Posts Tagged ‘usability’
CSS3 for the masses
Friday, January 30th, 2009
January 30th 2009
IMHO: CSS3 is a brilliant next step for presentational design for the web. And if you have been in the game as long as I have (around 13 years since my first webpage) then you know all about degrading your code so that alpha browsers get a really nice presentation with all bells and whistles (IE8, FF 3+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+), beta browsers get an OK presentation but might miss out on minor things. Gamma browsers (I count IE <= 6, IE for Mac, Netscape <=8, AOL users) well, seriously, just UPGRADE ALREADY.
In my latest project we are using CSS3, which appearantly even IE8 does a pretty good job of presenting.
One hump I got on my back is the implementation of columns in CSS3.
Typical column layout these days is done by floating or positioning div, depending on which school of thought you follow. This page for instance has a two column layout. It works and it is brilliant.
But is there any use for columns for content?
In normal newspaper layout you are used to read text in columns, and even that becomes hard at times, as the user looses track of where they were, especially when spanning several pages, or poor layouts. With the advent of columns for the web – users will not have a reference for dealing with this. Sure it is semantic and it will degrade properly, but my argument is that it will give a poor user experience, as users will have to scroll down for content, and print-designers think that their newspaper layouts automatically can be translated to the web. Bollocks to that. If anyone sees a good example of using multiple columns on a page, please let me know.
SEO for an idiot
Friday, January 30th, 2009
January 30th 2009
Right, SEO is a really complex subject matter. There are so many different strategies to get your site in that number one spot on Google and yahoo!.
My experiment into SEO is now “Blondy & Blacky – balklänningar, brudklänningar & smokings” and how to get them higher on the search engines rankings. The problem I face is the following:
I redesigned and moved the site from the web-address blondy.nu to blondyblacky.com in early December. At the same time we moved the shop into the textalk.se system – which is on a completely different server. Of course we dropped from the Google results immediately, and now my task is to get us back on the frontpage again. All the while trying to do this without having to fork out for the extra cost of search engine option on textalk.
I will post about my progress in this matter here
