Podcasting Hacks is a very good book for both beginners and experts.
A few points:
The books is organised into a series of tips that the book calls ‘hacks’. Each hack is cross-referenced with other relevant hacks and the information is presented in a no-nonsense way … the author gets to the point quickly. Makes for a great reference book.
Everything you need to know about podcasting is covered:
- Tips for those just starting out.
- How to get good sound: choosing hardware, on speaking well, on reducing room noice and more.
- Tips on editing - again addressing both the tools (software) and the process / techniques.
- Instructions on publishing your podcast (blogging,) and even on monetizing your podcast.
Continue reading ‘Book Review: Podcasting Hacks’
Killersites.com’s central philosophy is based in real-world web design principles. Real-world web design is about being able to filter out the ‘garbage’, while concentrating on what really works.
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In the web design and programming world, it is common for people to get caught up with trends that actually get in the way of our work. Many times the source of these ‘trends’ is found with people who are looking to make a profit.
I’ve been burnt in the past (and on more than one occasion,) by getting caught up with ‘the next greatest thing’. I’ve put together a list of the top 7 principles of Real-World web design, with the goal of helping people avoid common pitfalls.
THE PRINCIPLES OF REAL-WORLD WEB DESIGN
- Keep your eye on the prize: your job is to build effective websites, not to waste time on nerd-details that have no pratical impact.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel: use website templates, blogs and CMS (content management systems.)
- Don’t be ruled by ivory-tower specifications: pay attention to the reality in the field!
- Beware of upcoming technologies: ‘the next big thing’ is usually a one-hit-wonder.
- Respect your REAL audience: People surf the web with browsers - not website validators!
- Stick to: mainstream technologies and tools - avoid the weird stuff.
- Remember: most people don’t care what browser they’re using.
Stefan Mischook
Given the recent IE7 development, where many commonly used CSS hacks will now break many websites in the future (forward compatibility myth destroyed …) because (ironically) IE7 will be Web Standards compliant.
Many CSS books will have to be pulled from the shelves given a liberal use of hackery in many titles including:
* Eric Meyer on CSS
* More Eric Meyer on CSS
* The Zen of CSS design
* 250 HTML and Web Design Secrets
* Web Standards Solutions
* Designing with Web Standards
All these books (and several more,) make use of hacks and as such are outdated.
BTW: many of the titles are well written and have some good information in them (I’ve read them all and given several of them positive reviews … overall,) but nonetheless, the aforementioned flaws make these titles land mines for the unsuspecting web designer.
False prophets be gone.
It looks as though IE7 will be breaking many commonly used CSS hacks and thus many Web Standards based pages - this adding credibility to my articles critical of the overly zealous Web Standards movement.
Direct from the IE7 blog:
“We’re starting to see the first round of sites and pages breaking due to the CSS fixes we have made. We would like to ask your help in cleaning up existing CSS hacks in your pages for IE7. It is has been our policy since IE6 that under quirks doctype we will not make any behavioral changes so that existing pages will continue to render unmodified, but under the strict doctype we want to change behavior to be as compliant as possible with the web standards. For IE7, we introduced new CSS functionality (see Chris’ blog post for the full list) and cleaned up our parser bugs. This leads now to several CSS hacks failing. If you are using IE7 (you are MSDN subscriber or received a copy at the PDC) you may notice major sites breaking due to the use of CSS hacks and the strict doctype. ”
In a nutshell: the forward compatibility argument is now proving to be flawed (as I’ve been stating for a long while) and now many of these Web Standards based websites will have to be updated to work in IE7! So much for forward compatibility…
Continue reading ‘Internet Explorer 7 breaks commonly used CSS hacks!’
A quick overview of what a web designer needs to know.
Topics covered:
1. Pillars of Professional Web Design.
2. The Future of Web Design.
3. Getting your first web design Job.
Pillars of Professional Web Design:
The Definition:
I am referring to the sum total of what a web designer should know. The fact that we can now define this is a great thing.
I the recent past, a web designer was more of a vague profession, if one at all. Most ‘web designers’ were actually graphic designers moonlighting as web designers. They did not really understand the medium at all and we still see symptoms of this in websites all over the Web.
Symptoms that include sliced images, heavy pages, no thought or support for things like SEO, usability, accessibility, maintainability et cetera. In fact still today, many ‘web designers’ would have a hard time writing even simple CSS code.
The Pillars Of Professional Web Design
· HTML, CSS
· Basic Design
· Usability
· Accessibility
· SEO
· Best Practices
Continue reading ‘Killer Crib Sheet for Web Designers’
