using the right technology at the right time
I’ve become a fan lately of a small trend in breadcrumb design. Some sites are starting to put the page’s header (in <h1>) at the end of the list of breadcrumbs. It’s an interesting way to show how the site’s hierarchy leads up to the current page.
On Adobe’s site:
Read on for a couple more examples.
There is much truth in what martinibuster says about designing for IE6 in this Webmaster World discussion:
In my experience, when a site layout was blowing up, it usually took my site designer about an hour or two to fix the error and make the site display well for IE6.
So I am still not convinced that spending an hour, two hours, or even a single day is such a hardship, and less convinced that the minimal time typically required, about the time it takes to eat a sandwich, is going to impact sales to those who use more modern browsers. How could an hour or two spent upgrading a site for IE6 take away from sales? Is that a legitimate reason to throw away 10-15% of web traffic?
As far as the assumption that those who use IE6 don’t have money and correlate to trailer parks, I think there is absolutely no basis for that conclusion. Equally, I believe there is no foundation for believing that those who use modern browsers are more technically savvy.
The question should not be, Do you still design for IE6? The question should be, Why are you throwing away traffic by not designing for IE6?
This got me thinking about some of the assumptions that I’ve made over time. For example, I picture most IE users as grandmothers feebly trying to read the text on their screens. But would you be confident that your VP or CEO would not be the same?
I know of the pain and hardship that Internet Explorer 6 causes. I’m there often. But he has a really good point. Don’t get me wrong. I still look forward to the day that we can bid IE6 adieu.
Using some CSS voodoo, you can display a text link’s URL in parenthesis after the link text. This would be very useful for printer style sheets, where you can’t see where the links are pointing when the page is printed out.
Read on for more details and the code.
Thanks to Microsoft’s SuperPreview, I am able to test my websites in Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8, all from one copy of Windows.
Read on to see a screenshot of the tool and how it has helped me out thus far.
As I’ve been working on an uber portal application, I’ve run into a major information architecture problem. My design wasn’t allowing enough space for navigation options.
Read on for sketches and concepts that I used to solve the problem. I wanted to use standard concepts that wouldn’t be confusing to the user. I think I accomplished that.
As a web developer, some design decisions are in your hands. The UI team (if you have one) isn’t going to decide on what every single screen should look like. Every now and then, I run across something like this: Thank you. This assessment is now complete. To return your assessment list please click on [...]
[Update: Will Jessup appears to have taken down his blog. But here is the style guide that he linked to in his post.] I love Will Jessup’s suggestion for creating a style guide for your site. (Note: This is the archived post on Way Back Machine.) I think the most confusing part would be figuring [...]
In my college Creative Writing courses, we spent the majority of class time holding poetry workshops. The more that I think about it, the more I realize that these workshops were basically rudimentary poetry usability tests. The fact that we spent the majority of class time doing this activity shows how important these “usability tests” were in drafting a poem that was a good experience.
I’ve been reading a series of articles by Adrian Senior on Macromedia’s Web site called Introduction to Designing with CSS. I highly recommend reading these articles, especially if you’re just now thinking of stepping into the world of designing Web page layouts with Cascading Style Sheets.
About MeI'm Chris Peters, and I'm a lover of web design and development. I'm based in Columbus, Ohio. Follow me as I have successes and struggles in this fast-moving technology environment.
