Creating a Controlled Vocabulary

You have probably heard information architects discussing the benefits of their latest taxonomy project and how you should be implementing one. But how, you might wonder, can you get started? In the next installment about Controlled Vocabularies, our authors go into detail about one methodology.

Fast, Karl, Fred Leise and Mike Steckel. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Design>Web Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary

Creating a Dynamic Playlist for Streaming Flash Video

As developers, we are often bogged down with mundane tasks such as site maintenance and updates. Until now, if we wanted to pass these tasks on to clients or colleagues who are not tech-savvy, we had to develop sophisticated interfaces to simplify the process for them and to give them easy access to the data. But now, XML is changing that reality.

Larson, Lisa. Adobe (2004). Design>Web Design>Streaming>Flash

Creating a Robots.txt file

In order to prevent your site from being penalized for spamming, you need to prevent the search engine spiders from indexing pages which are not meant for it.

Roy, Sumantra. 1stSearchRanking (2003). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

Creating a Sales Page That Converts

Anyone can put up a web page, but putting one up that actually sells requires some skill. Discover exactly what you need to do!

Beckert, Loren. Webcredible (2005). Design>Web Design>Marketing>Usability

Creating a Template for a Large Web Site: the U.S. EPAWeb Branding Experience  

Staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created a template then steadily converted Web pages to achieve a 'corporate face' for www.EPA.gov, the Agency's Internet site. Management and maintenance of Agency Web pages rests among the technical subject matter and administrative experts within headquarters, program, and regional offices and laboratories – rather than centralized. Template design, deployment and conversion involved many employees and contractors nationwide, and took almost one year. As of February 1, more than 90% of EPA's Internet pages comply with the template, and staff continue improvements to the Agency's public Web resources.

Ellis, Leonid 'Lee'. STC Proceedings (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design

Creating a Two-Column Layout

This series explains how you can use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 to move towards using CSS as a positioning technique when developing web pages.

Senior, Adrian. Adobe (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS>Dreamweaver

Creating a Unified Web Site Design for the School of Technology at Purdue University  

The problem with any poorly designed web site is inconsistency. As a web designer or developer, one must create a web site as a finite, predictable universe with a specific set of standards and design specifications. When visitors go to any given page on a site, they should be able to recognize that they’re in the same site. The main focus of this paper outlines how a unified web site design was created for the School of Technology at Purdue University. In developing unified web sites it is important to have visual hints throughout a given site such as consistent typefaces for specific needs, consistent color palettes, and consistent placement and layout.

Miller, Susan G. STC Proceedings (2000). Presentations>Web Design>Usability

Creating a Usable Electronic Newsletter In House

Many organizations are opting to convert existing print publications into electronic newsletters (e-newsletters)—and for good reason. E-newsletters can be developed for a fraction of the cost of their print counterparts and delivered to a global audience instantly. While marketers are discovering the ease of reaching a target audience with e-mail, many e-mail users are frustrated by the barrage of e-newsletters that muddle their inboxes monthly, weekly, or even daily. An onslaught of unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam) has made readers wary of marketing attempts. To reach these wary readers, companies need to create e-newsletters that respond to their audience’s specific needs—namely usability and trust. By following a few guidelines, you can launch a usable and successful e-newsletter.

Lawless, Amy. Usability Interface (2003). Design>Publishing>Web Design>Usability

Creating a Web Service with Web Matrix

The Web Matrix project appears to have served as a test bed in the development of ASP.NET. This freebie attracted a lot of attention since it did not require an installation of IIS. It had its own http server whenever needed. Of course, one could use it also in the presence of an installed IIS. This tutorial is about creating a web service on Web Matrix and testing the service on the built in mini web server, as well as testing a second example on the IIS 5.1 on the local machine.

Krishnaswamy, Jayaram. Dev Articles (2006). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>ASP

Creating a Web Site

For a tech writer, creating a web site is a sort of online resume. You can use this as something for potential clients to look at once you've established contact in some other way. Invite them to see your web site, and they will get an impression, hopefully good, of both your experience and your writing and design abilities.

Tech Writing Jobs. Design>Web Design

Creating Accessible Cascading Style Sheets

For years, the only way to format HTML in a visually appealing way was to use tables, even though tables were originally created to display tabular data. As the Web evolved and became more sophisticated, designers wanted to do more than just display text, they wanted to emulate printed documents. They wanted to make an artistic statement. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, tables can be used for layout without ruining the accessibility of a Web site. Yes, it's ok to use tables for layout. Still, you can take your Web design to a higher level by eliminating tables entirely. The way to do this is through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Bohman, Paul. WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>CSS

Creating Accessible Flash

Macromedia Flash is a vector-based, interactive animation creation program designed to enable the addition of dynamic characters, scenes, interfaces and motion graphics animations to Web sites. Macromedia Flash materials are created using the Flash authoring program, the most recent version of which is Flash MX.

WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Flash

Creating Accessible Forms

When we talk about the accessibility of forms, we are usually referring about their accessibility to screen readers and the visually impaired. People with other types of disabilities generally are less affected by 'faulty' forms that are missing some of the HTML accessibility features.

WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Forms

Creating Accessible Frames

A frameset is a Web page which defines a collection of at least two other separate Web pages, which are combined in the same visual space. Visual users usually experience framesets as a cohesive entity. They can scan the contents of multiple pages all at once. Those using screen readers cannot quickly scan the contents of multiple pages. All of the content is experienced in a linear fashion, one frame at a time. Frames are not inaccessible to modern screen readers, but they can be disorienting.

WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility

Creating Accessible Images

Some people think that graphics are bad for accessibility. The truth is that graphics can be of great benefit to the accessibility of a Web page by providing illustrations, icons, animations, or other visual cues that aid comprehension for sighted individuals. Too often we forget that when we design for people with disabilities, we are not designing only for the blind. We must consider disabilities of all types. Graphics can be especially useful to individuals with certain reading disabilities, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, or cognitive disabilities.

WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility

Creating Accessible JavaScript

JavaScript is available on the Web to allow programming type processes that are not allowed with static HTML. In most cases, JavaScript does not overtly affect accessibility. Most browsers and screen readers are capable of accessing JavaScript items. You should, however, teach that many people cannot or choose not to allow JavaScript within their Web browsers or assistive technologies. Important content or functionality should not rely on JavaScript alone. JavaScript should usually be used to supplement content.

WebAIM (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>DHTML

Creating Accessible Tables

In practice, tables are perhaps most commonly used for page layout. Layout tables do not have logical headers that can be mapped to information within the table cells.

WebAIM. Design>Web Design>Accessibility

Creating An Information Model

An Information Model provides the framework for organizing your content so that it can be delivered and reused in a variety of innovative ways. Once you have created an Information Model for your content repository, you will be able to label information in ways that will enhance search and retrieval, making it possible for authors and users to find the information resources they need quickly and easily.

Hackos, JoAnn T. WebRef (2002). Design>Content Management>Single Sourcing>Web Design

Creating Disappearing Text or Images

In this tutorial, you'll see how to create text that's invisible as the page loads and appears only when a user rolls the mouse over a specific graphic, i.e., text appears on 'mouseover'and disappears when the mouse is no longer over the graphic.

Shadovitz, Deborah. Mac Design Magazine (2003). Design>Web Design>DHTML>Adobe GoLive

Creating Dynamic Web Sites

Creating Dynamic Web Sites is a presentation intended to teach beginners what it takes to add applications to a website in order to make it dynamic rather than static. This presentation was designed to cover everything thirty minutes and conclude by recommending various free sites to obtain free software to make your site dynamic including Java, ASP, and last but certainly not least, Perl.

Birznieks, Gunther. Extropia. Design>Web Design>Adaptive

Creating Events Using the EventDispatcher Class

Handle Flash events more efficiently in your code by using the event listener object model.

Toley, Kenneth J. III. Adobe (2004). Design>Web Design>Interactive>Flash

Creating Good Websites: Usability

Usable Web sites are those which help users to accomplish a goal (e.g. to obtain some information) easily, quickly, and pleasantly.

Marshall, Samuel. Leaf Digital (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability

Creating Keyword-Rich Pages

Once you have established the keywords for which you should optimize your site for the search engines, it is time to figure out how you can get a high ranking in the search engines for those keywords. The solution is to create Keyword Rich Pages (KRPs) - pages which provide good content and in which a particular keyword is repeated a number of times so that the page gets a top ranking for that keyword.

Roy, Sumantra. 1stSearchRanking (2003). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins

Two- and three-column, liquid page designs with header and footer are easy to dash off using old-school HTML table layout methods. Designing them in CSS is trickier, and can sometimes even require you to structure your page’s content elements in a specific (and undesirable) order. Negative margins to the rescue! Ryan Brill whips up two quick CSS layouts to demonstrate the power of negative thinking.

Brill, Ryan. List Apart, A (2004). Design>Web Design>CSS