Web Design News & Articles

A recent post on Content Management Connection's blog made a lot of sense. In it, the online community for technology practitioners, software companies and end users, discussed the need to be content first, design second.

Their point is that you wouldn't buy a suit for a stranger without first having her trying it on, so why design websites around content that doesn't exist yet. It's an interesting concept, but not as simple as it sounds.

While it's true that when projects are started and designers are tasked with putting together comps of possible designs, the actual content for a site is usually just a gleam in the project manager's eye. Rarely do design projects start with the final copy. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

With the advent of Software as a Service (Saas), it's surprising that more browser-based options for web development don't exist. Which is what makes Platformic (news, site) so unique. Not only does it offer a browser-based web development strategy, its platform combines web design with content management.

Recently we spoke with Mark Underhill, Chief Technology Officer at Platformic about their many innovative features. The essence of Platformic 3.0 is that it lets designers, developers and laypeople use the same tools to make exciting designs, offer new media and dynamic content to users who demand it.

When creating a search results page, it's unfortunately too easy to produce an ineffective design. We know this because, in the course of our research, we've studied hundreds of search results pages. Many of the pages we've studied hurt the user's experience purely because of their design.

For more than seven years, I’ve been teaching and coaching design teams on how to conduct usability tests and gather user feedback early on in the development process. One of the questions that comes up time and time again from clients is, "How can we get buy-in for usability tests from management and other team members?"

The demand for good web design is increasing, revealed a recent Webcopyplus online poll. Almost 25% of web users indicated “poor visual presentation” as the number one element that drives them away from websites.

Only 6.6% of web users who participated in a similar 2007 online poll indicated ‘poor visual presentation” as the main reason to abandon a website. That equates to a 267% increase during the two-year period.

Webcredible has noticed that governmental types aren't all that bright when it comes to technology (Barack Obama and Al Gore excepted) and has developed a highly accessible content management system for those in power at all levels.

Somewhere, right now, there's a team creating a new design with some amazing, never-before-seen functionality. And to take advantage of that awesome, groundbreaking functionality work, their users will need to login.

Login functionality isn't new. It's not awesome. It's not very challenging to develop. Teams are designing this functionality as if it's never been built before.

But it has been built before. Teams, all over the world, have built login functionality into their applications about a million times. And yet, here we are, doing it all over again.

All this re-creation and re-invention isn't just inefficient, it leaves the team open to problems. Because it's not the sexy part of their project, it's likely to get less attention, resulting in an unusable and frustrating experience.

This is where the Re-use Trinity -- Patterns, Components, and Interaction Design Frameworks -- comes in.

Recently, in a set of interviews UIE conducted with avid users of Netflix.com, the online DVD rental web site, we asked "What are the things you like best about the site?" Lots, apparently.

Best known for web content management systems designed for the educational sector, UK-based TerminalFour (news, site) now wants to get a bigger piece of the commercial market.

They are doing this by partnering with Different Digital, a creative agency also based in the UK. Different Digital is considered a rising star in the digital media and marketing space, so this partnership makes a lot of sense.

The new partnership gives Different Digital access to strong technology and experience in web content management. Together, the two should be able to provide strong solutions for commercial websites that need content managed, marketing solutions.

It's good to know that TerminalFour understands their strengths and see partnering as a way to add additional capabilities and grow market share. Some Web CMS providers try to do it all and many fail.

Web Design is different from web content management. But the two together are what makes a website a true experience. The partnership is already working with several joint initiatives under way.

Learn more about what TerminalFour can offer your business.

I finally got to drop in on CMS Expo. The brainchild of Linda and John Coonen (they have done an amazing job) it is a smorgasbord of CMS buzz, chat and the lunch wasn't bad either. A couple sessions were especially interesting this afternoon.

As a Joomla lover I thought I would check out the competition so visited Colleen Carroll and a session on Drupal design.

Colleen emphasized that using a grid to build Drupal themes always renders a better end product.

She worked with her own theme she has modified from Zen available at drupal.org/project/austin.

Tip: Colleen says to activate css compressor during development (in configuration) to speed dev time.

I found the Drupal community contribution feature interesting and wonder if other CMS should adopt it.

Familiar to us Joomla users, Colleen advised not to hack Drupal core if possible, as updates will wipe away your hacks.

Colleen showed us that good theme development is as much about deconstruction as building. A fitting philosophy for a self professed lover of Zen.

Drupal update rumor: Colleen says she has heard it through the grapevine that Drupal 7 the theming on Drupal.org's redesign should be released by September 09.

[Editor's Note: Colleen has pointed out a correction on the Drupal update rumor, saying the September timing was related to the theming on Drupal.org's redesign and not the Drupal 7 release. ]
 

The team was happy to be together. Forty-six folks from eight different offices, traveling from all over the world, had come together for their annual meeting.

They were excited to be there. It was good to see faces of people who were often just an email address or voice on a conference call. It was nice to reflect on all the great things they'd accomplished.

Over the past 3 years, the team worked diligently on server reliability, eliminating dead links, and consistent navigation and branding across all 200 of the sub-sites. They'd installed a new enterprise-wide content management system, a better process for editorial work, and new application tools to help their franchise owners sell more high-margin products. By all measures, the web site had become a critical element in their multi-national business.

Yet, there was still an unsettled tone amongst the group. Given all the progress they'd made, they felt they still had a long way to go. They weren't sure what the next step was.

As designers, we rely on communicating detail to our teammates and collaborators. Sometimes a picture is a thousand words, but often, we need more words and explanation to make those diagrams effective.

We had a chance to sit down with Dan Brown, the co-Founder and co-Principal of EightShapes, to talk about his experience with creating successful annotations. Here's what he shared.

Magnolia’s here with another release. Magnolia 4.0  is the fourth generation of the Java-based web content management system and brings with it a whole mess of template related pizzazz.

In addition to production-ready functionality, Magnolia’s latest release delivers content presentation that follows accessibility guidelines, is search-engine optimized and introduces support for mobile devices.

Xara Web Designer is new web page software that allows complete free-form, anything, anywhere web page design.  Without any HTML or JavaScript skills required, Xara Web Designer can create graphical webpages containing text, graphics, photos, widgets and Flash.

I have been working with Visio for many years now for making mock-ups and wireframes, but a few weeks ago I bought Balsamiq Mockups. It’s a tool that lets you make simple mock-ups that look simple. Here's a quick review.