Basic Flash Concepts and Terms

Macromedia Flash uses a movie-making metaphor in how they define their concepts and areas of their interface. The basic terms used to describe the animation are the movie, stage and motion.

Kurtus, Ron. School for Champions (2002). Design>Web Design>Multimedia>Flash

Basic Search Engine Optimization Guide And Tips

Search engine optimization or SEO is very important to get your website listed in search engines. Even if this is the first website you have built there are a few basic and easy steps that will help you with optimizing your website without being a pro.

DevBay (2005). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

Basics

Using web sites should be easy and pleasant, just like a great experience in a shop, hotel, or library. I believe that the all Web sites can be made lovable - easy, rewarding and pleasurable to use.

Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability

The Basics of Navigation

You can have all kinds of great attractions on your site, but if your visitors don't know how to get to them, they'll just collect dust on the server. Worse yet, if visitors find your site's navigation confusing or convoluted, they'll simply give up and head off to explore the rest of the Web, never to return. So, good navigation design is an essential ingredient for any successful Web site.

Timberlake, Sean. EFuse (2000). Design>Web Design>Information Design

The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes

I do this because, well, I love design. More to the point, I crave design talk: who’s influenced who, what tools do you use, what trends do you observe, what rocks your world, and so forth. I get a lot out of this discourse. The signal-to-noise ratio of this particular subset of the Internet has always tilted strongly towards meaning. Until fairly recently, that is, when I started to notice a new feeling creeping into the sites I frequented. In what were nominally gathering places to discuss and celebrate online design, design seemed to be just about the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Greenfield, Adam. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Graphic Design>Web Design

Battlecat Then, Battlecat Now: Temporal Shifts, Hyperlinking and Database Subjectivities

Like all media forms, the blog is not transparent. The technological code of the software contains affordances that filter and, in part, determine the constitution of the private/public Self represented in any weblog. And so, what kind of Self (or Selves) are made possible or enabled by typical blogging practice?

Jarrett, Kylie. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging

Bazzmann|Mag

Bazzmann|Mag si occupa di design molecolare, accessibilità, usabilità, web e UI design, standard W3C, semantic web e architettura dell'informazione.

Trevisan, Marco. Bazzmann. (Italian) Resources>Web Design>Usability>Blogs

Be Open to Closed-Loop Marketing

Though it's sometimes tough to implement, making marketers feel as if they're going in circles, closed-loop marketing can help you adjust marketing campaigns to deliver highly targeted content and advertising.

Allen, Cliff. Allen.com (2001). Design>Web Design>Marketing

Be Succinct! (Writing for the Web)

The three main guidelines for writing for the Web are: be succinct: write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication; write for scannability: don't require users to read long continuous blocks of text; use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1997). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Beating the Checkout Blues

Depending on which research report you read, roughly 25% to 75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before consummating the deal. Despite the disparity in numbers, all the research firms agree on one thing: that's way too many.

Greenwood, Wayne. Cooper Interaction Design (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce

Beating the Rap on User Interface Standards  

When your manager asked (told) you to write a user interface (UI) design standard, was it a no-win proposition? Apparently many developers feel that way.

Schaffer, Eric M. Human Factors International (1996). Design>Web Design>User Interface

Beauty is Only Screen Deep

What happens when web designers really 'get' designing for the web? Sarah Horton, co-author of the Web Style Guide, ponders the meaning of beauty and quality in the context of being a good web designer.

Horton, Sarah. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Aesthetics

A Beginner's Guide to HTML  

Answers to questions like: where do Web pages come from? What are all those brackets in the text, anyway? How much HTML do I have to learn? How can I get started quickly? What kinds of HTML authoring tools are available to me?

Quesenbery, Whitney. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Web Design>HTML

A Beginner's Guide to HTML and Web Design  

The best place to learn about HTML is on the Web itself. A few of the best resources for exploring HTML design are listed here.

Quesenbery, Whitney. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML

Behavioral Separation

Breaking up is hard to do. But in web design, separation can be a good thing. Content, style, and behavior all deserve their own space. One of the greatest advantages to designing with Cascading Style Sheets is the potential for separation of style and content.

Keith, Jeremy. List Apart, A (2006). Design>Web Design>CSS

Being a Trusted Expert

Find out how to become a trusted expert on your website and watch your online credibility soar!

Usborne, Nick. Webcredible (2006). Design>Web Design>Usability

The Benefits of an Accessible Website - Part 1: Increase in Reach

The Disability Discrimination Act states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law. Some organisations are changing their websites, but many are seemingly not making the adjustments. Disabled people don't access their website, they say, so why should they care?

Moss, Trenton. Webcredible (2004). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>United Kingdom

The Benefits of an Accessible Website - Part 2: the Business Case

The Disability Discrimination Act states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law. Some organisations are changing their websites, but many are seemingly not making the adjustments. Disabled people don't access their website, they say, so why should they care? There are, however, two very good reasons as to why businesses should start taking these issues seriously: an accessible website will make you more money; an accessible website will save you money.

Moss, Trenton. Webcredible (2004). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>United Kingdom

Benutzertests durch Spurenverwertung  

In most cases a technical writer cannot do any user tests. If you have access to the user log of a web server you can derive quite interesting facts like how often and how long a specific page was viewed and how the surfers navigated.

von Obert, Alexander. Techwriter.de (2003). (German) Design>Web Design>User Centered Design>Log Analysis

The Best of CHI-WEB and SIGIA-L

The chi-web and sig-ia mailing lists are two email based discussion groups on the topics of web usability, design and human computer interaction (the later with a heavier emphasis on information architecture). To subscribe to chi-web, read the info page or to get a better flavor for what happens there, use its full searchable archive. Alternatively, you can join sigia-l from here or view the sigia-l archive . Using the archives for each mailing list, I've compiled a list of the summary postings from useful threads, and a few personally selected favorite postings. Please note: my list below is not an exhaustive list of summary postings. I just picked the ones I found most salient and valuable for reference. Also, these summaries are collections of contributing posts: they are a mixture of opinions and commentary, with some references to reports, usability data, websites or books.

Berkun, Scott. UIWeb. Resources>Mailing Lists>Web Design>Multimedia

Best Practices and Future Visions for Search User Interfaces: Position Paper

The author argues that progress in search requires vigorous inquiry into how search can be embedded into application environments such as those for decision-making, personal information collecting, and designing.

Hendry, David G. Earthlink (2003). Design>Web Design>Search

Best Practices For Successful Intranets

Thinking big in the first phase of intranet planning is the nature of e-business, but then it's time to start asking the tough questions. One needs to figure out where the business goals and the user goals need to meet in order to create an intranet that offers the most value.

Barnes, Hank. Intranet Journal (2001). Design>Web Design>Intranets

Best Practices: A Case Study at Kohler  

The plumbing division of Kohler Co. is no stranger to managing their content. They had been using BroadVision's document-management system, Relation Document Manager (RDM), for three years and authoring in Interleaf since 1989. But when BroadVision stopped supporting RDM, Mark Peterson, the technical publications manager at Kohler, was desperate to find a replacement. BroadVision offered BladeRunner, but that tool didn't sufficiently support the heavy and stringent print requirements of Mark's department. Plumbers don't always have adequate or readily available access to the Internet.

Hedlund, Tina. ComTech Services (2003). Design>Web Design>Intranets>Case Studies