Coaching a Community

We’ve all been part of communities since kindergarten, or earlier. Churches, schools, sports teams, and neighborhoods all satisfy basic human desires to interact with others and work toward a common goal. And yet, when these communities are online and we start to think of them as “social sites,” these concepts can suddenly feel foreign. My work in communities (primarily as the editor of community-created magazine JPG) has shown me that different sets of people are usually motivated in similar ways. Most people have an innate need to belong and feel like part of something, and successfully contributing to that something can really reinforce self-worth. Whether you’re at a company such as Yelp working with product reviews, or Threadless working with t-shirts, or in a church group working on an annual recipe book, try some of these methods to nurture great content.

Miner, Laura Brunow. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Social Networking

The Elegance of Imperfection

Bringing heart to web experiences can be difficult, since websites and applications are fundamentally a construct of logic (via code). While you can’t create a website that functions as a pure expression of wabi-sabi, finding ways to infuse our creations with a hint of wabi-sabi adds a new dimension to our work. It forces us to consider how the natural order of our physical world should inform the virtual worlds of information that we create. One way this natural order finds expression in the web design world is through the notion of elegance.

Sherwin, David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Aesthetics

Fluid Grids

Fluid layouts are an undervalued commodity in web design. They put control of our designs firmly in the hands of our users and their browsing habits. They’ve also utterly failed to seize the imagination of web designers.

Marcotte, Ethan. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Document Design>User Centered Design

The Elements of Social Architecture

Humans can behave in surprising ways when you bring them together. In an information space, a human’s needs are simple and his behavior straightforward. Find. Read. Save. But once you get a bunch of humans together, communicating and collaborating, you can observe both the madness and the wisdom of crowds.

Wodtke, Christina. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Social Networking

Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2008

If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, it’s up to each of us to stand up and represent. Last year, 30,055 of you did just that, taking time out of your busy day to answer the sometimes detailed and often thought-provoking questions in the second A List Apart Survey. This year’s findings paint a clearer picture of the distinctions between full-time and freelance web professionals: how you work, what you earn, and what you love about the job. Interestingly, too, despite the brutality of a global recession that was already in full swing (like an axe) when we offered the survey, most respondents revealed a surprisingly high level of job security, satisfaction, and confidence in the future.

List Apart, A (2009). Careers>Web Design>Salaries

Taking the Guesswork Out of Design

Clients, like other humans, often fear what they don't understand. Daniel Ritzenthaler explains how sound goal-setting, documentation, and communication strategies can bridge the gap between a designer's intuition and a client's need for proof.

Ritzenthaler, Daniel. List Apart, A (2009). Design>Web Design>Freelance>User Centered Design

The Wisdom of Community

The web, with its low barrier to entry and permeable social boundaries, is the ultimate medium through which to explore the finer points of the wisdom of crowds. You’re surrounded by online examples: Google’s search results. BitTorrent. The “Most E-mailed” stories on your favorite news site. Each is powered by wisdom gleaned from crowds online. You need a few things to enable online crowds to be wise.

Powazek, Derek. List Apart, A (2009). Academic>Web Design>Collaboration>User Centered Design

Understanding Web Design

We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web. If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.

Zeldman, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2007). Articles>Web Design

Visual Decision Making

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success. Underneath the arguments, I see a fundamental culture clash.

Lynch, Patrick. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Visual Rhetoric>User Experience

Introduction to RDFa

The web is designed to be consumed by humans, and much of the rich, useful information our websites contain, is inaccessible to machines. People can cope with all sorts of variations in layout, spelling, capitalization, color, position, and so on, and still absorb the intended meaning from the page. Machines, on the other hand, need some help. A new kind of web—a semantic web—would be made up of information marked up in such a way that software can also easily understand it. Before considering how we might achieve such a web, let’s look at what we might be able to do with it.

Birbeck, Mark. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business

Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content.

Mullican, Lyle. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Search Engine Optimization

Managing Werewolves

While you’re always optimistic when leading a team, you know that not everyone’s got your back. Liars and poor communicators can wipe out good work faster than a 404 error. Learn how to think critically about verbal and non-verbal behavior and to separate office politics from truth, so you don’t let the Werewolves win.

