Time for some more website reviews! Many of this week's websites are of great interest to professional typographers and not of much interest to average Web designers. Histories, anatomies, and tutorials of typology share the assumption that we will be designing fonts -- not just the graphic logos or banners to which Web typography is mostly limited. By far the most interesting site this week was Digital Web Magazine's article on CSS typography, which is refreshingly honest about both the possibilities and the limits of type on the Web. It would also have been interesting to read about the psychological impact of serif vs. sans-serif fonts, connotations of common Web typefaces like Verdana and Georgia, and other topics that fall more wholly within the control of Web developers than typology as a discipline does.
My own website is probably going to need a new font. The default for the CSS template I chose is not bad -- once I increased the size to the point where a lowercase e could be readily distinguished from a c -- but experimentation will be salutary. I've made use of the Wichita University study linked to by the DWM article above, and agree with the intuitive result that margins and optimal leading make for a more pleasant reading experience than the alternatives; these elements will be incorporated into my site.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Week 6: Wait, what happened to Week 5?
What happened to Week 5 was that I got caught up in other projects and sidetracked -- a hazard when one doesn't do web design for a living! But I'm all read up now, and I'm happy to report that I have a PHP script live on my website: a contact form. It was a little harder than I imagined. Coding the form was not too hard, though it still needs some polish from the CSS side. The script itself was also not hard to get (with a little modification) from tele-pro.co.uk. What was hard was making the form and the script play nicely together. Here's that story.
1. I downloaded the script wholesale into the folder for my site, and added a call to the script in the markup for the Submit button. This seemed like a logical place to put it, since that's where a mailto command would go. I uploaded the result to my site and tried to send myself the feedback "Watson, come here, I need you." The page refreshed itself, and my inbox remained empty.
2. Okay. Maybe there's a problem with the script. I had set the email to originate from the address stop@nothing. Maybe it doesn't like that "nothing" isn't a real domain name. I changed it to nothing.com. Same result.
3. Serious debugging time. I set the script, if successful, to redirect the submitter to Google, and if unsuccessful, to redirect to Yahoo. That way -- I reasoned -- I can figure out whether the problem is that the script isn't working (Yahoo), or whether it's working but isn't doing what it's supposed to (Google). Instead, I got another page refresh -- no Google or Yahoo!
4. Wow, all right, so something is really wrong: the script is not getting called at all. Perhaps MyWeb doesn't support PHP. I looked that up in the tech support FAQs, and it turns out that PHP is the one and only supported scripting language -- lucky me, but it doesn't explain my problem!
5. Well, if the problem is not server-side, and it's not the script, it must be the XHTML. I finally stumbled on putting the call to the script inside the form tag instead of the Submit button's tag. On reflection, this made more intuitive sense. I tried it again and was rewarded with a trip to Google and an email from stop@nothing.com in my inbox! I threw together a quick "thanks for submitting your feedback" page to replace Google in the script, and that concluded my first sally into PHP!
Full congratulations and possibly a Congressional Medal of Honor are due to me for figuring all this out, but it's also interesting to observe how much I'm relying on the work of other people at every stage -- tele-pro, Dreamweaver, Chrome, the PHP team, Tim Berners-Lee's successors, whoever wrote the CSS template I'm using, and others. It takes decades of work from thousands if not millions of web developers before I can so easily put one silly script on my website. I am beginning to understand the fierce sense of community among Web developers and GNU enthusiasts!
1. I downloaded the script wholesale into the folder for my site, and added a call to the script in the markup for the Submit button. This seemed like a logical place to put it, since that's where a mailto command would go. I uploaded the result to my site and tried to send myself the feedback "Watson, come here, I need you." The page refreshed itself, and my inbox remained empty.
2. Okay. Maybe there's a problem with the script. I had set the email to originate from the address stop@nothing. Maybe it doesn't like that "nothing" isn't a real domain name. I changed it to nothing.com. Same result.
