client services


ALA 259: Career and Content

In Issue No. 259 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome
by Pepi Ronalds
Clients love to write copy. Well, they love to plan to write it, anyhow. On most web design projects, content is the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We’ll [...]

CSS Menu Writer debuts

Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs.
I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, creating primary and secondary menu [...]

Stick out your tongue

While employed at a famous New York advertising agency twenty years ago, a partner and I created a TV commercial touting an over-the-counter medicine client’s revolutionary new cold and flu remedy for young children.
Only when the shooting and shouting was over did we learn that the product did not, in fact, exist.
The commercial [...]

WordPress 2.5 unleashed

WordPress 2.5, designed by Happy Cog and built by Automattic, is now available for your downloading pleasure.

Books of Luke and Aarron

In Issue No. 255 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Sign Up Forms Must Die – Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design at Yahoo! and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008), calls for the abolition of sign-up forms where web services are concerned. Via “gradual engagement,” says Luke, we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them with forms. And in Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008), provides an overview of this essential web discipline, explains how it is like SEO but different, and tells how every member of your team can contribute to your site’s content’s findability. You can see Luke and Aarron live at upcoming An Event Apart design conferences in Boston and New Orleans. Plus: they’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace (and staff at ALA). I’m verklempt!

Zeldman on Talk Radio Today

Live today from 3:00 to 4:00 pm Eastern Time, I’m this week’s guest on “Design Matters with Debbie Millman,” the leading internet talk radio show on the “challenging and compelling canvas of today’s design world.”

Monday links

Chopsticks by Segura. A greener LA via Boston. Stealing patterns, making models. Samurai errata and SXSW bowling.

Appreciating web design; setting type

Appreciating web design for what it is instead of wishing it were something it’s not; plus a better best practice for setting type on the web via CSS. And from the past: why typographically correct punctuation matters, and how to make it happen on the web. Authors: Erin Kissane, Richard Rutter, Jeffrey Zeldman.

Faster, pussycat

Have you ever bought clothes while traveling, and been unable to fit everything in your suitcase when it was time to go home? That suitcase is what my days are like now.

Client input, iPhone constraints

Collaborative work sessions that actually work; designing and coding with the iPhone in mind.