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web design skills, usability, tools, techniques, and styling

Speed Up Your Site

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tips and techniques for improving download times

According to Andrew King, the best way to get people to your site and keep them there is to provide speed, feedback, clear navigation, and fun. His new book Speed up your Site is essentially a series of guidance notes and techniques for shaving every ounce of excess fat from your web pages. This means trimming everything which is not necessary, shortening every bit of code, and compressing the pages wherever possible. It’s intermediate level technically, but anybody with a web page or two could learn something from what he offers – and his instructions are clearly written and well illustrated.

Speed Up Your SiteHe starts out with a chapter of evidence to support the notion that “without feedback, the length of time that users will wait for web pages to load is from 8 to 12 seconds” – though in days where people are increasingly on broadband, these figures seem a bit high to me. One of the novel concepts he introduces is the idea of ‘flow’ – a state of being when we are at one with the activity at hand. What this means in Web terms is that we will go back to those sites where we get rapid feedback.

It becomes really interesting when he embarks on HTML optimisation. Since most people have sites written in HTML, this advice is very useful in showing you how to minimise code and shrink pages.

Every byte counts – Think fast and small

Next he shows how to update pages from HTML to XHTML as well as how to deal with style sheets. He shows how to minimise file sizes as well as how to make the most of the latest CSS-2 conventions, such as replacing JavaScript with CSS-2 rollovers, and how to compress the instructions in the code.

For those who want to tackle really advanced techniques, he shows how JavaScripts can be compressed for speed and even scrambled (obfuscated) for security. He even shows his principles at work in a series of site make-overs.

The latter parts of the book deal with how to optimize graphics and minimize the size of multimedia files, and there’s a very good chapter on different forms of file compression.

For those like me who are a bit intimidated by the more advanced strategies, he also has lots of advice on improving your chances with the search engines by choosing meta-tags and keywords that count.

This is an excellent book for intermediate to advanced users – people who already have a web site, but who want to make it more efficient. Be prepared for a lot of work – but he shows you clearly what to do.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Andrew B. King, Speed up your Site: Web Site Optimisation, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2003, pp.496, ISBN: 0735713243

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Taking Your Talent to the Web

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guide to good usability and web design principles

Jeffrey Zeldman is one of the new generation of writers on web strategy and design. His new book Taking Your Talent to the Web aims to help traditional designers move beyond HTML into the new possibilities of style sheets and XHTML. But this isn’t a practical guide – full of HTML code and suggestions for page design. It’s a carefully structured essay of thoughtful reflections on how the Web actually works, and how you can enhance your designs. It’s aimed at those people with Web sites who want to improve them; at designers who want to offer more functionality to their clients; and at anybody who wants to engage with Web developments using the most advanced techniques available.

Taking Your Talent to the WebHis overall message is that designers must learn to work within limits, must accept compromise, must learn to accept constant change. He is a great believer in The Liquid Page – designs which can flow to fit any browser and screen size. His approach is very similar to Jeffrey Veen, whose The Art and Science of Web Design comes from the same stable.

After discussing the foundations of good design and usability, he spends the middle section of the book dealing with branding, marketing, and working in a design team. These chapters are not nearly so interesting as those in which he tackles the technology. Once he gets back to creating good pages, the temperature rises again.

He is very reassuring on the issue of making the transition from HTML via XHTML to XML. He offers a clear guide to style sheets, showing how to take advantage of this technology to control the appearance of pages – without running foul of browsers. He admits however that until browsers fully support style sheets, designers will continue to use tables to control layout.

There’s an extended discussion of font control. His advice is quite unequivocal – in style sheets the font size should be specified in pixels. This is followed by a short but reassuring introduction to JavaScript. I liked the fact that he puts his emphasis on practical applications, showing how it can be used. And he finishes with a quick review of Java, scaled vector graphics (SGV) and Flash.

It should also be said that he writes in a lively, amusing style which makes some of the more technical passages easier to digest. In fact I think he gets the balance of coding details and web strategies just right – giving you enough information to try out his ideas straight away. This is an attractive book which offers support and encouragement to designers who want to make their sites more usable and more effective.

