Category: User experience, web, technology

  • Venting (&^$%#@!!!) about a web host company.

    Venting. Launching a web site really should be a simple matter. I’ve deployed hundreds of web sites over the last few years. Most of the time, it is a simple matter of backing up some files, uploading some new files, and occassionally making a DNS change so that a domain name actually points to said…

  • Plug for Mr. Tufte

    “One visionary day….the insights of this class lead to new levels of understanding both for creators and viewers of visual displays.”WIRED “The Leonardo da Vinci of data.”THE NEW YORK TIMES Tufte has courses coming up in Dearborn, MI in mid-April. I attended one of his courses in Chicago about a year and a half ago.…

  • Sir Inventor of the Web

    Tim Berners-Lee is now Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Congrats, Sir Tim.

  • Semantic vs. valid markup

    Scott Pennington of Matrix at Michigan State University emailed an interesting link to me. The SimpleBits blog has a post and discussion of semantic markup of a page heading. A fairly elementary quiz starts it off, but the range of perspectives in the discussion starts to show the complexity of semantic markup. On the one…

  • LukeW. linking to my web tips!

    This is cool: I referenced Luke Wroblewski’s book “Site Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability” in some of my web tip articles on my professional site, and he found them and linked back. Take a look. As of today, the links back to envisionic.com are at the bottom of the page under the Consulting…

  • Visual description of an HTML element

    Click on the words above to see the differences between an element, element content, attribute name, attribute value, start tag, and end tag. This is the first version of this “diagram,” so bear with me. Let me know if you have any feedback on it.

  • PHP tab navigation switcher

    I don’t consider myself a web programmer, but I have occasionally fiddled with the odd perl script, php, or asp code snippets. I had a situation yesterday that caused me to want to come up with a php script that would switch tab graphics on a web site, based on the URL of the page.…

  • Burning the midnight oil

    So we’re here in my office. Chey has been working on her thesis practically all day and it is now tomorrow. Her old, broken down laptop has been giving her problems. I initialized the hard drive and reinstalled the OS today to help make this go faster. The drop down menus were starting to get…

  • Study suggests shift in methodology for web development is needed

    A recent study mentioned by CyberAtlas (formerly NUA Internet Surveys), Errors Rampant on Gov’t sites, found that 68% of U.S. government web sites had web application failures. Of those with failures, 61% had technical errors and 7% had incorrect data errors. The report suggests that a large portion of other errors were user failure errors,…

  • I have a workaround…

    Oh, and just so you don’t get the wrong idea, I have a workaround functioning in place of MS Access. It is crazy to me that I had to put together some web pages to accomplish the fairly simple task that Access was supposed to do.