Web Design Blog

Visual Check of Website Images

2006-04-25T12:40:00.001-07:00

Use THIS website to check websites for usability by visually impaired users. The site offers the facility to siimulate colour dificiency problems so, you can see your site the way a 'colour blind' person would. Rather interesting on the whole!

Visual Check of Website Images

2006-04-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

Web Design Methodology

2006-04-25T11:06:00.001-07:00

Jakob Neilsen - again. Paper prototyping as a method for avoiding costly changes to code after full implementation - do the design on paper first! (wow - who would have thought of that??)Actually, these are often created on Photoshop etc and printed out. So, the graphics package is giving your user a really attractive, computer generated, visual impression that looks much like the final product might look.

Furthermore, the suggestion is that a prototype - even when it is coded - doesn't have to contain full functionality. So, for example, an asp or php site with dynamic content would not have to be functional - just pretty enough to convince the client.

Many of the observations on this are similar to what was learned/discussed during Warren's module. The waterfall model is slow but reliable, the spiral method is quick and effective but costly and labour intensive etc etc.

OBSERVATION: Based on my own experience I have found that clients, since they often know very little about web design themselves, are quite happy to accept your recommendations, assuming your designs look impressive enough. Therefore, the purpose of prototyping or other design methodology is simply to ensure that you, the designer, end up with the best possible site in the most efficient manner.

The Times - Web Design?

2006-04-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

In the section on 'Local Government' written by an unknown columnist the following points are made to advise Local Government (councils) on web design:
1. Don't try to control content - instead, concentrate on the presentation of the content within an accepted style. The example cited is at Shrewsbury council
2. Scrap printed leaflet entirely - good advice but not relevant to web design.
3. Consolidate the efforts of several councils into one 'mega site'. I wonder if this is such a good idea - bearing in mind what I have observed elsewhere that sites get very difficult to present and difficult for the user to navigate as the level of content increases.
4. Make even serious content engaging. Best advice so far. Check our Salford City Council. Not only do they have a 'ghost cam' on their site, there is also a section about the history of the Eccles cake. Serious point - on the ghost cam forum page they have contributors from the Netherlands! Thanks to that one 'daft idea' Slaford council are getting their services known as far away as Rotterdam! Great idea.

Observation: Although I am not sure about creating 'mega sites' (I don't like hypermarkets either) I think the idea of making some areas of even a serious site attractive to users is a good one. Get people onto the site and they will look around as well. This technique worked for me too. On the school website I run there is a notice board for staff to communicate with pupils (boring. . . .) a chance for pupils to do homework online (boring. . . . .) and a bulletin board / BLOG where kids can chat. Loads of pupils log in to chat on the bulletin board - and stay long enough to read the messages and do the homework. BINGO!

The Times - WIKIS

2006-04-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

The Times newspaper on the 11th April - An article, written by Richard Susskind (an IT advisor to the Lord Chief Justice and Honary Professor at Gresham College) suggests a new use for WIKIS. (BTW - the term wiki comes from the Hawaiian work wikiwiki - meaning quick!)

His suggestion was around the way WIKIS could be used by the legal profession to gather and summarise a body of legal knowledge about specific, and sometimes obscure, areas of the law. If lawyers were only willing to work collaboratively on this the body of knowledge thus built up could be of enormous value to all - both lawyers and clients.

His suggestion builds on what anthopologists tell us - that the primary difference between man and the animals is that we seek to pass on our knowledge, gained through study and experience, to the next generation. Do WIKIS offer a way for this to happen even more effecively in the future? Could WIKIS in fact alter the whole fabric of our society by making the passing on of knowledge more effective than previously?

Check your site is W3C compliant!

2006-04-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Just in case anyone actually looks at this BLOG! Use the following links to check your own site for compliance with W3C ideals. There are checks for both html and css.
CSS Check
HTML Check
Very well worth checking these sites out. I eventually got my front page to pass and am working on the others.

Meditations on a Learning Objective theme.

2006-04-02T14:03:00.000-07:00

Now that I am starting to compile my BLOG and WIKI material (plus lots more) into my web pages for assessment it occurs to me that structuring these as 5 separate entities may not be the most convenient way of doing this.

Looking at LO2 shows that if a thorough job is done of LO1, many of the points have already been covered. A different structure in which several learning objectives are referred to by one set of material may work better?

