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Accessibility follow-up
Four days later, my previous post on accessibility continues to generate a lot of discussion. That’s a good thing. Unfortunately (and really, unsurprisingly), some of the more zealous members of the accessibility community found a way to manipulate my comments into things I didn’t actually say. Thankfully, some of the more level-headed accessibility mavens understood what I was getting at.
So, as a follow-up, I just want to reiterate my original points, remove the extraneous ranting, and see if I can’t make myself perfectly clear. Please do read on…
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Has accessibility been taken too far?
There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while but have a been hesitant to post, for fear of it being taken the wrong way, and fear of me being labeled as insensitive. But I’ve finally decided to just put it out there. I’ll be careful with my wording and try my best not to offend, but I can’t promise anything.
I’m concerned about the state of accessibility in our industry. I’m concerned that the web is being limited creatively by a growing crop of accessibility and usability zealots that, in my personal opinion, over-complicate the matter.
Has accessibility been taken too far?
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Django for non-programmers
In the 48 hours since I launched the new version of this site, I’ve been inundated with questions about Django, the Python-based web application framework I used to build it. I’ve pointed many people at the official Django website, which is loaded with great information. However, most of it is aimed at programmers — and rightfully so. Django is, after all, a platform for programming web applications.
I wanted to take a moment or two while I still have your attention to tell you why I think Django is a great tool for those of us who really aren’t programmers, as well.
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Boot it.
I’ve never rebooted before. Oh, I’ve redesigned, but never on May 1st, and never as part of an official Internet-wide ordeal. But this year, the timing seemed right and I was inspired enough to follow through, so here you have it.
I started working on this shortly after I got back from South By Southwest this year. That event was so inspiring, I knew I had to do something special. I had a million ideas and goals for this site, and most of them actually managed to make it in. I hope you all like it.
In this post, which happens to be my 400th, I offer an overview of some of those goals, what I’ve done to accomplish them, and other things I think are worth noting (because I made them, and I’m an egomaniac).
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Pop quiz on the meaning of “web design”
Which of the following is not a component of “web design?”
- Aesthetics
- Layout
- User interface
- Human/computer interaction
- Readability
- Usability
- Accessibility
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On the “mobile web” and contextual relevance
The so-called “Mobile Web” was a pretty hot topic at SXSW this past weekend, with at least two panels dedicated to it and mentions of it in several others. While I heard it mentioned a few times (primary by Cameron Moll), I was disappointed that no one really seemed to put much emphasis on the component of mobile applications that seems most important to me: contextual relevance.
At World Online, we have mobile version of all of our flagship sites. Wherever possible, we try to consider what people really want or need to do on their mobile devices, as opposed to simply miniaturizing the desktop version of the site. Putting the context (mobile devices) first in the design process helps you to provide real value to your mobile users.
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1&1 Internet is the devil.
1&1 Internet (which might also be called 1 and 1 Internet or 1 & 1 Internet) is a piss-poor excuse for a service company, and I advise you to never use them for your web hosting, web site hosting, webhosting, internet service provider, or as your webhost. 1&1 Internet has possibly the worst customer support of any company I have ever dealt with in any industry. What follows is an e-mail I sent them this past weekend, to which I (of course) got no response from 1&1, not even from Andreas Gauger (Chairman of the Board), Ralph Dommermuth (Founder, CMO and CEO of United Internet, 1&1 Internet’s parent company), Achim Weiss (CTO).
What follows is an e-mail I sent to complaints@1and1.com, which (of course) went compleltley unanswered, in regard to the twenty seven (27) hours of downtime I had here at jeffcroft.com (and several other sites I host) late last week.
Update: About an hour after posting this, I got a response from 1&1 offering me a free month of hosting. Hard to say if this post had anything to do with it, but it sure feels a little contrived to me. While I wouldn’t really say they’ve made up for the frustration I dealt with, at least they did something. The e-mail they sent me is now included here, as well. Update #2 (March 4th): A week later, this entry is now the fourth result on a Google search for “1&1 Internet”. I don’t feel the least bit guilty. I gave them plenty of opportunity to make things right, and they wouldn’t do it (sorry, a free month isn’t good enough).
