Calling All Designers: Learn to Write!
You know all that copy that goes around your forms and in your confirmation e-mails? Who’s writing it? Derek Powazek explains why it’s important for user-interface designers to sharpen up their writing skills.
Powazek, Derek. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>User Interface>Writing
Review: Calling in the Big Guns: Review of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
What is likely to win the most converts is the joy Wroblewski takes in designing. This impression becomes clear as you page through the book. He isn’t just an ardent evangelizer, following the rituals of going to conferences selling snake oil. He’s been there in the trenches, just like you; he’s done this a hundred, maybe a thousand times. He’s tested these ideas and provides a framework for you to use from day one. Half the battle in good form design is defending your decisions to stakeholders.
Evans, Will. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Reviews>Web Design>Forms
Can Color-Blind Users See Your Site?
Information that will help you to create more readable Web sites.
Hess, Robert. Microsoft (2000). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Color
Can Expanding Targets Make Object Selection Easier for Older Adults?
Given the proliferation of computers and rapidly aging demographic trends, there is a critical need for user interface designs that accommodate older adults. It is known that many adults in this age group experience declines in cognitive, sensory, and/or motor capacities that may interfere with their ability to interact effectively with current user interfaces. Motor behavior slows with age. Compared to younger adults, older adults take longer to complete the same movement, and their movements are more variable, less smooth, and less coordinated (Seidler & Stelmach, 1996). The loss of fine motor skills makes it difficult for older adults to position cursors on computer screens, particularly when interacting with small objects (Chaparro, et al., 1999; Walker et al., 1996). This can lead to greater frustration and possibly increased risk of cumulative trauma due to prolonged periods of time in awkward postures. This article describes one of a series of studies designed to explore alternative interaction techniques to make object selection easier for older mouse users.
Bohan, Michael and Deborah Scarlett. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Elderly
Can Internet Shoppers Be Described by Personality Traits?
Personality traits are used to describe the strong consistencies that people demonstrate in their behavior across time and situations. People display behaviors that fall into a continuum of trait extremes. This behavior can be malleable to the situation such as the differences in behaviors across various shopping venues. For example, while consumers may not hesitate to give their credit card to a cashier or give personal or credit card information over the phone, research has shown that many consumers are concerned with online security. Therefore, this study explores Internet purchasing behaviors and the following personality traits: Vigilance and Openness to Change.
Copas, Gina M. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>E Commerce
Today's Web forms are hopelessly tied to the original GUI of NCSA Mosaic for X Windows, circa 1994.
Khare, Rohit. University of California Irvine (2000). Design>Web Design>XML>Forms
Can Your Audience Trust Your Web Site?
Convincing photo manipulation is not quite as easy as it's made out to be. Adding something to a photo, for example, is much harder than removing existing items. And while it often makes sense to expend time and effort on this for advertising, it's not cost-effective, despite inexpensive software, for most journalistic or political purposes.
Paul, Fredric. Builder.com (1998). Design>Web Design
The Canonical Intranet Homepage
In recent years, intranet homepages have become very similar in their basic layout. Intranets that look the same can nonetheless differ drastically in usability due to different features and content.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Design>Web Design>Intranets>Usability
Capturing Feedback: Building a Tighter Net 
Describes how to use Microsoft FrontPage and Access to build a system for organizing and retrieving feedback from reviewers. The article is intended for those with some experience with Web and database design.
Shoesmith, Kevin. Intercom (2001). Design>Content Management>Web Design>Microsoft Access
CSS oder Cascading Stylesheets zeigt auf, was alles möglich ist im Bereich dieser Formatierung. Es werden Befehle für CSS 1 und CSS 2 behandelt und mit Beispielen erklärt.
Schwarz, René. Talky.de (2001). (German) Resources>Web Design>Standards>CSS
Web authors gain unprecedented control over the look of documents with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This section contains a list of articles that are available for CSS in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Microsoft (2000). Design>Web Design>CSS
A collection of almost two hundred online resources about cascading style sheets.
A collection of tutoirals to inform those using Cascading Style Sheets to design websites.
Pozadzides, John and Liam Quin. Web Design Group, The. Design>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. Tutorials, books, mailing lists for users, etc. can be found on the 'learning CSS' page.
