new web developers out there already have Firefox, if your using Internet Explorer for anything other than testing, you still have a lot to learn.

1. Firebug

Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. If you only get one of these add ons make it this one.

2. Web Developer

Along with Firebug this tool box has everything you need to inspect and edit code on any website.

3. YSlow

Optimize the performance and download time of your websites with this tool.

4. Accessibility Extension

Support web developers and people with disabilities in accessing and testing web resources for accessibility features.

5. Operator

Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

Search the full list of Firefox Add Ons.