#25524
Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz
Making it as a web designer is like staying alive in the slammer. So before you sharpen your Photoshop skills or crack open that new book on crafting more effective customer experiences, you’d be well advised to catch a few reruns of HBO's Oz. ALA system designer Brian Alvey points out the parallels between a successful career in web design and the popular prison drama.
Alvey, Brian. List Apart, A (2004). Articles>Web Design
#28266
Everything You Wanted to Know About SQL Injection
If you are a CMS user or web developer then you should know what SQL injection attacks are and how to protect your web applications against them. Hackers are using more SQL based attacks, getting smarter about how to attack a website and using better tools. You have to get a good understanding of how their attacks work if you are going to choose the right software and keep your website secure. Here I will review several types of SQL injection attacks and how they occur. Then take a look at what web developers and end users can do to prevent them.
McDade, Carl. Hiveminds (2006). Articles>Web Design>Databases>SQL
#23953
Eviter le Langage Trop Promotionnel
Internet n'est pas un mass media réceptionné passivement comme peut l'être la télévision ; Internet est un média qui est activé par l'utilisateur. C'est ce qui explique sans doute l'échec relatif de la publicité en ligne à laquelle les internautes ont tout le loisir de ne pas prêter attention. Les surfeurs n'ont pas de temps à gaspiller : ils s'orientent tout droit vers les informations qui leur sont utiles et fuient tout ce qui ressemble à de la publicité.
Redaction (2004). (French) Articles>Web Design>Writing
#28095
Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines
'Use a Search Box instead of a link to a Search page.' This is one guideline from the plethora of recently created usability guidelines to help designers produce more usable web sites. It makes sense. After all, there are more than 42 million web sites on the Internet. It should be simple to study these sites and put together a list of 'do's' and 'don'ts' that, when followed, will produce easy-to-use sites. But...
Spool, Jared M. uiGarden (2006). Articles>Usability>Standards>Web Design
#27484
Without innovative solutions that are imaginative and that promote the talents of the producer, the designer is left solving narrow, piecemeal issues that don't add up to much. Which is why Nielsen and Tahir reduce everything to the banal. They accept that the interface is the most critical aspect of the product, losing sight of the possibilities of the product itself.
Perks, Martyn. Spiked Online (2002). Articles>Usability>Web Design>CRM
#26762
Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0
The industry has spent a lot of time defining Web 2.0 and mapping its DNA. But as we attempt to emulate the fast-growth success of the Web 2.0 darlings, we need to zero in on the parts of the DNA that actually create this noteworthy new value.
Schauer, Brandon. Adaptive Path (2005). Articles>Web Design
#27800
Extensible Master-Page Framework for ASP.NET 1.1 Using Pattern Oriented Design
Development of a framework for master-pages using ASP.NET and C#.
Mukhtar, Shams. Code Project, The (2004). Articles>Web Design>Server Side Includes>ASP
#31905
Extreme Usability: How to Make an Already-Great Design Even Better
The 1% of websites that don't suck can be made even better by strengthening exceptional user performance, eliminating miscues, and targeting company-wide use and unmet needs.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#13738
An Eye on User Data: An Interview with Jared Spool, Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering
Our most striking finding is how bad web sites are in general. We have yet to find a site where, if you choose questions at random based on information the developers have placed on the site, users can find the answers more than 50% of the time. (The best we've found is 42% of the time.)
Spool, Jared M. WebWord (1999). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#26129
Eyes Top Left: Lessons from Eyetrack III
Where do your eyes go when you read articles on the Web? What do you notice, and what do you miss? The upper left quarter of the screen gets the most attention, according to the Eyetrack III research of The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools.
McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2005). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Eye Tracking
#27167
F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Eye Tracking
#32026
Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence 
Not all Facebook users appreciated the September 2006 launch of the `News Feeds' feature. Concerned about privacy implications, thousands of users vocalized their discontent through the site itself, forcing the company to implement privacy tools. This essay examines the privacy concerns voiced following these events. Because the data made easily visible were already accessible with effort, what disturbed people was primarily the sense of exposure and invasion. In essence, the `privacy trainwreck' that people experienced was the cost of social convergence.
Boyd, Danah. Convergence (2008). Articles>Web Design>Privacy
#29799
'Faces of the Fallen' and the Dematerialization of US War Memorials
The advent of internet technology has enabled the process of memorialization of those killed in US military conflicts to keep pace with the casualties themselves and, as such, has marked a shift in both the ideology of the war memorial as symbol and the ideology-driven media use of those symbols. This article argues that a process of increasing humanization and specificity enabled by the information architecture of the internet has led to a form of `war memorial', exemplified by www.facesofthefallen.org, that emphasizes decontexualized human loss at the expense of a coherent representation of a military nature for the loss itself.
Grider, Nicholas. Visual Communication (2007). Articles>Web Design>Visual Rhetoric>History
#26699
Facilitating Conversations: Orange, Interface Design, and Electronic Discourse
The philosophy behind the Orange Journal requires that the editors take several practical, theoretical, and technical elements into careful consideration in order to provide the best knowledge-building community possible.