Style Sheets allow you to control the rendering, e.g. fonts, colors, leading, margins, typefaces, and other aspects of style, of a Web document without compromising its structure. CSS is a simple style sheet mechanism that allows authors and readers to attach style to HTML documents. It uses common desktop publishing terminology which should make it easy for professional as well as untrained designers to make use of its features. Visual design issues, such as page layout, can thus be addressed separately from the web page logical structure.
Internet.com (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Style Sheets - An Overview
The commercialisation of the Web led to demands for advanced formatting control. Netscape and Internet Explorer quickly became the dominant Web browsers. Each had different ways of handling advanced formatting. Cascading Style Sheets are an attempt to return to structural markup by separating format from content.
Soltys, Keith. IRTC (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
Discusses the history, purpose, and limitations of Cascading Style Sheets.
Williams, Jocelyn Crump. Intercom (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Tutorial 
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium to help determine the layout of an HTML document. Removing the formatting from the HTML document allows you to quickly apply a style to a whole site, rather than going through each document and changing the tags that represent the style. It also means that the content of the HTML document isn't bloated by extra information about how data is to be presented. The current specification for using style sheets, Cascading Style Sheets, level 2, may be found at the World Wide Web Consortium's site. Cascading Style Sheets, level 3 is currently available in its draft version.
Cascading Style Sheets Tutorial 
The Cascading Style Sheets standard returns some control of style to web authors. HTML describes only the structure of information. CSS, though incompletely implemented as yet, adds a style sheet where an author can specify fonts, colors, margins, alignments, indentations, and other elements for any HTML tag or class of tag. Our presentation demonstrates CSS, describes the CSS language, and surveys browser support for CSS to introduce this already-useful addition to HTML.
Jackson, Ken and Sonya E. Keene. STC Proceedings (1999). Design>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Style Sheets Tutorial
A brief introduction to CSS that will allow you to find out what style sheet are, and what they can do for your pages.
PageResource.com (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Style Sheets Tutorial 
The Cascading Style Sheets standard returns some control of style to web authors. HTML describes only the structure of information. CSS, though incompletely implemented as yet, adds a style sheet where an author can specify fonts, colors, margins, alignments, indentations and other elements for any HTML tag or class of tag. An introduction to CSS shows the status of the CSS standard and various browser implementations, how to generate HTML and style sheets, the use of CSS compared to PDF, and the role of style sheets in HTML Help.
Jackson, Ken and Sonya E. Keene. STC Proceedings (1998). Presentations>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Style Sheets: HTML and CSS
In many ways, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification represents a unique development in the history of the World Wide Web. In its inherent ability to allow richly styled structural documents, CSS is both a step forward and a step backward--but it's a good step backward, and a needed one. To see what is meant by this, it is first necessary to understand how the Web got to the point of desperately needing something like CSS, and how CSS makes the web a better place for both page authors and web surfers.
Meyer, Eric. O'Reilly and Associates (2001). Design>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Style Sheets: Using Element Display For Layouts, Links and Lists
Introduces the concepts of block-level and inline elements and mentions padding, borders and margins along the way. You'll learn simple techniques using CSS to create accessible layouts, lists, links and navigation bars.
Jordan, Miraz. Wise-Women (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS
Cascading Stylesheets and Dynamic HTML 
Have you been frustrated by the limitations of HTML as you have struggled to present information attractively on a Web page? Have you used common work-around methods such as setting up complex tables for text layout and creating special text effects with a graphics package? Cascading Style Sheets offers a way to produce desired layout effects through HTML. If we are programmatically inclined, we can use Dynamic HTML to increase interactivity. We will demonstrate methods for using Cascading Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML to design Web pages and point out design limitations we still need to be aware of.
Randolph, Elaine F. and Jeff Randolph. STC Proceedings (1998). Design>Web Design>CSS>DHTML
Cascading Versus Indexed Menu Design
If there is one basic truism about the Web it is that every designer has their own opinion concerning the best method for presenting menu items on a web page. Two common ways to present menus are to either hierarchically cascade the menu items upon mouse-over, or to simply place most, if not all, of the menu items in a categorical index. Cascading menus have the advantage of requiring little screen real estate. However, they have been much maligned for several reasons. First, it is sometimes difficult to use for the reason that users must precisely control their mouse movements in order to select the correct menu item. It becomes increasing difficult with the number of levels a user must navigate. Second, cascading menus hide menu information until the user positions the mouse over the menu level above it.
Bernard, Michael and Chris Hamblin. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability
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