My List of Entities

I always have trouble remembering entity codes, and I never seem to find a list that includes the ones I need. I’ve decided to make this its own page.

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Solidifying Some Fundamentals of XHTML: Page Titles

In working on the design for a new project at CHNM, I sat down today to write page titles for each page of the site. These titles will be dynamically generated. Writing a page title has never been so hard before, but in thinking about all of the things we’re supposed to do these days to keep sites semantically marked up, accessible, and optimized for search engines, I paused and asked myself “what exactly makes a good title?” A quick Google search turned up a 2003 SimpleQuiz discussion on Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits website, and I thought it was worth bookmarking here. In a complex site, as my current project is, in which the core and majority of content is historically valuable information in a database. Questions of how to organize and access this information through a web browser are paramount. And, if someone finds a document he likes, and he chooses to bookmark it, what title should appear in the bookmark list? If Google scans our site, what titles will make sense? I can come up with many ideas, but some are so lengthy they seem useless…off to the drawing board to figure out the optimal solution.

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It’s better when you have content

Things have gone pretty well over the last week, working on my re-design of CHNM’s French Revolution website, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” In my work this week, compared with the design project, I really appreciate having the content finished and basically organized. Trying to redesign CHNM’s home page was challenging in large part because, as Lee Ann and Paula highlighted, a new organization of the material is essential. I took a stab at it, and there are parts, frankly, that I believe should disappear from the site altogether and parts that I wasn’t sure what to do with. If we actually tackle a redesign of the home page, I certainly talk to the CHNM folks about what should stay, go, or move about. But I didn’t because I wanted to focus more on visual design and less on information architecture (though I did spend quite a lot of time on that as well, but I was unable to make -decisions- about it). But that was the last project, and now we’re on the final…

For the French Revolution site, the content is there. The content is great. The content just needs to be presented better. First of all, a visitor needs a better idea of what is on the site than what is currently presented on the main page. I have revamped the information architecture and hammered out a few pages for this week. They aren’t bad, but I know they need some more styling. Some things will be impossible to accomplish even for the final next week because they relate to the information that is stored in the database which needs to be revamped. That will take some time. Here is my preliminary design.

I also commented on Jenny’s blog that: (1) I think her design is great and a very good use of the web to present historical content because it is interactive and dynamic, and because it provides information that probably isn’t available elsewhere, so real value added. And, (2) that for those of you in the history program, I can understand how it is hard to worry about your content as you design these sites, but the class is about the design, and so, in my humble opinion, you are allowed, even expected, to neglect your content a little bit as you focus on learning design. That way, later on, you can simply recall all the fundamentals of design you’ve learned in this class and apply them with ease, allowing design worries to fall to the background as you write brilliant history. Right? I would add that I thought of using a paper I wrote in graduate school years ago for one of our projects, and I was far too concerned about whether or not my content was still well-written and indeed good enough to be posted online. So I completely understand the worry, and I can tell you I am much happier this week working on “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” where I absolutely do not need to worry about the content, only about its presentation.

I have also commented on Mark’s blog, saying that he has organized a large project very well, and he made some great image choices. I also think the site would benefit from more consistency in header style and from more dreary or violent colors to provide an appropriate and consistent ambiance throughout the site.

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Principles of Beautiful Web Design

As part of my brainstorming to come up with design ideas this morning, I was surfing around the ol’ Internet and came across a wonderful little site. It was highlighted on Stylegala as a new entry, and I thought it was really cool. Since our class is always talking about and questioning what makes good design, I thought I would flag it for everyone. The site is a promotional site for the book designer Jason Beaird has recently published: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. What is most fun about the site is that when you hover and/or click on the menu items, such as “Layout,” you get a visual description of how Jason applied certain design principles on his page. This creative use of imagery is a good explanation of how to use different elements and how to apply different techniques.

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Design and Redesign

For anyone interested, I have added to the design portion of my portfolio page one example of a new redesign of my design project. As I write there, there are still many things left to change…colors, size of images, add text, and certainly to code it. I’ve found through this design process that I do like to do Photoshop mock-ups. If I had taken a snapshot of each version, there would be many, many more to post here. Now, however, it is time to move on to the final…

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