Quick Tip #3 – Textarea Fonts
August 31st, 2009
The Problem The font family in this text area default to Courier New, but that’s pretty ugly. The Goal Look at the nice font in this textarea! The Solution You have to redefine the font-family for a textarea. Just a weird quirk. textarea{ font-family:Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; }
Selectable RSS with SimplePie and jQuery
August 17th, 2009
I was building an RSS reader for a project last week and it turned out to be a cool little app. So I thought I’d share some of the code. View demo Download demo files Let’s start off with the HTML we need to get some user interaction with the form. It’s a pretty basic, [...]
10 Videos for the Web Community
August 7th, 2009
I was poking around YouTube last night watching some design videos and I thought I’d share them since it’s been my RSS feed has been a bit stale lately (I’ve been working on a pretty big redesign for this site). Enjoy! Web Design Mistakes Duration: 3m 52s Watching someone use a screen reader Duration: 3m [...]
Quick Tip #2 – Bringing Back Search with jQuery
June 29th, 2009
This is something I use on all my projects now. It’s designed for a search box, but can be used with any sort of input field. The great thing about this is that the field value “Search” will only come back onBlur if the field is empty (or doesn’t say “Search”). So if you started [...]
10 Tips to Create a More Usable Web
June 4th, 2009
My First usability article came out today on Web Designer Depot “10 Tips to Create a More Usable Web” Don’t get me wrong, I like writing about CSS, but this was a nice change of pace. Anyway, Let me know what you think!
Quick Tip #1 – Image Replacement
May 28th, 2009
Problem Image replacement can be easily abused; but when used properly (like replacing logo text) it’s a great resource. Image replacement without extra markup usually means setting text-indent:-9999px on your link. And this works great great. But in a lot of browsers it leaves a focus outline that runs way off the page to the [...]
Twitter and the Downfall of Social Networking
May 17th, 2009
One of the great things about the folks at Twitter is that they really stick to what they’re good at and they let the community define what they want out of the service. So much so that they’ve responded with some really great community-driven Twitter services. MySpace The downfall of MySpace started when users were [...]
Usable Accessibility
April 14th, 2009
Many times focusing on standards and guidelines puts the focus on the technical aspects of accessibility, and the human interaction aspect is lost. This problem can be avoided by adopting the broader definition of accessibility as a guiding principle. Instead of focusing only on the technical aspects of accessibility, it is important to recognize that [...]
Form Security with Autocomplete
April 10th, 2009
I was looking through my blog this morning because I could have sworn I already wrote this post. I know I’ve had this conversation with Phil Nash of Unintentionally Blank. But I guess I never wrote it down? Oh well… One of my pet peeves when filling out a form is when I click in [...]
Analyzing Home
April 8th, 2009
The “Home” link has been a staple on almost all of the Web sites I’ve made in the past 5 years, but lately I’ve been wondering how important it is. I heard Steve Krug at An Event Apart Boston 2007 talk about how the “home” link should always be list first in your navigation, but [...]