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Django Templates: The Power of Inheritance
For this, the second entry in my series of posts about the Django template language (part one was an introduction), I’ve chosen to focus on its inheritance capability, which is probably its most powerful feature. Inheritance makes it possible to whip up new pages for your site very quickly and easily.
Because many of the readers of this site are bloggers themselves, I’m going to use an example of a simple blog template in an attempt to demonstrate how inheritance works in Django’s template language.
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Django Templates: An Introduction
Within the first few hours of my new job at World Online, I was tossed into the unfamiliar land of Django templates. In fact, the idea of using a template language at all was mostly new to me. Sure, Iâve poked at Moveable Type templates here on this site, but Iâd never used anything on the level of Django’s templates before. A month later, Iâm extremely impressed with the system. It lets me do everything I need to do without my having to learn to be a programmer — and a not-trying-to-fumble-over-a-programming-language-Jeff is a happy Jeff. As such, I thought Iâd start a series of posts here on jeffcroft.com highlighting some of my favorite features of the Django template language…
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From Aggieville to Larryville, part one
It’s time for a new chapter in my life, it would seem. Last night I accepted a Senior Designer position working for The World Company in Lawrence, KS.
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Many of you probably know of World Online’s work. They are responsible for several sites that have won bunches of awards and gotten a lot of accolades in the journalism industry, including LJWorld.com (home of the Lawrence Journal-World, local newspaper), Lawrence.com (a community site with associated print publication that features info on Lawrence’s nightlife and music scene, podcasts, blogs, and more), and KUSports.com (sports news site for all things Jawhawk). You may also be familiar with a sweet little framework they’ve built and open-sourced, name of Django. -
Modern Web Design in Higher Ed
In the past couple of days, there has been a good bit of discussion in the web standards community about education and why there are still so many web professionals that haven’t a clue about the modern web and are still building the web the way they were in 1998.
I assert that a major part of the problem is the lack of quality front-end design/development instruction in higher education. I’ve spent the last four years working at universities, and my experience supports this assertion. There are several reasons for this, but to me the core issue is that good, solid front-end web design and development on today’s internet is so incredibly multi-disciplinary.
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Jakob’s Ten Mistakes: Responses from a real live web designer
Jakob Nielsen, everyone’s favorite usability expert, has published his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005.
The nature of Mr. Nielsen, in my humble opinion, is to be on target, yet sensational and extremist. While his concepts are often well-intentioned, his solutions are very often not practical in the real world. Insofar as I know, Jakob doesn’t consider himself a web designer, so I thought it would be interesting to explore a few of his Top Ten Mistakes from that perspective.
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Mint: Better than Girl Scout Cookies
If you run a website of any kind, you know how important it is to get a quick, at-a-glance overview of the goings-on related to visits, referrers, searches, and the like. Being able to easily keep track of this kind of information allows you to make sound decisions about how you should develop, tweak, and promote your site.However, most of the stat-tracking tools out there aren’t ideal, at least for me. Most of them are enormous, monolithic programs that keep every minor detail of every hit since the beginning of time and package them in a horrific user interface, making the actual browsing an analysis of these stats nearly impossible. The are a handful of tools I’ve seen that work well and have a nice UI, but they tend to be very expensive (see Urchin, now a product of Google’s). But, for the past couple of months I’ve been involved in beta testing a stat-tracking application that turns out to be exactly what I need. It’s called Mint, and it’s yet another production of The Wolf himself, Shaun Inman. The best news is that
Moreyou’ll be able to get your grubby little mitts on it early next weekit’s finally available for your purchase and download. -
Holiday Postcard Entries
Well, seems we’re a little late with the results of our first postcard design contest, but as you’ll see, we were pretty snowed under with entries. On top of sorting the submissions, we had to come up with the ideal way of displaying your work for maximum impact.
