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Are you a member of all the latest and greatest social networking sites? Tired of re-entering your personal details? Need to keep your information up-to-date across a myriad of accounts, and enable your user base to do the same? You need the foundations of the social web, brought to you by Ben Ward.
You might know your Facebook from your Odeo, but most companies couldn’t give a Flickr about social media. How do we let them know the opportunities that a Web 2.0 world can hold for them? Britt Parrott explains how to develop a coherent and buzzword-free web content strategy.
Every week heralds the announcement of yet another handful of web startups, filling a new niche or competing with established services—but all too often they are never heard from again. Marketing expert Dave Goldenberg is here to tell us what the problem is…and it has nothing to do with sprouts.
All the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tricks in the world won’t help you if nobody can find your website in the first place. We take a look at the book that aims to make sure your site has that most important of features: Findability.
The Web is a “show not tell” medium, but putting together effective screencasts takes time and editing. Ben Chestnut tells us he how was able to use Screenflow to produce a professional product at minimal cost.
This week, we take a look at how to handle the conflict between what your users want, and what you want them to want. Robin Ragle-Davis considers how upfront audience profiling can reap customer relationship benefits down the line.
Faceted browsing is a powerful navigation tool for content dense sites—but not all browsing is alike. Mike Padilla explains the importance of remembering the users’ needs when creating this alternative to search to avoid pushing your audience down a path you didn’t intend.
It might seem like a good idea when you’re sat in the audience, but once you land your first speaking gig at a web conference it can seem a daunting concept. Why would anyone want to listen to what you have to say—and do you actually have anything worth saying in the first place! Branding expert Lea Alcantara shares what she has learned about putting together the perfect presentation.
When you think of the people who use your website, where do they use it? At work or a home office? What about a mobile phone? What about even more diverse devices like Amazon's Kindle or the Nintendo Wii? Dave Shea asks us to reconsider how and where people use our websites, and how best to tackle the demands of building sites for a wide array of devices.
Does your business take responsibility for its impact on the environment or the local community? And does it do enough for your employees? John Reeve, co-founder of Santa Barbara design and development shop Pelago, shares the tips and advice that can help make your business whiter than white when it comes to being green.
Web development frameworks are a brave new world for some developers coming to them after years of procedural coding—and while the golden boy of frameworks, Ruby on Rails, now has several books to learn from, the relatively new PHP framework industry is lagging behind in that respect. Columnist Nathan Smith takes a look at a new book aiming to plug that gap for one of the hottest frameworks around: CodeIgniter.
If you’re anything like me, your hard drive is probably littered with unfinished redesigns of your personal portfolio site. As professional designers, we can often be our own worst client—which is why I’m very pleased to welcome FreelanceSwitch’s Collis Ta’eed to set out some sensible ground rules to consider when approaching that portfolio project.
Whether you’re a multi-million pageview behemoth or a much smaller site, you can speed up your website by offloading some of the hosting to a different domain. But who needs the hassle of setting all that up, when you can use Amazon’s infrastructure instead? Craig Noeldner and Mike Culver walk us through the process of setting up and configuring your own little piece of Amazon S3.
There isn’t much that all-round web expert, Garrett Dimon, doesn’t know about the unique challenges of designing and developing for the web. This week he turns his attention to the ubiquitous web form, and demonstrates the do’s and dont’s of effective form design. (No international auction sites were harmed during the making of this article.)
Come January, when we look back over this year and take stock of the key advancements that have been made in our corner of the industry, one of the highlights will surely be an increased focus on website performance—and it’s mostly due to the work of one man. Digital Web’s Matthew Pennell takes a look at a book that is the result of years spent fine-tuning the Yahoo! sites: Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites.
It’s time to put away your copy of Photoshop and delve deep into the murky depths of DNS configuration this week, as new author Lei Zhu investigates an ingenious way to handle load balancing for web applications. It’s not just required reading if you’re about to launch the next Twitter or Facebook—what would happen if your site went down today?
Just what happens when four of the smartest guys around join forces to create a new web-design powerhouse? And why do they care so much about their mileage? Digital Web sat down with Steve Smith, Jonathan Snook, Dan Rubin, and Bryan Veloso—now collectively known as Sidebar Creative—to find out the answers
It’s the sticky moment in any negotiation with a potential new client—no matter how great your proposal, you’re still going to have to deliver The Quote. But how do you arrive at that magic figure, taking into account the unpredictability of developing for the next generation of the web? Andy Budd, no stranger to client work, takes a look at a new way to cost out your projects.
