1. Aarron Walter

  2. Interface Design Bootcamp: Future of Web Design Workshop

    Nov 17, 2010 | Conferences,Design,Development,Tools & Utilities,User Science,UX | 3 comments

    I recently conducted a day long “Interface Design Bootcamp” workshop in New York at the Future of Web Design. We covered a lot of territory including user research, personas, wireframes, sketchboards, prototypes, and usability testing. There are so many useful resources freely available on the Web that make the job of a user experience designer easier. Here are a few of the UX resources discussed and the slides from the workshop.

    read on »

  3. The InterACT Summit

    May 25, 2010 | Accessibility,Books,Conferences,Development | 1 comment

  4. Findability/SEO Cheat Sheet: Guide to Web Standards SEO

    Jul 28, 2008 | Development,Findability,SEO,Tools & Utilities,Web Standards | 9 comments
    Findability cheat sheet SEO guide
    free findability strategy cheat sheet [PDF 200k]

    When I was researching my book, I asked a group of my students at The Art Institute of Atlanta what sorts of content they’d hope to find in a book exploring findability and SEO through web standards. Thinking like students with limited time to work on their projects, they all agreed that “the book should include coverage of what needs to be prioritized, and what can be done later if you run out of time”. Brilliant idea! I never would have thought of that. Well it’s covered in chapter 9 thanks to them.

    As I was running through my table of contents with them, they pointed out that it’s all useful info, but it would be nice if there were a quick reference that you could just print out and keep nearby as you start new projects. That way you don’t miss any of the important stuff you should be doing to make your site findable.

    I’ve created what I think is a pretty comprehensive findability strategy cheat sheet that will guide you through all of the stuff you should be doing when creating new websites or even redesign existing ones. All of the advice follows industry best practices and web standards, and have references to the places in my book or in the 5 free online chapters where you’ll find detailed explanation and examples of how to do this stuff.

    I hope you find it useful!

    download free findability strategy cheat sheet [PDF 200k]

  5. Running Two Domains On One Shared Hosting Server

    Jan 15, 2007 | Development,Tools & Utilities | 7 comments

    Most people run their web sites on one of the many inexpensive shared hosting servers running a LAMP environment. If you are like me, you probably have a number of domain names registered, perhaps all parked on the same server pointing to the same site. It would be great to split things up, though, to point one domain to a particular site on your server, and other domains to their own site. Apache lets you do this using a special .htaccess file, which configures the server software on the fly. You can set up unique sites in their own directory on your server, and then direct Apache to point requests for a particular domain to that folder. Let’s assume the domain you want to redirect is called “somedomain.com”, and the folder on your server where the site files reside is called “somedomain”. Create a plain text file with a text editor and add the following to it:

    RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} somedomain.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !somedomain/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ somedomain/$1 [L]

    If you are on a Mac or Linux machine, you will need to save the file as something like htaccess.txt so the operating system does not hide the file (.htaccess is a special name the operating system recognizes, and will try to interpret the commands within). Upload the file to the root directory on your server (sometimes called, htdocs, public_html, or www among other names). Rename it .htaccess, then try accessing somedomain.com in a browser. It should direct your request to the files within the somedomain folder transparently, giving the effect of multiple domains with their own site running on the same shared hosting environment.

  6. Atlanta Adobe User Group Formed

    Jan 9, 2007 | Design,Development | be the first to comment

    Michael Hagel, a former student turned friend, has recently organized an Adobe User Group that will have its first meeting to meet and greet all interested in taking part on Thursday January 11 at 7PM at Deardorff Communications. For more information visit the official site. Michael has some excellent guest speakers lined up for the first few events, and is a wealth of knowledge himself with Flash and mobile platforms.

  7. Dynamic Select Menus With PHP

    Dec 12, 2006 | Development,PHP | be the first to comment
    When building content management systems, or most any web application, you often need to generate select menus dynamically by querying a database. A Select menu offers a user a set of predefined options to choose from, and prevent possible input errors that could occur if you instead gave the user a text field to type their selection, resulting in typos or selection of an option that is not available. A perfect example is when you have some list of categories stored in a table, and you need to create a form that allows a user to add a new record in a particular category. Here's what your table may look like:

    Categories Table

    A unique category Id is used as the primary key, creating a practical method of referencing a category. To query this table and generate a select menu, we can use a while loop like this: [php] [/php] Notice that the select tags need to be written before and after the loop, so you don't end up with multiple menus, but just one menu with many options. This approach is practical for future maintenance too, as you can simply add a new category to your database, and the interface will include it automatically. The above example works great for building a menu on an add page where the user has not yet selected an option and stored it in a database, but if you were creating an edit page you would need to have the user's previous selection already shown in the menu.to do this you would need to dynamically write in the selected="selected" attribute/value pair in the option tag for the category selected. Assume we have an articles table that has a CatID field that relates to our category table. To find out which option was selected we'll compare the CatID in the articles table and the CatID in the categories table as we run a loop to build the menu. We'll need to run two queries, one to get the articles record (in this demo I'll hard code in the id of the article we want) and one to get the categories. [php][/php] The $selected variable stores our attribute/value pair needed to preselect the user's option stored in the database, and will be empty if the condition was not met, thus leaving the option tag untouched. Yet another common, dynamic select menu scenario is displaying date selections for years, months, or days. I create an external arrays file that has associative arrays of common lists such as this. Here is what such a file might look like. You could also add things like credit cards your e-commerce system accepts, and a list of countries for shipping information forms. Looping through associative arrays like this is a little different. [php]