So, without further ado, the entries for the first ever ISDLAB Postcard Design Contest. The theme was the holidays…
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Happy 10th Webiversary to Me
Although I don’t know the exact date, I realized tonight that it was around Christmas time of 1994 that I wrote my first line of HTML. I was 18 at the time, and I used Netscape 1.1N to view my first personal web page, which I created in SimpleText on Macintosh System 7.
10 years later, I’m a web professional, and I’ve litteraly spent my entire adult life working on the web. I’ve maintained a personal site the entire time (I got the jeffcroft.com domain name in 1998 — at which time I transitioned my personal site into a blog).
10 years designing web pages. Not a whole lot of people can say that. I think that’s pretty damn cool.
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Virgin puts out for Drunk Dialers
Virgin Mobile has deployed a new service to its wireless customers: “dialing under the influence prevention.” Seriously.
A recent survey by the company of more than 400 people found that 95 percent made phone calls after a drinking session, with 30 percent of calls going to exes and 19 percent to current partners.
The survey also found that the morning after more people will first reach for their mobile phone to check who they had dialled (55%) instead of reaching for painkillers (8%).
With Virgin’s new service, you can simply dial a prefix, and then the number you don’t wish to call while drunk, and that number will be blacklisted until 6am — by which time you ought to have been long since passed out.
The prevention, of course, is only effective in the case that you know you are going to get drunk, and you actually expect yourself to drunkenly call your ex for a late-night booty call.
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On Design vs. Usability
Late last week, Dirk Knemeyer posted a follow up to his original Digital Web article, The End of Usability Culture. Both articles generated some discussion in the blogosphere as well as in my office. The gist of the article is that while the practical aspects of web design (usability, accessibility, etc.) are important, it seems that the visual and creative aspects are getting somewhat ignored. There is a balance to be reached, and it seems that it’s been a bit out of whack recently.
I generally agree with Drik’s sentiments, and I posted a comment on his redux article to share my personal feelings. It seemed appropriate for this site, too, so i’ve decided to re-publish it here. For the entire discussion, read Dirk’s article and the related comments.
My comment follows:
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Pistons fans should be suspended, too
Now that NBA Commissioner David Stern has come down with his sentences for the players involved in Friday’s epic Pistons/Pacers riot, who will be responsible for punishing the Detroit fans?
In the event you’ve been living in a cave for the past three days, allow me to recap: With 45 seconds left in Friday’s Detroit/Indiana tilt, the Pacers’ Ron Artest (who is always in the middle of everything) dropped a foul on Piston Ben Wallace, despite his team being ahead by 15. While this was a silly foul, it could not be defined as flagrant. Wallace didn’t take kindly, and retaliated with an extremely hard two-hand shove to the throat of Artest. After an extended scuffle, Artest was lying on the scorer’s table, apparently trying to calm himself down and let things die (it’s widely known that Artest has been “working hard” at keeping him emotions in check during games). Just after Wallace threw a towel at him, a Detroit fan threw a large cup, full of lquid and ice, at Artest, hitting him squarley in the face. Artest darted into the stands and gave said fan a beat down he won’t soon forget. What ensued was the worst melee in American sports history — a full-on riot inside the Detriot arena. Both teams were in the stands fighting fans, spectators were on the court confronting players, chairs were flying, concessions were makeshift weapons, police officers threatened with pepper spray, elderly folks were left bloodied on the ground, and kids were seen crying in the arms of their families.