Designers, information architects, project managers, bloggers—most of us love to add skills to our repertoire. But if our main expertise isn’t programming, we sometimes feel a bit intimidated at the thought of venturing into somewhat more technical areas. Digital Web staff member, writer, and designer Jessica Neuman Beck scouts out the territory of forum set-up for us and points the way to making the process perfectly simple.
Go behind the scenes with Ryan Nichols to experience the rebranding of Carson Systems’ “Future of” conferences. From pencil sketches to fully realized identity, this installment of our popular Working Designer series gives you a unique glimpse into the creation of a brand.
Freelancers and hot-shot web agencies are only one side of the web development party. Behind the scenes of every company website, you’re likely to find a frustrated in-house developer or two, wondering why exactly they bought all those shiny books when web standards seems to be a bad word in the weekly marketing meeting. If this sounds very much like your daily grind, new author Scott Gledhill has some advice on how to approach introducing standards in a corporate world.
Maybe you’ve approached a website design with the burning desire to do something that’s altogether different. Perhaps you’ve attempted to build a site, CMS, or hot new app that meets management’s vague goals to somehow turn our current thinking upside-down. Or, could be you’ve considered a new IA project and thought, “there must be a new way to approach this.” If so, then you’ve wrangled with the concept of innovation. Few understand innovation—its challenges, and how to harness our abilities to pull it off successfully—as well as Scott Berkun, author of the respected Art of Project Management, does. His new book, The Myths of Innovation, attempts to take a fresh look at the subject. Did he succeed? Read Digital Web staffer Tiff Fehr’s review to find out.
Innovation is both a buzz word and an elusive goal these days for many companies and web professionals. After writing her review of
Scott Berkun’s new book The Myths of Innovation, DW staff member Tiff Fehr decided to dig a little deeper by asking him these five pertinent questions.
Some web design projects suffer from lack of leadership. We’ve all seen the results—home pages overflowing with everything including the kitchen sink, or sites without focus that, in the end, don’t pay off for the client or their visitors. Nathan Smith shares two stories that will help you explain—to both your clients and your team—the importance of leadership, focus, and structure when building a site.
Spend any time in the business sections of web design forums and you’ll hear countless freelancers complaining about client trouble. “He won’t pay up.” “They changed the requirements after we started work.” “Who owns the copyright on my code?” All are legitimate business concerns, but enough to make your head hurt if all you want to do is design websites. In his column ‘The Business End,’ Nick Gould tells you how to address these problems and enjoy a more professional relationship with your clients—and it all comes down to why you need to bother with web design contracts.
Judging by the upsurge of interest in internationalization over the past year, it is a subject to which increasing numbers of web professionals are paying careful attention. If you are in a position where foreign markets play a role in your online strategy, join new Digital Web author Huiping Iler as she shares her secrets for creating a successful international website.
Websites don’t exist in isolation, of course—the competition is always just a click or two away. How can you make sure yours is the site that wins the hearts, minds, or dollars of visitors? An insightful, detailed competitive analysis can make the difference between a site that delivers or one that sits unused. In Part Two of the excerpt from his book Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, IA and user experience expert Dan Brown continues to show us how to create an effective analysis.
User-experience consultant and information architect Dan Brown gives us the scoop this week on performing a competitive analysis. Excerpted from his new book, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, the first section of chapter five explains the analysis as a series of conceptual layers—with plenty of images to make our choices clear. The remainder of the chapter—not excerpted here—digs deeper and demonstrates how to use the analysis within a project. Communicating Design covers competitive analysis and nine other key documents for web design, including wireframes, site maps, personas, and usability reports.
With today’s acceptably cooperative browsers, implementing CSS-based designs is simply routine. But our gleeful tweaking and hacking is creating bigger, more complex style sheets. Without standards to turn to, how do we organize, segment and maintain CSS files? Find out how to whip your CSS into shape with Garrett Dimon’s guide to planning and architecting CSS.
If you’re a small (or one-person) shop, the many approaches to planning a Web site can be dizzying. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some guidelines to make design decisions easier? Karen Morrill-McClure guides you through creating a site design plan by outlining business and user needs and defining goals.
More and more, designers are working on the same site for months or even years. As new features are added and new needs are identified, a site needs to be flexible to changes, so that post-launch changes can be made quickly and easily.
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