Lopp, Michael. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Management>Collaboration

Content Templates to the Rescue

Getting even semi-publishable writing from experts is notoriously difficult; they may be immersed in their “real jobs” and too busy to write even a first draft of content, they may not understand why web content matters at all, they may not be fluent in the language(s) in which you publish your website, or they may just be terrible writers. Define a content workflow as early as possible, preferably as part of a unified content strategy that includes a content audit (a detailed analysis of what content you have, what content you need, and how to bridge that gap), voice and tone guidelines, and a schedule for collecting and generating content.

Kissane, Erin. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy>SMEs

Content-tious Strategy

It’s an open secret in our daily work how often the challenges posed by content elude our collective talents and acumen. We’ve all been there. For me, lorem ipsum makes it personal. It personifies the proposition at the heart of what content specialists do and mocks how often the manifold complexities of content can get the better of all of us. It’s happening because we haven’t been talking.

Macintyre, Jeffrey. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Content Management>Content Strategy

Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision

Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. When it comes to site search, user experience designers are often sidelined like the single person at an old flame’s wedding: Everything seems to be moving along without you, and if you slipped out halfway through, chances are no one would notice. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.

Ferrara, John. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Assessment

Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering!

Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very important to understand the data that site search generates.

Kaushik, Avinash. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Usability

Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up

While goal-driven analysis is wonderfully useful, we’ll explore a different, “bottom-up” approach that relies on pattern analysis and failure analysis to help you understand your users’ intent in qualitative ways that complement the top-down approach.

Rosenfeld, Louis. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Search>Assessment

Get Ready for HTML 5

Ready or not, here it comes. Despite the confusion surrounding its evolution, real-world HTML 5 is right around the corner. Longtime ALA contributor J. David Eisenberg returns to get us all up to speed on the markup we’re about to be writing.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>HTML5

Validating a Custom DTD

In his article in this issue, Peter-Paul Koch proposes adding custom attributes to form elements to allow triggers for specialized behaviors. The W3C validator won’t validate a document with these attributes, as they aren’t part of the XHTML specification. This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add those custom attributes, and will show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Information Design>Standards>XML

Using XML

The reason that we use XML instead of a specific application is that XML is not just a pretty face, living in isolation from the rest of the computing world. XML is more than a rulebook for generating custom markup languages. It is part of a family of technologies, which, working together, make your XML-based documents very useful indeed. To demonstrate what I mean, I decided to create a new XML-based markup language from scratch, and show what you can do with a document written in that language, using off-the-shelf tools.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML

How to Read W3C Specs

If you’re working with the latest technology, there may not be any user reference material at all; the only documentation available is the specification. In such a case, learning to read the spec is a necessity, not a luxury.

Eisenberg, J. David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Specifications

Inline Validation in Web Forms

Inline validation gives people several types of real-time feedback: It can confirm an appropriate answer, suggest valid answers, and provide regular updates to help people stay within necessary limits. These bits of feedback can be presented before, during and / or after users provide answers.

Wroblewski, Luke. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Forms>JavaScript

JavaScript MVC

While MVC is a familiar term to those in back-end application development—using frameworks such as Struts, Ruby on Rails, and CakePHP—MVC’s origin in user interface development lends itself to structuring client-side applications. Let’s examine what MVC is, see how we can use it to rework an example project, and consider some existing MVC frameworks.

Snook, Jonathan. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Programming>JavaScript

The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style

If content strategy isn’t in the current budget, though, how do you convince your client to add money for it? Your client might already realize content strategy can help create measurable ROI. If they don’t, help them understand. After all, relevant and informative content is what their audience wants; content strategy assesses the content they have and creates a plan for what they need and how they’ll get it.

Bloomstein, Margot. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Content Strategy

Erskine Design Redesign

In just two years, Erskine Design grew from two people working at home into a full-fledged agency of eight, working with some major clients. Our website needed to better reflect our achievements, abilities, team strengths, and to get better information from client inquiries to help grow the business. I’ll explore our thought processes and share the decisions we made as our own client.

Collison, Simon. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Interviews>Web Design