home portfolio what I'm reading

What I'm reading...

A List Apart

The Look That Says Book
Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.
Date:
Strategic Content Management
Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?
Date:
Apps vs. the Web
There's an app for that, and you're the folks who are creating it. But should you design a web-based application, or an iPhone app? Each approach has pluses and minuses—not to mention legions of religiously rabid supporters. Apple promotes both approaches (they even gave the web a year-long head start before beginning to sell apps in the store), and the iPhone's Safari browser supports HTML5 and CSS3 and brags a fast JavaScript engine. Yet many companies and individuals with deep web expertise choose to create iPhone apps instead of web apps that can do the same thing. Explore both approaches and learn just about everything you'll need to know if you choose to create an iPhone app—from the lingo, to the development process, to the tricks that can smooth the path of doing business with Apple.
Date:
Good Help is Hard to Find
Help content gets no respect. For one thing, it is content, and our horse-before-cart industry is only now beginning to seriously tackle content strategy. For another, we assume that our site is so usable, nobody will ever need the help content anyway. Typically, no one is in charge of the help content and no strategy exists to keep it up to date. On most sites, help content is hard to find, poorly written, blames the user, and turns a mildly frustrating experience into a lousy one. It's time to rethink how we approach this part of our site. Done well, help content offers tremendous potential to earn customer loyalty. By learning to plan for and create useful help content, we can turn frustrated users into our company's biggest fans.
Date:
Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings
Too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people's time reiterating what everyone already knows. If every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first one? By asking stakeholders tough questions before the kick-off, and using the meeting itself to explore ideas and build relationships, you can turn a room of mutually suspicious turf battlers into an energetic team with shared ownership of the end-product and the kind of bond that can sustain the group through the challenges ahead.
Date:

All Web Design Resources

Can You Make Money from a Website?
It seems everyone and their mother now has a website or a blog. We hear the success stories like the woman who blogged about cooking and had a major studio buy it to make the movie Julie & Julia. But how can the average web designer make any money without waiting for that kind of luck?
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:05:55 +0000
Minimalist Website Design Can Now Improve Search Engine Position
A minimalist web design makes your webpage load faster, which is now one of the criteria Google uses to determine a website's search engine position.
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:47:26 +0000
Tips for Taking the Guesswork out of Web Design
Web design can sometimes feel a little like mind reading–clients trying to express abstract ideas about what they want, you trying to divine what they mean, all of you hoping to land on some kind of common ground. But the design process doesn’t have to be such a scary leap into the unknown. Expert user experience [...]
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:39:53 +0000
Quick Ways to Bump up Your Web Design Skills
MediaBistro is offering one killer deal for anyone looking to bump up his/her web design skills. Right now you can get a year subscription to their On Demand Video library for just $97–that’s more than half off the usual price! The On Demand Videos are a great resource for any designer, and include practical online tutorials [...]
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:51:57 +0000
How to Design an iPhone Application: Part 2
So the last post started you down the road to iPhone app stardom. Now let’s talk about how to execute your big idea and actually get it up and running in the iTunes store: 5. Get going on the design work. While you’re waiting for Mac’s Software Development Kit (SDK)  and Xcode files to download, work on [...]
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:51:23 +0000

Bokardo

Designing the Usage Lifecycle Workshop in Boston Oct 25
A quick announcement about a workshop I’m giving in Boston in October on the Usage Lifecycle. The workshop is for designers, design managers, product folks, and other people responsible for web sites who are struggling with creating a great user experience. The workshop will cover, among other things: How to design for the psychology of [...]
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:29:03 +0000
Dunning-Kruger Effect: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is Part 1
A fascinating read about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which to my observation is enjoying somewhat of a heyday in certain circles. I see reference to it everywhere…well here is an interview with David Dunning, the one who originally thought of it. “There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we [...]
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:45:17 +0000
How (And When) to Motivate Yourself
A great piece by Peter Bregman in the Harvard Business Review about How (And When) to Motivate Yourself: I write at least one post a week. Does that take discipline? Sure. But when I break it down, the hardest part — the part for which I need the discipline — is sitting down to write. [...]
Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 11:18:01 +0000
A good problem to have | Mike Industries
Mike Davidson rightly points out why iPhone/iPad apps are often better than their web counterparts. It also amuses me when people talk about two things in particular with regard to the iPhone and iPad. First, how much better some companies’ iPhone apps are than their web sites, as if the company is somehow so much [...]
Date: Wed, 05 May 2010 17:46:45 +0000
Facebook Behaving Badly
The difference between Facebook’s public commentary on new features and the actual privacy implications of such features could not be more stark. Consider this tidbit from the EFF, Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information, about a change that Facebook made just days ago, on April 19: : “Once upon a time, Facebook could [...]
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 11:00:04 +0000