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© Roy Johnson 2005

Jeffrey Zeldman, Taking Your Talent to the Web, Indianapolis (IN) : New Riders, 2001, pp.426, ISBN: 0735710732

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The Art and Science of Web Design

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web design strategies – for the present and the future

Jeffrey Veen is a webmaster who put the pages of avant-garde magazine WIRED onto the Net, and he went on to have something of a best-seller with his first book – HotWired Style: Principles of Building Smart Web Sites. The Art and Science of Web Design is his follow-up, and if anything, it’s even better. Be warned though. It’s not a practical HTML manual, with lots of advice about how to write web pages. It’s a study of how the Web works, why it works how it does, and what strategies serious users ought to adopt to make it work for their benefit.

The Art & Science of Web Design He starts from a simple premise. Any graphic designers creating attractive printed pages know that they must have a comprehensive knowledge of their tradition. This means they should know the principles of good layout, modern print technology, paper, inks, and the full range of resources for translating their ideas from one medium into another. They are in fact drawing on a design tradition which is nearly six hundred years old.

If that is the case, web designers need to know how their own (new) medium works – and he sets out to make it clear. He starts with a history of the Web, and how its content has always been separated from its appearance. We all know about the constraints and limitations of HTML coding – but now there are style sheets to give us more control. And he shows how this can be done.

In fact he is what might be called a radical traditionalist. He believes that you must respect the fact that web visitors bring notions of navigation and structure from the other sites they have visited. You can introduce novelties onto your site – but these should be subtle, and they absolutely must keep the user’s needs in mind at every click of the mouse.

There are some wonderful in-depth analyses of major sites, showing how they have managed to keep user’s needs in mind, even when building their information from huge databases. Yahoo and Amazon come out well – because they create fast downloading pages which give visitors what they want.

On browsers and speed he is quite uncompromising. You must check your pages in as many browsers as possible, and you must eliminate all superfluous coding so that users get what they are looking for immediately. There’s a fascinating page of screenshots from a competition for high quality homepages – all created within a size of 5Kb maximum.

The other central feature of his argument is an interesting notion of what he calls ‘liquid’ pages. He argues that designers ought to stop worrying about the exact appearance of the layout and graphic features of their pages. Instead they should design so that the page will flow into any browser, on any screen size, set at any resolution.

And he shows how it can be done. There is a wonderful example, reduced to only a few lines of code, showing how style sheets and a clever use of font specifications can be used to create paragraphs which will look good in any browser.

Finally, he presents the idea of what he calls ‘object oriented publishing’. This is creating dynamic websites using templates, stylesheets, and information stored in databases so that the work of the designer is minimised. This part is more technically demanding, but he keeps jargon and coding to a minimum.

Click for details at AmazonIt’s written in an engaging, accessible style. You can try out his ideas immediately, and he gives an account of the way modern web technology works which is inspiring and enthusiastic. This is a very impressive follow-up to his earlier best-seller HotWired Style, and even though it will be of most use to those who already have web sites, anybody with an interest in web design will find something of interest in what he says. It’s going straight onto the Highly Recommended list at this site, and then after fiddling with some code, the first thing I’m going to do is read the book again.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Jeffrey Veen, The Art & Science of Web Design, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2001, pp.259, ISBN 0789723700

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The Art of Project Management

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Project Management skills from A to Z

Scott Berkun was a senior project manager at Microsoft who worked on the development of Internet Explorer, Windows XP, and MSN. These are his reflections on the philosophy and practice of project management, and on software development in particular. Three things immediately stand clear: he knows a lot about his subject from practical experience; he’s thought a lot about its underlying principles; and he expresses his ideas in a fluent manner.

The Art of Project ManagementThe structure of the book is to take you through all stages of a software design project, from its first conception, through to testing and completion. There are lots of useful tips – such as his ‘rule of thirds’ in which the time devoted to any task of a project schedule is broken down into equal parts – one for designing or planning, another for implementation or programming, and a third for testing or troubleshooting.

He splits his exposition into admirably straightforward topics, such as ‘How to figure out what to do’, ‘Writing good specifications’, and ‘What to do when things go wrong’. His use of jargon is kept to a minimum and he explains any new terms the first time he uses them.

