With hindsight, much of my writing from this period feels dated, but it’s also clear how the underlying thinking and analysis have informed and shaped many of my practices years later.
2007
Designing interactive forms is one of the most challenging aspects of web design. Done with the user’s experience in mind, and some finesse, it can be one of the most rewarding, too, resulting in increased visitor satisfaction and conversion.
A deeper dive into choosing the semantic markup behind a personal site redesign.
Markup is the technical foundation of front-end code. In one way or another, it influences or is influenced by design, content, accessibility, CSS, DOM scripting, and more. The quality of your markup will affect the quality of related code, and even the cost of implementing or maintaining that code. Your markup might be good now, but following the guidelines in this article will help bring it to the next level.
2006
It’s easy to sit back and preach about how a web team should operate, but it’s rare that we really consider and appreciate the realities and challenges involved. We’re going to take a look at how the team behind NYTimes.com, a real team with real constraints, has learned to work together to create one of the best online news experiences in the world. While their situation isn’t perfect, it’s an impressive story of unity, balance, and communication that makes the few imperfections of the site that much more interesting.
You don’t often see “CSS” and “typography” used in the same sentence—and for good reason. Traditional typography is a very subtle and beautiful form of design, with thousands of variations and choices. Unfortunately, with CSS that’s not quite the case. Don’t lose hope just yet, though. CSS can do more than you might think.
If you’ve been building Web sites or applications for any period of time, chances are you’ve maintained one or two as well. If you didn’t create bulletproof markup like the great stuff advised by Dan Cederholm in his new book, you probably had a little extra work to do in order to accommodate some new additions or changes. As they say, the only constant is change, and online, this couldn’t ring any truer.
Exploration around the idea of prototyping directly with HTML.
You don’t often see “CSS” and “typography” used in the same sentence—and for good reason. Traditional typography is a very subtle and beautiful form of design, with thousands of variations and choices. Unfortunately, with CSS that’s not quite the case. Don’t lose hope just yet, though. CSS can do more than you might think.
2005
By now you’ve probably heard of microformats and wondered what they are, exactly. Officially, they’re a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards that are designed for humans first and machines second. What does that mean to you? Fortunately, it’s simpler than it sounds.
With nearly ubiquitous standards support among modern browsers, we’re turning to CSS to handle presentational heavy lifting more than ever. The more we rely upon CSS, the larger and more complex CSS files become. These files bring with them a few maintenance and organizational challenges. Gone are the days of creating a single CSS file and dropping in rules as needed. As we build new sites, it is necessary to spend time planning how to organize and structure CSS.