Glazebrook, Rob L. Orange Journal, The (2005). Articles>Publishing>Web Design
#25537
A Fairy, a Low-Fat Bagel, and a Sack of Hammers
One bright, sunny day, the Bad Internet Fairy closed down every company and organization site on the web. But even though all those company and organization sites had closed down, the internet was still ablaze with activity.
Usborne, Nick. List Apart, A (2003). Articles>Web Design>Writing
#20260
When did weblogs stop filtering the web and begin cluttering it instead? Rich Robinson on digital glut and creative solutions.
Robinson, Richard. List Apart, A (2000). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#26570
To explore information behavior from a psychological perspective by relating information seeking to personality traits and study approaches. Fast surfing could be related to a surface study approach and emotionality, as well as to low openness to experience and low conscientiousness. Broad scanning was linked to extraversion, openness, and competitiveness, whereas deep diving was a search pattern typical of analytical students with a deep and strategic study approach.
Heinström, Jannica. Journal of Documentation (2005). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design>Cognitive Psychology
#20655
The criteria for web-based technology and information are based on access guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. Many of these provisions ensure access for people with vision impairments who rely on various assistive products to access computer-based information, such as screen readers, which translate what's on a computer screen into automated audible output, and refreshable Braille displays. Certain conventions, such as verbal tags or identification of graphics and format devices, like frames, are necessary so that these devices can 'read' them for the user in a sensible way. The standards do not prohibit the use of web site graphics or animation. Instead, the standards aim to ensure that such information is also available in an accessible format. Generally, this means use of text labels or descriptors for graphics and certain format elements. (HTML code already provides an 'Alt Text' tag for graphics which can serve as a verbal descriptor for graphics). This section also addresses the usability of multimedia presentations, image maps, style sheets, scripting languages, applets and plug-ins, and electronic forms. The standards apply to Federal web sites but not to private sector web sites (unless a site is provided under contract to a Federal agency, in which case only that web site or portion covered by the contract would have to comply). Accessible sites offer significant advantages that go beyond access. For example, those with 'text-only' options provide a faster downloading alternative and can facilitate transmission of web-based data to cell phones and personal digital assistants.
Usability.gov. Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Section 508
#30475
Fieldsets, Legends and Screen Readers
The grouping and labelling of thematically related controls within a form is an important aspect of providing semantic information so users can understand and complete a form successfully. Differences in quality and implementation of support across user agents can hamper some users' ability to benefit from this information. This must not be taken as disincentive to developers, as the benefits of using these elements outweighs the negatives. But it is clear that some assistive technology vendors need to improve implementation of HTML features that enhance accessibility, so their users can gain the most benefit.
Lemon, Gez. Paciello Group, The (2007). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Semantic
#32006
Fifteen Things You Can Do with Yahoo! UI
Slicken up your web apps with these tips and tricks using the Yahoo! User Interface library.
Diaz, Dustin. Vitamin (2008). Articles>Web Design>Programming>Ajax
#31071
Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
Findability is to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as 'web standards' is to 'table layouts.' In a web whose vastness exceeds comprehension, sites with findable content win. The good news is that everyone on your team can help make your site findable.
Walter, Aarron. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#13345
Finding Information on the Web: Does the Amount of Whitespace Really Matter?
It has been a long-held notion that the use of open space or 'whitespace' adds not only to the attractiveness of the design of a written publication, but adds to the functionality as well. For example, it has been stated that whitespace plays the crucial role of 'directing the viewers attention to the regions where important information is provided and allowing the global structure of the composition to assume a meaningful configuration' (Mullet & Sano, 1995, p. 126). It is contended that Whitespace 'gives the eye a place to restIt can help to organize the material on the page. It can tie successive pages together by repetition of identifiable areas' (White, 1974, p. 48). However, it has been asserted by Web usability researcher Jared Spool that these assumptions should not apply to Web design.
Bernard, Michael, Barbara S. Chaparro and R. Thomasson. Usability News (2000). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#29953
Firefox 2.0 brought several important changes in its XML support. It's currently reaching its peak in user deployment. Learn about updated XML features in Firefox 2.0, including a controversial change to the handling of RSS Web feeds.
Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>Web Browsers
#32075
Firefox 3: The Webmasters Portal to the Internet
So now, you have absolutely no excuse! Firefox’s newest release, version 3, takes everyone’s favorite open source web browser to a level unparalleled by any of the competition. While Firefox has always been the browser of choice for most web developers, designers, and internet geeks, the new features have taken it to a completely different level for user experience. So you’re a web developer or graphic designer and don’t use Firefox? Why not? Firefox makes being a webmaster much less of a chore. With hundreds of useful extensions, Firefox allows webmasters to customize their browser to meet their needs. Need some examples? Here’s a few I use on a daily basis.
Robbins, Kyle. ReEncoded (2008). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Web Browsers
#25231
Firefox Spread Leads to Design Scrutiny, Built-In RSS Feeds
Are the browser wars back? As Firefox and Netscape gain steam, site designers can avoid losing users by focusing on Web standards. Plus, built-in RSS is here -- warts and all.
Glaser, Mark. Online Journalism Review (2005). Articles>Web Design>Standards
