Web sites protest by going black. A little over 100 web sites have bandied together to go black on this international day of protest. Some with interesting art, some with personal notes and others with strong words. Are there other web protests going on that you've heard of? Links?
posted by DragonBoy on Feb 15, 2003 - 16 comments

Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you've ever designed a web site with "selectors or tabs that... seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface" such as Metafilter's header or Amazon's tabs or c|net's yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication's patent number 5,933,841. Here's the abstract:

A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.

Effective Web Design and the Tao of Plinko all this time I have been reading the wrong web sites to figure out the web. What I needed to be doing was spending some quality time with Bob Barker and friends on The Price is Right! Oh yeah, rumor has it that Bob Barker is set to retire next season (the shows 30th).
posted by DragonBoy on Oct 17, 2000 - 2 comments

Making Sure Usability 'Fitts' Flash Another thought provoking article about making better Flash sites on the web. I have to admit, I consider myself a designer, but I had never heard of Fitt's Law until I read this piece. Oh, I thought this was a nice quote:

Chris' First Law of Usability: Usability makes everything easier except for the job of the Designer.

Let web designers have Jakob Nielsen for usability guidance, we Flash designers have our own budding guru of usable Flash on the web at Flazoom.com. The guy behind Flazoom follows up his Cancer piece with some good guidelines for Flash on the web. The best link in the article goes here, where he asks you to find both uses of Flash on the page. I totally missed the first one, even when I knew what to look for. His use of Flash that just blew me away - hardly any animation, just usefullness. I'll stop cheering now...
posted by DragonBoy on Jun 20, 2000 - 2 comments