3. Serious debugging time. I set the script, if successful, to redirect the submitter to Google, and if unsuccessful, to redirect to Yahoo. That way -- I reasoned -- I can figure out whether the problem is that the script isn't working (Yahoo), or whether it's working but isn't doing what it's supposed to (Google). Instead, I got another page refresh -- no Google or Yahoo!
4. Wow, all right, so something is really wrong: the script is not getting called at all. Perhaps MyWeb doesn't support PHP. I looked that up in the tech support FAQs, and it turns out that PHP is the one and only supported scripting language -- lucky me, but it doesn't explain my problem!
5. Well, if the problem is not server-side, and it's not the script, it must be the XHTML. I finally stumbled on putting the call to the script inside the form tag instead of the Submit button's tag. On reflection, this made more intuitive sense. I tried it again and was rewarded with a trip to Google and an email from stop@nothing.com in my inbox! I threw together a quick "thanks for submitting your feedback" page to replace Google in the script, and that concluded my first sally into PHP!
Full congratulations and possibly a Congressional Medal of Honor are due to me for figuring all this out, but it's also interesting to observe how much I'm relying on the work of other people at every stage -- tele-pro, Dreamweaver, Chrome, the PHP team, Tim Berners-Lee's successors, whoever wrote the CSS template I'm using, and others. It takes decades of work from thousands if not millions of web developers before I can so easily put one silly script on my website. I am beginning to understand the fierce sense of community among Web developers and GNU enthusiasts!
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Week 4: Pages from other books
I've been falling behind in my website reviews. I have a number of excuses for this. The readings are more immediately relevant to the course project than most of the websites are; the websites often have so much content that there's no way for me to review the site comprehensively; working on my website is much more interesting than reading Jesse James Garrett's self-marketing materials; I frequently have little to say about a website beyond "well, it's good that this exists." But these are just excuses. Let's get to work.
This week, I reacted the most strongly to Smashing Magazine's inventory of interesting blog designs. The author's commentary on what makes these designs unique, cool, and functional is making me wonder whether I've got the right idea about including a blog on the front page of my site. For one thing, all these blogs have at least two columns. They need the second column for navigational tools ranging from keyword search to a Blogger-like list of previous posts. A blog with no navigational tools is rather difficult to use for anyone interested in dated material. This should have been obvious, but it took fifty pictures of two-column blogs for me to figure this out with confidence. But to deal with it, I have to either adopt a two-column template, in which case I'm obliged to find stuff to put in the second column on the other pages of my site, or else (in the ideal case) figure out how to give only the blog two columns without breaking CSS. Since the blog is a very simple one, it's not inconceivable I could find a way to make a blog work in one column -- say, a contextual link to the archives at the top of the content -- but it could be tricky, and doesn't seem to be "best practices."
Interestingly, neither the Web Style Guide nor the Universal Usability site -- each the length of a textbook -- has much to say about designing blogs. The UU site is almost completely silent on the topic, and the Web Style Guide's advice is exceedingly general. I wonder how useful these sites are for people who aren't designing from scratch.
This week, I reacted the most strongly to Smashing Magazine's inventory of interesting blog designs. The author's commentary on what makes these designs unique, cool, and functional is making me wonder whether I've got the right idea about including a blog on the front page of my site. For one thing, all these blogs have at least two columns. They need the second column for navigational tools ranging from keyword search to a Blogger-like list of previous posts. A blog with no navigational tools is rather difficult to use for anyone interested in dated material. This should have been obvious, but it took fifty pictures of two-column blogs for me to figure this out with confidence. But to deal with it, I have to either adopt a two-column template, in which case I'm obliged to find stuff to put in the second column on the other pages of my site, or else (in the ideal case) figure out how to give only the blog two columns without breaking CSS. Since the blog is a very simple one, it's not inconceivable I could find a way to make a blog work in one column -- say, a contextual link to the archives at the top of the content -- but it could be tricky, and doesn't seem to be "best practices."
Interestingly, neither the Web Style Guide nor the Universal Usability site -- each the length of a textbook -- has much to say about designing blogs. The UU site is almost completely silent on the topic, and the Web Style Guide's advice is exceedingly general. I wonder how useful these sites are for people who aren't designing from scratch.
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