Review: Professional Blogging

There's a new blog out there that looks promising—professional bloggers can now turn to Performancing for advice. This new blog is focused on professional blogging by offering keywords tips, advice about headline styles, and how to increase your blog traffic.

Hartzer, Bill. Search Engine Guide (2005). Articles>Reviews>Web Design

Programmatically Manipulating Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets with the Apache POI API

The Apache Jakarta POI project consists of Java APIs dedicated to the manipulation of files based on Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format. In this article, you'll learn how to use the APIs of the POI project to read from and write to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. As you will see, the programmatic liberty to manipulate Excel files represents a powerful offering to the Java programmer.The Apache POI contains a number of components. In this article, we'll be focusing our study on the HSSF component. The HSSF project will provide us with the ability to read and write from XLS spreadsheets.

Bhogal, Kulvir S. Dev Articles (2003). Articles>Web Design>Server Side Includes>Microsoft Excel

Programming Hamlets

This tutorial illustrates various aspects of Hamlet programming as it provides a number of practical Hamlet examples. The examples are part of WebZEC (Web-based Zurich Event Console) -- a fast, browser-based console to quickly navigate in intrusion-detection alarms. With these samples, you can develop a good understanding how to use Hamlets for Web-based application development and how Hamlets work.

Pawlitzek, Rene. IBM (2005). Articles>Web Design>Programming

Promiscuous Fictions

With little exaggeration it might be claimed that the primary emotion associated with popular thinking about blogging is anxiety. The number of bloggers and blogs is unwieldy and amorphous: to my mind a sublimity that is often associated with the innumerable swamps journalistic and other commentators who believe that one must, perforce, make some generalization about blogs, all blogs, every blog. Is there something that could be said about every blog? Where would one start?

Curtain, Tyler. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Promises of a Global Intranet

Did you know an intranet could actually be more global than the Internet? The interactions within an intranet are more intense and frequent, and anonymity is replaced with specificity—your real name, job title and location. Company management often believes that a unified employee communication intranet site will foster a community, a shared corporate culture and a universal standard. But a review of two U.S.-based global intranets reveals that today’s reality may fall short.

Lopez, Joselito T. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>International

Protect Your Web Site from Legal Land Mines  

This article explains how regular legal audits can keep your company Web site on the right side of the law.

Juillet, Christopher. Intercom (2004). Articles>Web Design>Legal

A Prototype Theory Approach to Website Localization: An Analytical Method for Technical Communicators    

As global online access grows, Web site designers find themselves creating materials for an increasingly international audience. Cultural groups, however, can have different expectations of what constitutes acceptable Web site design. This article examines how prototype theory can serve as a methodology for analyzing Web sites designed for users from different cultures. Such analyses, in turn, can help individuals create more effective online materials for international audiences.

St. Amant, Kirk R. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Web Design>Localization>Cultural Theory

Providing Context for Ambiguous Link Phrases

This article demonstrates a technique that allows ambiguous link phrases to be rendered visually in a page, whilst making sense to screen readers, and other non-graphical devices, that might render the links out of context.

Lemon, Gez. Paciello Group, The (2007). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Hypertext

Put XHTML 1.0 Strict and Transitional to Work  

As its name suggests, XHTML--which is considered the successor to HTML 4--is a combination of HTML and XML. By combining the power of XML and HTML, XHTML makes Web content more accessible to devices such as phones, handhelds, and televisions. XHTML 1.0 is broken up into what the W3C refers to as three flavors: Strict, Transitional, and Frameset. In this article, I focus on the two most useful, Strict and Transitional.

Morton, Shawn. TechRepublic (2003). Articles>Web Design>Standards>XHTML

Putting A/B Testing in Its Place

Measuring the live impact of design changes on key business metrics is valuable, but often creates a focus on short-term improvements. This near-term view neglects bigger issues that only qualitative studies can find.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Assessment

Putting Our Hot Heads Together

The web is a conversation, but not always a productive one. Web discussions too often degenerate into whines, jabs, sour grapes, and one-upmanship. How can we transform discussion forums and comment sections from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration?

Wood, Carolyn. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Community Building

Putting the White Back in Strunk and White

In web design screeds, the most commonly cited book is not what you might expect. It is not by Jakob Nielsen or Jeffrey Zeldman or Edward Tufte. It's not even on design or typography or code. It is a thin volume of guidelines on writing by a professor 'at the closing of the first world war' and treasured by one student enough to put it into print. William Strunk was the professor, and E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, was that grateful student. White took the master's set of laws, removed some 'bewhiskered entries,' corrected some errors, and added his own chapter at the end for 'those who feel English prose composition is not only a necessary skill but a sensible pursuit as well.'

Wodtke, Christina. Boxes and Arrows (2006). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Minimalism

Quality Criteria for Indexes, Website Navigation and Search    

When users find the answers they are looking for, the investment in technical documentation gets a chance to pay off. In large volumes of technical information, just finding the answer can be half the battle. Microsoft found that users of its intranet were spending an average of 2.5 hours per day online - 50% of that being searching. This article was written as part of an experimental online workshop with the MITWA (Mentors, Indexers, Technical Writers & Associates) discussion group(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MITWA/). The article retains the workshop format including learning assignments.

