Web Design Archives

Webstandards, SEO, and CSS in 3 minutes 22 seconds.

Interesting article from A List Apart about the misuse of sign-up forms. The bottom line: engage new users in your site BEFORE you ask them to enter their personal information.

Looks like Dan Cederholm is re-designing the SimpleBits website again. As Cameron Moll wrote in the classic A List Apart article about website re-aligning, good designers don’t just re-design, they re-align their businesses in conjunction with a re-design. Re-design for the sake of changing your identity can be a cool gimmicky thing as well, as demonstrated by Minneapolis-based Space150 (they change their identity every 150 days.) But a change in your visual presence that coincides with a business modification seems much more meaningful.

If you’re at all familiar with Shopify, you know that the one of it’s most inescapable flaws is that lack of ability to customize the check out pages. The lively discussion on the Shopify forum illustrates a lot of the opinions, and Shopify creator Tobias Lutke explains in a forum posting why the decision was made to limit the designers’ control of the checkout pages:

As the shopify veterans will be able to tell you we work on the checkout procedure constantly. Recently we eliminated an entire step from the process and added discount codes. We will move the checkout system into the themeable domain but not just yet. Once it is released as editable though we will not be able to change the checkout in any meaningful way.

Tobi later posted a compromising solution to allow Shopify designers to style the check out with CSS while not giving up control over structure or content. By allowing users to upload a customized checkout.css to the Shopify assets folder, designers now have complete control over the look and feel. Point Clinic, one of Bust Out Solutions’s first Shopify customers, got the checkout style treatment.

Before

After

Nice article from New York Times Technology News regarding small merchants gaining a larger presence online. Bust Out currently does quite a bit of work in this area, most recently with several Shopify implementations. Drop us a line if you need any help doing anything similar.

Cheers!

One of the most common features of an Ajax-enabled application is a “loading” animated image. You know, like a spinny thing that tells the user that “something is happening so wait for a server response.” Creating animated GIFs is not hard, especially when using web imaging software like Adobe Fireworks. But it is time consuming and generally annoying. Enter ajaxload.info. Check it out. It’ll save you time and make you a happy web designer.

If the title of this blog posting makes you cringe (as should anything with the words IE 5.5+, at least when it comes to web design), then check the TwinHelix solution. It exploits the non-standard implementation of CSS “behaviors” developed by Microsoft for the Internet Explorer browser. The fix is a simple, non-JavaScript solution for a nasty, annoying problem.

A colleague of mine forward this site to me today: brainmind.com. We both agreed that it potentially wins the award for worst website. Obviously, the webmaster is not too concerned with information architecture, design, web standards, usability, or code optimization. The site was so bad I couldn’t stop looking at it, which maybe works in his favor for driving traffic. It’s the William Hung of the web world.

I think I need to lie down for a while now…

If you’re a web developer or even a web designer, there are three Firefox add-ons that you probably already use. If not, get them now and consider this your first step into smart web development.

• Web Developer by Chris Pederick
• Firebug by Joe Hewitt
• YSlow by Yahoo! Inc.

Any other suggestions? What do you use?

Icons can make your website look super cool when used properly. My preference is to use icons that are exactly 16 pixels by 16 pixels. That’s just about the height of a line of text so the images line up well with words. I am a huge fan of Mark James’s “Silk” icon set that you can download for free from his website at famfamfam.com. Dan Cederholm also provides very nice icons for purchase at his Icon Shoppe. Go nuts.