Much of the advice he offers involves nothing more than asking simple but deep questions about each stage of the project: ‘What is the product for?’ Who will use it? How will it be made? Who is responsible for design/testing/implementation?’ These might seem very obvious, but as he points out, many projects fail because nobody takes the trouble to ask them. He even provides a list of common bad ways to decide what to do.

He’s very good on the need for clear expression in all plans and documentation:

It should be understood that clear thought does not require many pages. The most effective leadership documents in the world are not very long. The US constitution, including the Bill of Rights, is a mere 7,000 words (about six pages). The 10 commandments are 300 words. The Magna Carta is 5,000.

Yet strangely enough he does not follow his own advice. His style is lose and conversational. It’s like someone talking to you in a bar. Although this makes for ease, it also extends the page count. This book could easily cover the same ground in a half of its length.

Next he shows what to do with ideas once you have got them, work gets under way, and the project starts to develop its own momentum. The answer to this problem is to use affinity diagrams. This is a fancy term for brainstorming, post-it notes, and putting ideas into logical groups or categories.

The next part of the book deals with the skills a good project manager needs: how to make good decisions; how to write clear specifications; how to develop good communication skills; and what to do when things go wrong (break the problem into small pieces).

The third part of the book deals with the psychological and political part of project management skills – building trust through commitment; getting things done by drawing up clear priorities and plans of work; and recognising that big deadlines are a series of smaller deadlines

Hitting deadlines is like landing airplanes: you need a long, slow approach. And you want to be ready to take off again quickly, without having to do major repairs.

Along the way there are many interesting anecdotes from his years at Microsoft, so the theory is backed up by real-life practical examples. For anybody engaged in projects, whether as manager or humble foot soldier, this offers a clear and reassuring account of the whole process.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Scott Berkun, The Art of Project Management, Sebastopol: CA, O’Reilly, 2005. pp.488. ISBN 0596007868

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The Non-Designer’s Web Book

by

best-selling Web design manual for beginners

Robin Williams is a top Web design guru, and this is one of her best-selling books. You can see why. The Non-Designer’s Web Book is clearly presented, beautifully designed, and lavishly illustrated with full colour screen shots and examples of successful Web pages. It’s a book for beginners. Everything is chunked into single or double-page spreads; all the main points of her advice are clearly illustrated; and she covers every stage of establishing a Web presence – from understanding how the Web works to designing, uploading, and promoting your own site. Users at an introductory level will like her approach, because she assumes you will want to use a web editor such as FrontPage, Netscape Composer, or Adobe PageMill.

The Non-Designer's Web BookThere are no details of coding – unless you must – and each chapter ends with a self-assessment quiz. You can check what you have understood, before moving on to the next step. She explains the advantages of Web over print publication – full colour at no cost; interactivity with customers; and instant updates.

She’s also very good on the need for page design basics – alignment, repetition, contrast, and proximity. That is, page elements should be arranged on a grid; topics should be tightly grouped, not scattered; and colour coding plus repetition should be used to create visual unity and coherence.

She shows why designing Web pages is different from designing printed pages, and why a site can look terrific on one monitor but terrible on another. There’s a lot on creating and controlling graphics, and plenty of examples of good and bad design. A couple of chapters describe how to avoid obvious mistakes that would otherwise make your work look amateurish.

The book also includes details of how to get a site up and running, register your domain name, and add it to search engines. After the design is finished and implemented, the site has to be uploaded and updated – and this is explained, too.

If you’re going to build Web sites, for either personal or professional use, but you don’t know where to begin, start with this book. It’s easy to read, avoids confusing jargon, and it’s full of do’s and don’ts to help you avoid common snags.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Robin Williams and John Tollett, The Non-Designer’s Web Book, Berkeley (CA): Peachpit, 2nd edn, 2000, pp.304, ISBN: 0201710382

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The Smashing Book

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glamorous illustrated guide to modern web design

The Smashing Book is an offshoot of a web site that offers daily, sometimes twice daily articles on the very latest trends in web design. Some are about graphics and getting the best visual effects; some are tutorials on the latest developments in cascading style sheets; and others are on the golden rules for success as a freelance web designer. In other words, if you want to keep abreast of what’s happening in web design, it’s a site you should have on your favourites list.

