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Deborah’s Weekly Web Resources Roundup: April 28, 2012

April 29, 2012 By Deborah Edwards-Onoro

Not sure if it was on everyone’s calendar, but this past week should have been named “Responsive Design” week for all the great design posts and tutorials published on the web. Hope you find this week’s roundup of resources helpful.

Responsive Design

  • Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Designing Responsively (part 1): The first in a five-part series from .net Magazine. Paul Robert Lloyd from Clearleft takes you through the process of creating a responsive site with practical advice toward the design and coding.
  • Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Typography and Grids (part 2)
  • Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Images and Video(part 3)
  • Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Media and Queries (part 4)
  • Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Going Further (part 5)
  • Responsive Design Conditionally Loading Content: Jeremy Keith shares his approach for managing content on multiple devices. Check the comments for good discussion and ifferent approaches.
  • Handling Typography in Responsive Design: It’s not enough to have a responsive layout and scaling images; you need to manage how your typography looks across devices. 
  • Examples of Great Responsive Design: Not just a showcase of responsive designs, this article from TripWire Magazine highlights tools you can use to test your responsive design. 
  • Freebie: Responsive HTML5/CSS3 Template: If you’re not interested in building your own responsive site, check out this one page template with jQuery gallery, sticky header, and jQuery image glider.
  • Responsive Web Design: Layouts and Media Queries: Detailed explanation of responsive layouts and media queries with stylesheet examples from Stéphanie Walter.

User Experience

  • Apple’s 27 Guidelines for Mobile User Experience: You’ll nod as you read these guidelines, most are good common programming guidelines. But I personally need to be reminded of guideline #25 daily.
  • Gamification and UX: Where Users Win or Lose: Use gamification wisely.

    Gamification is here to stay, and unfortunately many people will continue to use it the wrong way.

  • Researching Meaning: Making Sense of Behaviour: A long read, but worth your time.The article highlights several examples of user behavior on website and argues the need to balance goals with activities.
  • Mental Model Diagrams (Cartoon): Great cartoon to share with people who aren’t on a design/development team or those who don’t understand user behaviors and interactions.

WordPress

  • Jetpack Adds Support for Custom Contact & Email Forms: Jetpack just keeps adding more and more features. The Grunion Contact Form, used by many people on WordPress.com, is the lastest feature to be added. Depending on your contact form requirements, you might find you can delete your standalone contact form plugin and use the Jetpack contact form instead.
  • Theme Options Gallery: Konstantin Kovehsnin started a new blog this month focused on theme options. His tagline? The best and the worst theme option screens around.
  • 10 Admin Menu Plugins to Improve Your WordPress Site’s User Interface: Rename menu items, move menu items around, or color code your menus are just a few of the options these plugins provide for your site or your clients’ sites.
  • Giving WordPress That New Car Smell (Part 2): Mika Epstein walks us through the steps she took to update her sites with three premium WordPress themes. I liked her approach for managing StudioPress child themes.
  • Super Useful WordPress Action Hooks and Filters: From Cats Who Code, a collection of hooks and filters to allow you to prevent automatic image compression, enable threaded comments, add post thumbnails to the RSS feed, and more.

Filed Under: Web design & development links Tagged With: bookmarks, responsive design, user experience, wordpress

Deborah’s Weekly Web Resources Roundup: April 15, 2012

April 16, 2012 By Deborah Edwards-Onoro

It’s a shorter list this week since I was out two days attending the .eduGuru Summit conference. Hope you find some web development and design resources that help you with your projects.

Accessibility

  • Improving the Accessibility Game Plan: Recording of Karl Groves April 10 webinar on the challenges the accessibility community faces in promoting & discussing accessibility.
  • Links to Resources Discussed in “Improving the Accessibility Game Plan” Presentation: Karl Groves provides resources from his Improving the Web Accessibility Game Plan April 10 webinar. 
  • An Exciting Invitation to Join a Community of Accessibility Professionals!: Deque Systems invites accessibility professionals to join their Accessibility Consultant Engagement Program (ACE).
  • Google Issues New Android Accessibility Guidelines: Google released two new resources, a developer guide and accessibility training.
  • Web Accessibility Toolbar: Thanks to The Paciello Group for a new update of the toolbar.

CSS

  • CSS Sprites Revisited: Niels Matthijs discusses the difficulties with CSS sprites, and shares some tips on how to use them with LESS and SASS.
  • Useful Links for Learning CSS @Keyframes Animation: Now is a good time to learn about @keyframes since the support is no longer limited to webkit browsers. Firefox has support as of summer 2011 and IE 10 is expected to have support when it’s released.

HTML

  • The Current State of HTML5 Forms: Wufoo has updated their HTML5 form page; be sure to check out the browser support table for HTML5 input types.
  • Quirky HTML Tags: Test your HTML knowledge with this quiz on some of the more obscure HTML elements.

User Experience

  • Open Card Sort Analysis 101: Moving beyond the open card sort, Alan Salmoni shows you how to analyse open card sort data using R, an open source statistics language.
  • Once Upon a UI Nightmare: A Story of Customer Dis-Enchantment: Follow along with Alex Stetson as she shares her experiences booking flights on American Airlines and JetBlue. One airline’s user interface made her comment, I wanted to kill someone.
  • A Usability Controversy: Mobile vs. Full Site: My collection of the posts and criticisms of Jakob Nielsen’s article recommending building separate mobile-optimized sites.