Thoughts on a postcard to the usual address please!

More CSS and ASP!

2006-03-29T12:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's session was mostly practical based and I certainly made some progress with my website layout and the process of importing information from the WIKI etc. We looked at navigation layouts using CSS. I'm very much inclined to agree that there is no need for images - coloured bars that change on mouse-over are extremely effective. So, check my previous post and link to the site. Have a look and comment - what do you think?

BTW - I have been working more on my 'commercial' site (the one I run for the school) and playing around with ASPs some more. I discovered something really powerful! It is quite posible, with minimal alteration, to take a query straight from ACCESS and paste the SQL into the 'advanced' window of the Recordset window in Dreamweaver. This overcomes the cumbersome and restrictive nature of the query developer that Dreamweaver offers and lets you do more or less whatever you want - as long as you can get the query to run in Access. As far as I know this is the only way to draw together information from a relational database. Try it out - or respond to this post if you want more info!

CSS Latest Developments

2006-03-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

The latest is that My website is now looking more like it should. There are pages in place that will hold the content already on the wiki and more! (To claim a grade for the learning outcomes.)
Also, I have now settled on a layout that, apart from some minor tweeks to colours, is one I am happy with. Check it out and comment - tell me what you think.

Web Content Accessibility guidlines.

2006-03-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

At last - the holy grail (or should that be the Bible) of web design. W3C issue guidelines on web design.

There is no need for me to go over what this organisation advises - just click the link! However, their 14 point list seems to make sense. Two of the most interesting issues arise in their section on "Themes of accessible design".
1. Ensuring graceful transformation - That is, making sure your pages are usable despite physical contraints. Key points here include separating structure from content, making text available (esp alterntive to images etc), providing information that makes the page usable even if the user can't see it (text description etc) and pages that don't rely on set hardware. This point is especially interesting! ie. Don't rely on all users having a mouse!
2. Making content understandable and navigable. Making text clear and understandable, avoiding navigation or information that is too dependent on graphics/video.

Many of these points seem aimed at users who have a visual handicap. The best place to look for further guidance on this is theNational Federation of the Blind

Web Usability - Specific Issues - Accessability

2006-03-20T10:16:00.000-08:00

First - More on Usability:
Eg1:Offermatica claim to be "the leader in website marketing tools and services" and claim that their service can add millions to revenues for online companies.
The aim of this company is to turn visitors into customers. A worthy aim but not entirely relevant to all websites. After all, much of the 'net is about information. The service Offermatica offer seems to be mainly about an effective way to allow designers to make subtle changes - then monitor the effect these have.
This sounds rather like 'suck it and see' and would seem to be a good way of working.

NOTE: On a personal level I did something similar. I checked the web access logs my ISP creates to see which pages visitors were looking at. I them modified the navigation 'bar' (created a nifty FLASH graphic that served the purpose). Two weeks later I checked the logs again and noted a very obvious increase in the number of visitors accessing ALL pages (as opposed to looking just at the first one or two).

Eg2:Vincent Flanders Web pages that suck! Sorry - I think the layout of his page does rather (suck that is!). However, his site is one of the few that are not immediately commercial (ie. trying to sell you a service to 'improve' your website). His ideas are mainly quite personal - the one he rants about most is what he calls MMN (mystery meat navigation) ie. Graphics that change to words/links when you 'mouse over'.
Interestingly, this example is cited by Flanders as a 'bad' case of 'mystery meat' and poor text contrast. If you look at it now there are some fairly obvious changes. Perhaps they listened to him!!

Usability

2006-03-08T12:56:00.000-08:00

On the topic of Usability - This website has a good range of rules and guidance for developing a usable web site.

Perhaps I am missing something but, with my own background in product design, I can't see anything new here (anything that isn't common sense when designing any product). Essentially this website and other reading I did (more examples to follow) outline a product development cycle as follows:
* Figure out what the market/client wants/needs
* Develop conceptual designs (for the web as for products these deal with both appearance & function - think graphical/architectural)
* Mockup/prototype - and get user/client feedback
* Production/Implementation
* Maintenance and feedback (feedback in the case of a website can result in changes being made - for other products it will influence future product development).