The Smashing BookSpurred on by the success of the site in the last year or so, the owners have decided to publish a book which encapsulates all their best design principles. I immediately thought it would be a collection of the ‘best of’ articles they have published. But no, it’s more a condensation of their general wisdom – and is much better for that. A chapter on ‘Best Design Features 2009’ would be out of date before the book came into your hands. .

As the authors say ‘The book contains no lists of links or aggregated content. It has ten carefully prepared, written, and edited stories that are based upon topic suggestions and wishes of Smashing Magazine’s readers’. All the links and resources are available online.

The advice is pitched at what I would call intermediate-to-advanced level. It’s aimed at web designers, doesn’t include any coding details, and focuses on notions of good practice. Elegant solutions for common problems are offered on almost every page. The book has also been written by a group of professional designers – so they know what they’re talking about.

The first chapter deals with the subtleties of interface design, then the next does the same thing with style sheets. They cover fundamental topics such as page size, base fonts, interactivity via links, and best screen colours. It reminded me of Yale University’s excellent Web Style Guide which takes a similar approach of concentrating on general design principles.

the smashing bookThey cover fixed page width versus fluid pages and even fluid grid layout systems. Some of these techniques (such as ‘text-zooming’) require both a knowledge of CSS and some mathematical calculations to get the proportions right. There’s a rock-solid chapter on typography which goes through all the basic details of presenting text on screen and ends by showing how good typography in page layout can be seen as a form of user interface design.

On usability the point is made again and again that everything should be subordinated to the user’s needs – and these might not be the same as the designer’s preferences. The chapter on colour profits from the book’s high quality production values, and site optimization has plenty of free downloadable software listed to analyse your site and improve its performance.

The later sections on branding and marketing are full of advanced promotional strategies, some of which will cost you money or time – or both. Even blogging or Twittering take time if you hope to develop a regular following.

The last part of the book is in many ways the most fascinating. It’s a forum of specialist web designers answering questions on day-to-day business strategies – how to get started, what they see as the latest developments, what software to use, and favourite approaches to design. I was delighted to read that so many of them recommended the .same content management system I have just chosen for my latest project (WordPress) and speaking as both a designer and a client of agencies, their advice struck me as sound.

Smashing Magazine is an interesting success story in its own right, and I was glad to see that the co-owners included a chapter on its genesis. There was no magic formula for its success. They stuck to design principles in which they believed, expected little, and worked hard. The site succeeded because they delivered high quality content on a regular basis – meaning an essay length illustrated tutorial almost every day.

The only thing they seem to have done wrong is not make their book available via Amazon – but you can order it directly here.

© Roy Johnson 2010

Sven Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman, The Smashing Book, Smashing Media: Lubeck, 2009, pp.311, ISBN: B003CH11BU

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Universal Design for Web Applications

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an introduction to the study of sign systems

Universal design is a general principle, but it’s used here as something of a coded term for two topics which are discussed in detail. One is designing for accessibility (people with disabilities) and the other is designing for a variety of devices – PCs, laptops, PDAs, and most challenging of all, for mobile phones. The argument is that more people fall into the disability category than is generally realised, and that for huge numbers of users the mobile device is now the principal means of accessing Internet services.

Universal Design Fail to take these two factors into account, and you are automatically falling behind in providing what users want. The first important piece of advice these authors offer is that you should separate content from presentation in everything you design. This means using HTML in the way it was originally intended for use. Tables are for presenting tabular data, the <OL> feature for ordered lists, and so on. The <FONT> tag should now be abandoned altogether, and replaced by the use of cascading style sheets (CSS).

They are quite adamantly against using tables for layout, and think CAPTCHAs ought to be banned altogether: (those are the pictures of text you’re supposed to read to prove that you’re a human being, not a spambot).

If you’re using tables correctly however, they have a lot of useful tips for adding information in the form of captions and summaries. The same goes for making streamed video accessible for disabled users.

They explain the three different approaches to this issue: to offer audio or text transcripts, subtitles, or captions. These are time-consuming and therefore expensive to provide – but anyone who claims their web presence is designed for maximum usability to cater for all users needs to be aware of these features and incorporate them into their work.