WordPress

  • Get WordPress Security Tips from the Sucuri Pros: Free Webinar: Join this free webinar on April 25 to learn tips for keeping your WordPress site secure.
  • How To Add Simple and Elegant Footnotes in Your WordPress Blog: If you ever wondered how to add footnotes to your posts, this is the plugin for you.
  • Smashing Special: What’s Going On In The WordPress Economy?: Long read, but definitely worth it. Filled with stats and great interviews with WordPress designers, developers and founders. 
  • How To Build a Donation Form with Gravity Forms: Step-by-step guide to creating a donation form using Gravity Forms and PayPal.
  • How to Have Different Sidebar Content On Different Pages of Your WordPress Site: I knew about Widget Logic, but hadn’t heard about the other plugins to control sidebar content.

Have any good resources to share? Feel free to add them in the comments.

Filed Under: Web design & development links Tagged With: accessibility, bookmarks, CSS, html, user experience, wordpress

Deborah’s Weekly Web Resources Roundup: April 1, 2012

April 2, 2012 By Deborah Edwards-Onoro

Discovered some great resources this week, including some interesting visualizations, cool CSS3 effects and a new process to add to my user experience toolkit. Hope you found them helpful.

Accessibility

  • Google’s Self Driving Car Takes Blind Man To Taco Bell: The technology is still years away before it’s expected to be commonplace. Interesting to hear Nevada is the first state to pass a law (in February 2012) allowing self-driving vehicles on the roadways. 
  • How to Include ALT Text with Images in Word 2011: Time to celebrate. Can’t believe it’s taken this long, but you can finally add ALT text to images in Word 2011 on the Mac.
  • Closed Captioning of Internet Protocol-Delivered Video Programming: Protocols have been published in the Federal Register of the United States. Long read, I hope someone can provide a shorter summary.
  • eAccess+ Survey of Accessibility Advocacy: If you’re involved with information and communication technologies, and you consider yourself an accessibility advocate, take this survey.

CSS

  • 25 Coolest CSS3 Effects Roundup from 2012: Enjoyed learning how the IBM Lotusphere logo was recreated in CSS3.
  • Minimum Paragraph Widths in Fluid Layouts: Interesting solution for managing text wrap and floated images.

HTML

  • BrowserQuest – Massively Multiplayer HTML5 Game Demo: Have fun playing this game release by Mozilla this past week. If you’re interested, the code has been posted on GitHub.
  • 7 Facts and Myths of HTML5: A quick read clearing up some of the misunderstandings about HTML5 including HTML5 won’t be ready for another 10 years and HTML5 will end the use of Flash. 
  • Create an interactive bubble chart with HTML5 canvas: I’ve never created a bubble chart for visualizations before, have you?
  • How to Code an HTML5 Template: Step by step guide from Dain Miller on Web Designer Depot on building an HTML5 template. Be sure to check the comments for clarification on the markup.

User Experience

  • Style Tiles, The Flip Side of Wireframes: First time I’ve heard of style tiles, but definitely something I’m considering for my next project.
  • Digital Insights: Mobile Is Not a Channel – It’s an Attitude: Let’s stop talking about mobile as a separate channel and start designing digital experiences that incorporate mobile the way it obviously needs to be done.
  • Should We Design in the Browser From the Start? .netMag asks several well-known developers and designers their opinions on designing in Photoshop vs. the browser.
  • User Experience vs. User Interface Infographic as Cereal: Love this simple way of showing the differences. Reminded me my datacenter needs to get bigger.
  • Mobile UI Design Patterns: 10+ Sites for Inspiration: If you’re doing mobile work, this post is a great resource of mobile design pattern sites.

WordPress

  • WordPress Multisite 101: Thanks to Mika Epstein and Andrea Rennick, a WordPress Multisite guide was published last week, answering lots of questions on how to setup, configure and manage a multisite installation. I know of no other resource on the web and give thanks to Mika and Andrea for publishing the e-book.
  • Adding Custom Styles in WordPress TinyMCE Editor: Make it easier for your clients to manager their websites with additional styles in TinyMCE.
  • The Complete Guide To The WordPress Settings API, Part 5: Tabbed Navigation For Your Settings Page: Tom McFarlin continues his series with an excellent post on tabbed navigation. Good discussion in the comments.
  • WordPress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records: The numbers are amazing. As of March 2012, WordPress is on 72.4 million sites in the world and WordPress.com hosts about half of them.
  • Empowering Journalists with WordPress: Ryan shares his thoughts on whether blogging is journalism and offers some of his favorite plugins for writing. What I liked best in his post was reading his workflow.

What I Found Interesting

  • NASA Perpetual Ocean: The Ocean Surface Currents around the World: Cool visualization of the ocean currents from June 2005 to December 2007. (Be careful which version you select, you may hit your bandwidth limit.)
  • 10 Tools to Analyze Your Website: Though I’ve heard of and used Alexa, Compete, and CrazyEgg, I’ve never heard of Woorank. Have you used it or know anyone who has used it?

Have any good resources to share? Feel free to add them in the comments.

Filed Under: Web design & development links Tagged With: accessibility, bookmarks, CSS, html, user experience, wordpress

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