Brown, Fred. International Journal for Technical Communication (2006). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Technical Writing

Quick and Dirty Web Applications with Bookmarklets

Web 2.0 is well known for the fact that it's not built on breathtaking new inventions, but rather on renewed emphasis on age-old Web technologies. One of those age-old technologies that is enjoying a revival in Web 2.0 is bookmarklets. A bookmarklet is essentially a Web application shoehorned into a regular browser bookmark. This article includes a fully functioning bookmarklet and installation instructions you can use to highlight text on any Web page and search IBM developerWorks for that text.

Ogbuji, Uche. IBM (2007). Articles>Web Design>DHTML>Web Browsers

Quick and Easy Flash Prototypes: Bring Your Wireframes to Life

To tackle the classic “how to prototype rich interactions” problem, Alexa Andrzejewski developed a process for translating static screen designs (from wireframes to visual comps) into interactive experiences using Flash. Requiring some fairly basic ActionScript knowledge, these prototypes proved to be a quick yet powerful way to bring interaction designs to life.

Andrzejewski, Alexa. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Interaction Design>Flash

The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch

Companies would often hire new outside firms to create and execute these new designs, abandoning the firm that made the previous design. The new firms would try to top the existing design with something dramatically different and attention-grabbing. After all, if you can't notice any change, why did it cost so much?

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2003). Articles>Web Design>Planning

Reach Out and Touch Someone

The hardest part of communication lies in the many options we have available, and how tricky it can be to pick the right option for each individual member of our audience. When we write something, whether in print or online, we try to produce something that satisfies as many readers as possible because we require a 'one size fits all' solution: we're not physically present to tailor our approach to meet each individual's needs, and so must meet a range of needs in a single document. With print, we're stuck with static text: the text can't change until we rewrite it and distribute a new version. Moving information online makes it easier to revise and distribute information, but actually updating the information still requires a writer. Are there alternatives that make it easier to reach customers with our messages?

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (2001). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Personalization

Ready for Life in Transparencyville?

Before you jump up and down about social media and the wonderfully transparent world it is creating, consider the consequences. There’s just no way to prevent those outside your walls from looking in. Leaky information, errant e-mails and inappropriate instant messages now have the capacity to become very, very public. If there's one lesson that communicators need to take away from the new social media, it's how to operate in a world of transparency.

Fernando, Angelo. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Web Design>Collaboration>Social Networking

The Real Costs of "Free" Search Site Services

When owners of the big money tree use their excess profits to subsidize unrelated services, independent software vendors (ISVs) are driven out of business. Although such behavior got Microsoft into trouble in the past, ISVs shouldn't expect relief from search-engine-sponsored software from the U.S. Justice Department or the European Commission any time soon. These government agencies are notoriously behind the times, as proven by the fact that they attacked Microsoft only after it had won the browser war by cutting off Netscape's air supply.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search

Realising the Full Potential of the Web    

The inventor of the World Wide Web argues that the first phase of the Web is human communication though shared knowledge and predicts that the second side to the Web, yet to emerge, is that of machine-understandable information, with humans providing the inspiration and the intuition.

Berners-Lee, Tim. Technical Communication Online (1999). Articles>Communication>Web Design

Realistic Search Engine Optimization Expectations

Even keyword phrases that nobody's searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you're doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day, and gone the next.

Whalen, Jill. High Rankings Advisor (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

Reflections on Site Usability and the State of Flow

Although the general performance of commercial sites is poor at the moment, increasing awareness of Web-user behaviour and the importance of site usability will improve this situation.

Hudson, Roger. Usability.com.au (1998). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Reliable HTTP: A New Protocol

HTTPR aims to ensure that a Web transmission gets delivered to its destination only once, or gets reported as undeliverable. HTTPR is geared toward business-to-business communications over the Web, such as paying a bill or processing a purchase order, where a request must be delivered once and only once to its intended receiver.

HyperWrite (2004). Articles>Web Design>Standards

Remembering Your Reader in Web Design

Technology advancements have allowed for many improvements and enhancements in web design. Drastic changes have been made concerning programming, development, and available features. From flash animations, to blog pages, forums, and live chat, website designers have a multitude of design elements that can be added to their websites. Multimedia products such as audio, video, and podcasts are some of the other advancements in web design. One thing that has not changed, however, is the website readers. Successful website developers know and understand this concept, and apply it to every website that they design.

Haig, Anders. ReEncoded (2008). Articles>Web Design>Rhetoric>Audience Analysis

Report From a 1994 Web Usability Study

This reports summarizes results of a usability study of several Web sites I conducted in the beginning of December 1994. Users were observed as they browsed the Web sites of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Time Warner. The report has only been very lightly edited and thus represents my thinking about Web usability in 1994. In fact, the report was originally written for distribution to the rest of the Web team on paper since we were not heavy intranet users in 1994, despite having designed SunWeb a few months before this study.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1994). Articles>Web Design>Usability