I wonder how many of the self-righteous sites claiming full usability would pass scrutiny in this regard? Certainly not my local town council, whose site boasts full accessibility – but doesn’t even include email addresses and hides behind a general menu option telephone answering service. And after you’ve left your message, they ‘guarantee’ to get back to you within ten days. Some promise!

The latter chapters of the book cover working with scripts (Ajax) to produce dropdown menus that are accessible even for people using the keyboard for navigation – though when I went to look at an open source menu script they claim to have put on the book’s web site (http://ud4wa.com) there was nothing available.

They finish by explaining how most of these procedures can be pursued using a content management system (CMS) with templates and style sheets. Finally, as you might expect, they offer checklists for making sure your content matches up to what’s required, and resources for implementing features that cover magnification of text, scrolling, multimedia, screen readers, and full HTML validation of your output.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Wendy Chisholm and Matt May, Universal Design for Web Applications, Sebastopol (CA), 2008, pp.179, ISBN 0596518738

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Using Drupal

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Configuring Modules to Build Dynamic Websites

Drupal is the most powerful, industrial-strength option amongst the open source content management systems (Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress). But it’s notoriously difficult to configure and manipulate. Hence the up-front sub-title to this publication. The answers to the problems have been supplied by designers creating plug-in modules which deliver separate functions. These all sit on top of the Drupal core.

Using DrupalThe user is left with ‘only’ the task of getting these modules to work together. And as anyone who has tried it will tell you, it’s no mean task. That’s where this guidance manual comes in. It takes you through a selection of the most basic add-on modules you’ll need to get a site up and running.

It’s written with the latest version of Drupal in mind (6.0) and you should be warned that modules written for other versions (5.0 and earlier) are not compatible with the latest version, and visa versa.

The other warning which needs to be flagged up as a major hazard and frustration is that configuration settings in one module might have a global effect, affecting your tweakings in another module, or even wiping it out altogether.

Fortunately there’s a very useful introduction which explains how a content management system works and the differences between first, second, and third generation web sites. You need to get used to lots of the specialised terms which are employed in this form of technology – modules, themes, and nodes – and you’ll have to let go of comforting terms such as folders and pages, because they just don’t apply any more.

In my experience of CMS systems, these naming conventions can be very confusing. Articles become stories, and features become modules or blocks. So you need to grit your teeth and just take on the new language.

The good thing about this book is that there are full instructions on adding and configuring modules that add functionality to a site. The creation of basic content is quite a complex business – partly because it’s assumed that a site will be fully interactive, and its materials can be tagged, commented upon, and served up in different forms. That’s why you end up arranging the content from a control panel with lots of options and settings.

There’s another reason why this approach to development by configuring modules is important. That’s because, rather surprisingly, the basic Drupal core does not include such fundamentals as a text editor and image manipulation tools. These have to be bolted on as extras. But free open source solutions are listed at the end of every chapter.

Separate chapters of the book have been written by open source evangelists, and the success of their approach is reflected in several five-star reviews for this book at Amazon. They concentrate on a wide range of third party modules which have been created by the Drupal community. This means the modules have been devised to solve real life problems and requirements.

The book is also arranged as a series of projects, showing how Drupal can be used to build a commercial web site; a job postings notice board; a product reviews site; a Wiki; a photo gallery; and an event management site. They explain how to use the most important modules, the content creator’s kit (CCK), categorise materials with Taxonomy, and use the Views module to arrange the display of content in a variety of user-selected forms.

The range and scope of sites built with Drupal in this book is truly impressive – from multi-language sites to eCommerce shopping sites using the Ubercart module. Full details of the all the software used is listed for every chapter, and there’s a very strong sense throughout that you are taking part in a community activity – where ideas, work, and results are shared.

O’Reilly took quite some time getting this, their first Drupal manual onto the shelves, but the wait has been worth it. I wonder when they will do the same thing for Joomla?

