Webdev

Excerpted from The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Source for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.

Can first-time users find their way around your site easily and locate what they're looking for? Before you say yes, put yourself in front of their keyboards.

Your site's usability depends on the design and features of your user interface (UI), but it also depends on the quality of your user-interface text: the copy that orients people on your site and helps them move around it. Clickable headings, links, and buttons; feedback and error messages; and user-assistance text like FAQs and help pages—they can provide site visitors with a great experience or can frustrate and confuse them.

If people need to interact with buttons, radio buttons, and checkboxes to use your site, they require consistently stated, helpful text.

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Facebook Places is now live. It does three things essentially. Allows you to share where you're, find your friends and discover new places.

It comes with all the privacy settings. Either you can opt out of it altogether, so friends can't tag you or you will be notified every time you're tagged, so you can remove individual tags manually. Businesses can claim their shops on the map.

Right now, you need an iPhone to start using the app, but soon all mobile devices will be supported. The API allows developers to plug-in to the system and create games and other applications. It's not yet live in all regions, but will be soon. Wonder which agency and brand will take advantage of this new technology first for their marketing activities.

With Google recently hitting the headlines with the purchase of semantic database tool www.freebase.com, semantic search is becoming a big upcoming topic that is promising a lot in terms of the way we search the web and more importantly how we view the information in different media.

The official Twitter share button has been finally released. It will replace the Tweetmeme button most websites use today. Tweetmeme required users to connect their Twitter accounts to Tweetmeme before they could share a page making the tweet a little more complicated than it should be.

Adapted from HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart)
By Remo Camerota

HTML is the unifying language of the World Wide Web. Using just the simple tags it contains, the human race has created an astoundingly diverse network of hyperlinked documents, from Amazon, eBay, and Wikipedia, to personal blogs and websites dedicated to cats that look like Hitler.

HTML5 is the latest iteration of this lingua franca. While it is the most ambitious change to our common tongue, this isn’t the first time that HTML has been updated. The language has been evolving from the start.

As with the web itself, the HyperText Markup Language was the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 1991 he wrote a document called “HTML Tags” in which he proposed fewer than two dozen elements that could be used for writing web pages.

Sir Tim didn’t come up with the idea of using tags consisting of words between angle brackets; those kinds of tags already existed in the SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) format. Rather than inventing a new standard, Sir Tim saw the benefit of building on top of what already existed—a trend that can still be seen in the development of HTML5.

Read further on Graphics.com

You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMole or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.

I wish there was a similar app for iPhone app development.

Building websites is a glamorous business, but at the end you still need to consider if that website is usable and works in most browsers. I've built this handy checklist based on some web searches and from personal experience. Feel free to add suggestions in the comments. I want this list to grow!

Before the list, and before you do anything else, get Firefox for your website quality control testing. Add ons like Web Developer, Firebug, and Dust Me Selectors will make your job a breeze. FF even has W3 Validation Tools linked in Web Developer.

[more...]

Excerpted from Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works! (SitePoint)
By Remo Camerota

Selling email services is a logical step forward for freelance web designers and developers. We will look at the practicalities of selling email to existing and new clients. Once we review the reasons you should add email to your service offering, we’ll take a closer look at the variety of email-related services that you can offer, and what is involved in selling email services. We will cover the common approaches to pricing and preparing a folio of email samples, and discuss tips for a winning client pitch.

Why Sell Email Services?
Perhaps this section would be more appropriately titled, “Why wouldn’t you sell email services?”

More than Just a Designer or Developer: If you see yourself purely as a web designer or developer, it’s time to broaden that view. The first important step in selling your email services is to recognize your capabilities in email design and delivery. Then you’ll be able to see—and present—yourself as someone who designs or develops more than websites alone.

There’s one particularly good reason why you should sell email services. If you’re freelancing, email services provide a prime opportunity to maintain ongoing, potentially lucrative relationships with clients. Designers and developers often find that they have few reasons to continue the client relationship once they’ve delivered the site they were contracted to provide. Email is a very handy solution to the challenge of maintaining close client relationships over time.

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McCann creative Mat Bisher is conducting an "experiment" as he calls it that's a reaction to Apple's lack of Flash support and a message to Steve Jobs all in one. Here's Bisher's explanation:

The Web Design Sketchbook is a carefully crafted set of website tools to help you through the process of planning and designing your web projects.

The Sketchbook starts with a set of design and content planning questions that cover everything from site objectives, design tone to the information architecture or sitemap.

The book the features a series of design and layout brainstorming pages with full browser chrome and grids to better plan how your site will look and operate when it is finished. The book features thumbnail, detail and full page sizes for more effecient brain storming and detail development.

A free downloadable version is available:
http://webdesign-sketchbook.com