Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has released his Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design for 2006. Here’s a summary:

1. Bad Search
2. PDF Files for Online Reading
3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links
4. Non-Scannable Text
5. Fixed Font Size
6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement (except text-only)
8. Violating Design Conventions
9. Opening New Browser Windows
10. Not Answering Users’ Questions

Here’s a neat blog article on Boagworld, Why Meetups Matter from a couple months ago. Web expert Paul Boag discusses the advantages of web professionals meeting in person periodically. He encourages those in the web industry to attend meetups–not only web designers and developers, but web site owners as well. Paul states:

Unlike conferences, meetups tend to be free or at least very cheap and so there is little excuse not to go…Even if it is only four or five people, it is still a chance to swap war stories and have a drink while you’re at it.

For those interested, I’ve provided notes on last week’s Second Life presentation by Adam Pasick at the Ann Arbor IT Zone.

Background Information

1. 1.5 million users
2. 40% of users are outside the United States, equally split between men and women
3. users are considered to be young and rich
4. $600K is exchanged daily
5. Linden dollars (the currency used on Second Life) is exchangeable with US dollars
6. users create their own homes or islands
7. islands cost $1700

Community

1. users can make an island private, or open to all
2. word about products and services are passed throughout the Second Life community by word of mouth
3. search functionality is not good
4. traditional websites are linking to their Second Life sites through slurls (Second Life urls)
5. close knit community
6. currently only 50 people can gather in one place in Second Life

Interaction

1. users interact with each other through avatars
2. to talk with another user, use text or a phone call at the same time (many people use Skype)
3. currently no audio capabilities

Companies/Organization on Second Life

1. IBM – a place to hold meetings (They also have this years Wimbledon video available in some form, on a private island)
2. Dell – you can buy a computer on Second Life
3. Amazon – you can buy a book from Amazon
4. Nissan

Development companies are charging between $20-$100K to create Second Life communities.

At last night’s meeting I mentioned the free four-day pass for Web Directions North for the first place entry in their snowboard design contest.

Well, there are a whole lotta prizes, including

• 50% off Media Temple’s new Grid Server
• Adobe’s Studio 8 (which includes Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks and Contribute)
• books
• training videos
• more items

The contest ends Monday, December 4th. Great opportunity to show off your design talents and win a ticket or some great prizes.

There’s a new book coming out that looks promising–HTML Mastery: Semantics, Standards and Styling by Paul Haine. It’s due to release in the next month or so. The book describes in detail how to use semantic XHTML for a usable and accessible web site. Not a new concept (dare I say trendy?) but very valid and relevant as this is what we should all be developing for. The web site for the book states:

it’s aimed at web designers and developers who have already mastered the basics of HTML and web design, but want to take their markup further, making it leaner and more semantically rich, for a more efficient, more usable/accessible web site

Just checking who might be interested in participating in STC’s “world’s largest online card sort”. I know little about the event other than what’s posted on the STC website. I signed up to be an organizer; hopefully I’ll find out soon what that means! If you’re interested in participating, signup online.

It occurred to me that we all probably have a stack of books that we have already read, and a list of books we would like to read.

Would participants be interested in swapping books at meetings (not indefinitely, just till the next meeting).

Comment here and let me know, and we can start up a book exchange page.

After reading the excellent review in Roger Johansson’s article about this new book, it took me a couple weeks, but I finally decided to buy it. I ordered the book from my local bookstore and two days later had the book in hand.

The book covers lots of material, and specifically details steps web developers can take in making their sites more accessible. I haven’t read the whole book yet, it’s over 500 pages! However, individual chapters can easily be read out of order. The chapter on Acrobat PDF was extensive and very detailed; I was able to follow it only because of the detailed research I did last December on the accessibility of Adobe Acrobat 7.0.

My only concerns about the book is the timeliness of the material. Much of the material is current for this year, but will quickly become outdated as new methods and technologies are introduced. For example, a reference is made to Kiko and Google Calendar. Kiko is no longer in business. The code for Kiko, a Web 2.0 online calendar application, was auctioned on eBay recently. It’s likely to remain on Google search for a while, but I wonder how many web developers are familiar with it.

Refresh Detroit founders Dennis Lembrée and Ross Johnson interviewed Paul Boag for a Web Axe podcast. (A few weeks ago they interviewed Chris Heilmann.) Paul is co-founder of a British company Headscape, and runs the very popular blog and podcast boagworld.com. If you want to know more beyond listening to the interview, Ross blogged about the Boag experience, and Dennis blogged about it as well. Web Axe is a podcast dedicated to topics around web accessibility.

Refresh Detroit founders Dennis Lembrée and Ross Johnson interview Christian Heilmann for the Web Axe accessibility podcast. Chris Heilmann is the author of Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax: From Novice to Professional. He’s also a co-author of Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance. He writes the bog Wait Till I Come and has contributed many articles in web development including several articles to A List Apart and SitePoint.

Go there now > Web Axe Accessibility Podcast Interview with Christian Heilmann

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