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Angela Byron et al, Using Drupal, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp.464, ISBN: 0596515804

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Visual Language for the Web

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Visual Language for the Web is a book about the language of icons, buttons, and navigational aids used in the design of graphical interfaces of computer software programs. The first chapter deals with Mayan hieroglyphs and Chinese ideograms – writing with pictures. This establishes how much information can be conveyed semiotically. Paul Honeywill then looks at how graphical icons are used in interface design – and how well we understand them, particularly on a multi-national level. Some, like the folder icon, have been successful and are now widely used.

Visual Language for the WebOthers seem to be understandable only within the context of the program for which they are designed. Next comes an explanation of the design of icons, taking account of the psychology of visual perception and the technology of rendering images on screen. He explains for instance why colours and font sizes are rendered differently on PCs and Macs.

He offers an introduction to digital font technology which will be useful for anyone who doesn’t already know how serif and sans-serif fonts are used for quite different purposes.

To illustrate the principles on which graphic icons best operate, he presents two case studies of designing business logos. He considers pictographic languages ranging from the natural Mayan hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform, to recent experiments such as Elephant’s Memory. But he seems reluctant to acknowledge their limitations in telling anything but simple narratives.

However, the very absence of any individual authority on the Internet means that any graphic icons which become generally accepted will be those which are commonly understood.

The last part of the book looks at testing recognition of icons – and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that the most effective and best known are those such as the magnifying glass ‘Search’ icon which appears in lots of different programs.

It has to be said that all this is sometimes discussed at a very theoretical level:

the day sign for Manik when it appears without the day sign cartouche in a non-calendrical context is chi

But this will be of interest to anybody concerned with the study of writing systems, as well as graphic designers, usability experts, and information architects.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Visual Language for the Web   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Paul Honeywill, Visual Language for the World Wide Web, Exeter: Intellect, 1999, pp.192, ISBN: 187151696X

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Web Design in a Nutshell

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comprehensive manual, plus tips and explanations

Web site design manuals are often all screen shots and little substance. These can be quite useful for beginners, who might be intimidated by too many technicalities. At the other extreme there are the dense catalogues of coding definitions issued by the standards authorities which only an expert would ever need to consult. In between are all the rest, which need to present something original or at least interesting to distinguish themselves from the mass. Web Design in a Nutshell manages to combine the best of the intermediate and advanced worlds.

Web Design in a NutshellThey feature a compressed mixture of instruction and reference which cuts out all dross, and offer their usual excellent value. Jennifer Niederst explains that she felt the urge to produce yet another book on Web design for the simplest of motives – her own use.

I was becoming frustrated with the time I was spending on the Web tracking down the answers to little questions: ‘Which tag does that attribute go in?’, ‘Does this browser support that technology?’, ‘What’s the best way to put audio on the Web?’ And I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been reduced to tears after hours of battling a table that mysteriously refused to behave, despite my meticulous and earnest efforts. You just can’t keep all this stuff in your head any more.

Niederst is one of their former staff writers and designers [see her recent Learning Web Design]. She explains HTML in a clear and sensible manner, starting with what she calls ‘the web environment’ – how it all works, why you should keep different browsers in mind, and what ‘screen resolution’ really means.

Then there is a very thorough coverage of all the basic elements: HTML coding, text formatting, links and images, tables, frames, and forms; then graphics in .gif, .jpg and .png formats; colours, audio, video, and javascript. The latter part of the book is devoted to what she calls ‘the emergent technologies – cascading style sheets, dynamic HTML, XML, and font embedding.

All the way through, she throws out tips, hints, and warnings which give you confidence that she knows whereof she speaks, and as you would expect in a work of this kind, there are a full range of reference tables – the complete HTML 4.0 specification, ‘deprecated’ and proprietary tags, a glossary of terms, and even an extended table of the latest support for style sheets in a wide range of browsers.

The latest edition has been substantially revamped and extended. Additions include more on printing pages from the Web, using Flash and Shockwave, using SMIL for multimedia presentations, and designing for the wireless web using WML.

At the risk of sounding like an O’Reilly groupie, I have to say that their productions are almost always a bibliographic joy to behold. They are well written, elegantly designed, meticulously edited, and flawlessly printed. This one is no exception.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Jennifer Niederst, Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference, 2nd edition, Sebastopol: O’Reilly & Associates, 2001, pp.640, ISBN: 0596001967

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