Seem logical really. However, this refers to usability for an 'average' user and doesn't extend to the needs of specific groups of users. E.g Visually impaired.

CSS used in web page design

2006-03-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

Well, last session was partly about using CSS so we all had a play with that. I must admit, I have been having real issues using tables to lay out web pages recently (mainly to do with resizing when screen resolution changes) so I was kind of motivated to go away and play with CSS.

Conclusion? Well, check out my webpages for an example of what I did over the weekend. I was so pleased with the appearance of the pages that I spent the time to overhaul the entire site replacing dodgy table layouts with CSS layouts.

What's the point? Well, I hope even the one page shown as an example demonstrates that the result appears rather more professional looking than previously. Also, the issues with re-sizing have disappeared (whew!!!!). The other thing is perhaps most relevent to what we are doing on this course - once you decide on the page layout you want, in this case more or less just one I lifted off Eric Meyer's website (with some colour/font changes), you end up sticking to it - that's the whole point of CSS (Design once, use repeatedly). This results in consistent page layouts throughout the site - good practice according to all sorts of experts!

My Website

2006-02-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

Just the front page there at present but check it out at HERE

ACM Portal

2006-02-26T09:32:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one that finds this a ********** nuisance - that we can't access ACM portal off campus. I have found so many very promising looking articles that I can't access 'cause they are held on ACM portal. Let's start a petition. Surely it must be posible to have an off site access arrangement for this??

Web Design vs Content

2006-02-19T12:12:00.000-08:00

Just to add another thought. Try visiting the site http://www.elenafilatova.com . I guess this really isn't all that clever in terms of web design but - here is the rub - it used to be much worse! When this site first went public it was hosted by angelfire and consisted simply of scrolling screens containing images and text. At the base of each screen was a link either back to the previous page or on to the next page. No index, introduction or real structure. BUT - In the first few days after it was posted this site was receiving over 100 hits worldwide every 2-3 seconds!

Clue to success - CONTENT! A good product sells itself!

Session 14/02/06

2006-02-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

Task - to compare our thoughts on module assessment with the master criteria. First observation: The master criteria are much, much broader than what we considered - partly because we only looked at one learning objective. Second observation: Taking one strand, that of "Reading, Identification of concepts" and comparing it with what we as a group put together here it is apparent that we really weren't far off at all. The only addition the master criteria make is that the selection of 'sources' should be increasingly autonomous as the grade improves. I feel we took this for granted when we wrote our criteria since we never really expected sources of material to be provided for us.

Stuff for Colin's Module

2006-02-12T06:41:00.000-08:00

Hi Guys,
Try this link for a news story about INTEL which is kind of relevant to what we are doing with Colin.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4701522.stm
Can't promise this will work - BBC is sometimes odd about linking direct to their site.

Session 7/2/06

2006-02-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

The session was about using criteria to evaluate web sites. (See related blog). In summary, the basis seems to be that web design, as long as it actually 'works', is rather subjective.

The second half of the session was to do with generating criteria for assessing learning outcomes. We tried to list suitable academic criteria for assessing our final work. These can be viewed here

Web site evaluation

2006-02-07T11:17:00.000-08:00

Review of the bbc.co.uk website!
Web-page load time was considerable - perhaps only due to broadband speed available - which end of the link caused this problem I don't know, I usually find the bbc website is more quickly accessed. Having said that, there are a lot of images and this can slow things down.

The page doesn't auto resize - it simply leaves a big blank space down the right hand side - cool!
As I understand it, this is a standard procedure - to make the page content either centre or left align when viewed at higher screen resolution. Another way is to use tables and set the table size to 100% rather than a pixel width so that it resizes automatically - can look quite effective.

Since the whole site is about news, the content is heavy - there is lots of it!! I don't personally like the layout - using templates - as the links are too small and there are too many of them. In an idal world the content of the page should reflect choices made - and the ongoing links should also reflect the previous choices made to some extent, which they do, there are simply too many choices. Kind of Sainsbury versus Aldi!! Shopping is easier, quicker and more fulfilling when there is less choice!

Summary - massive amount of regularly updated content but the presentation doesn't do it for me! Of course, web evaluation is subjective so another user may be thrilled with this layout.

First Comment

2006-01-31T10:41:00.000-08:00

I don't believe how horrible this is going to look!