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Giving Thanks
With Thanksgiving in a week, I got to thinking about thinks I am thankful for this year. There are a handful of things I am thankful for every year — among them are my daughter Haley, my girlfriend Michelle, my entire family, and my friends. Those things will always be the most important things life has to offer, and I certainly don’t want to shortchange them. But, there are a handful of things specific to the past year that I am thankful for, and I’d like to highlight those. I’m thankful for:
- The ability to forge friendships (of a sort) with a number of web designers and bloggers who previously only served as inspiration to me. Among them: Mike Davidson, Shaun Inman, Paul Scrivens, Jon Hicks, Dave Shea, Derek Miller, Andrei Herasimchuk, Wilson Miner, and Mike Rundle. There are others, too, and I certainly don’t mean to leave anyone off the list. Special thanks to Mike Davidson for starting the Fantasy Football league, which facilitated a lot of these relationships.
- Work. This year I left my previous job at Washburn University, primarly due to a boss whose evil is rivaled only by Beelzebub himself. It was a scary time, being jobless for a number of months, but some timley freelance work held me over until I snagged my current job at Kansas State University, which has been absoultly great so far. In fact, it all worked out so well that I should probably actually thank afore mentioned princess of darkness for forcing me to move on.
- Basketball season. Baseball and football have been miserable — nothing but dissapointments and not living up to expectations. Of course, my Jayhawks are ranked number #1 this year, which means they’ll probably dissapoint me, too.
I guess those are the main things. I could go on, but those (in addition to the primary ones I mentioned above) are the ones that really come to mind. Quick data analysis would suggest that most of my thanks are for people. So if you’re one of the people — well, thanks. :)
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The one constant is baseball.
When I was a kid, baseball was life. My entire day, quite litteraly, was consumed by baseball. I’d go to school, where my friends and I would spend valuable class hours tallying up fantasy baseball scores (yes, some of us played fantasy sports before there was Yahoo.com or ESPN.com to calculate for us). I was into journalism and would write for hours about baseball for my junior high school paper (now that I think about it, that audience probably didn’t care, huh?). After school, I’d go to my friends’ houses and trade baseball cards until it was time for baseball practice.
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Corporate Blues
Research tells us that about 70% of American corporations use blue as their corporate color. Blue is defined by most experts to be a generic, calming color that is well-liked by both genders. It often emits a feeling of stability and “big-ness.” When a committee sits around and chooses a color for their brand, it’s often the one color that everyone can agree on.
That all sounds pretty good. The problem, of course, is that is sounds pretty good to everyone. A quick look at the websites of Dell, Microsoft, and IBM will show you that there is a serious lack-of-identity problem going on. If you were to glance at these sites from ten feet away, you’d not have any idea which was which. 
Now, take a look at MTV, Nickelodeon, and Nike. I hear what you’re saying: “Yes, Jeff, but it’s a different target audience completly!” And you’d be right. Obviously these companies have younger, and generally hipper, audiences — but they still prove my point: to use the same color as every other guy on the block is to miss an opportunity to differentiate your brand.
And if you want an example in the business PC market, look no further than HP. A few months ago, HP was very blue and generic and could have easily been lumped into my earlier you-can’t-tell-them-apart diatribe. Recently, though, HP has made a point of standing out (we love you, Carly Fiorina), and hence, has gone very, very red.There are some companies, such as Gap and BMW, which do the blue thing and pull it off very well. They do so, it seems, by letting their logo and identity stand secondary to their product(s). The simplicity and understated-ness of their brand allows their products to shine through. Generally speaking, though, I think it’s best to avoid blue and look for something that sets your brand apart.
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Homestar Funk
Put together another groove in GarageBand tonight. This thing is just too fun. I’ve downloaded a ton of loops and even created many of my own.
Anyway, this one’s called Homestar Funk. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble being able to tell why…
- Homestar Funk, 76 bars of 100% uncut J-Funk — ya dig? (3.2 MP3)
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Luxury Type
If you’re a regular reader of Dave Shea’s mezzoblue, you probably remember his MOSe concept. The idea is simple: go ahead and use all the latest and greatest CSS tricks, enhancing the page for Mozilla/Opera/Safari users, but leave IE a way out so that your IE viewers still get a decent experience, even if it’s not the same as in a modern browser.
A recent blog entry and related comments over at Whitespace got me thinking…
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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