How can one help one’s company take the turn of accessibility. Its usually difficult to explain accessibility and its uses and issues to fellow workers, let alone those who do not work in the technical field. Accessibility can be a huge support when answering an offer. Bruce Lawson gives you his experience of how to get accessibility into the higher spheres.
I’ve been working on new designs lately and found myself raking my brains on blog footer designs. They are useful and “fill up” a page. Here are some reviews that can be used for inspiration:
I was hanging around Digg this morning and came across this (really) old article concerning Mauritius and the term cyber-island. This will clear a lot of inconsistancies on the term used.
As you can see, this Digg article was published some 3 years ago. This was the original idea: setting wireless over the whole country. Today this isn’t the case and political and entrepreneurial coalitions have turned this whole project into a mess.
On the GT website, the 2006 article related to this Digg stated the following:
“It is our vision to transform Mauritius into a cyber-island,” said Deelchand Jeeha, the country’s minister of information technology and telecommunications, in a speech last year. The nation, he said, “is confident in the potential of (the industry) as an engine of growth which can generate jobs and wealth creation.”
Seems that wealth creation has been done only for some categories of providers. For the rest of it, the ISP adventure has been a real ordeal but what is clear is that the ordeal numerous Mauritians are going through just to have access to the Internet is worse than that if time, money and stress are added up. Vanesha Bijou’s article on le Defi (yes, there are some *extremely rare* good posts there) sums it all. What strikes me is that telephone based ADSL is a mammoth sized problem that cannot be tackled. What about the real cyber-island objective then? Has it gone down the drain? Where are all these promises?
In France there are free open wireless access spaces around nearly every city and this is a local service. Set these up side by side and you get enough to cover all Madagascar in wireless and in Mauritius it seems to be impossible. Avinash Meetoo stated the outcomes and problems of this whole business as well as the misunderstanding of the underlying projects (especially that of Cyber City which should have been the heart of the project) some two years ago. True enough that there are many drawbacks but I think that the major problem in this project is the way the project has been driven and the lack of interest and incentive the government has for it. The cyber-island coinage was too good to be true.
Along with that Mauritius does not give incentives for young engineers to come back with their enhanced talents. Blame it on politics, social privileges, corruption etc. I know one of the guys who worked on the extension of the optical fibre to Mauritius who has now emigrated to the UK because the board at MT just gave his “promised” team management seat to an elder on the very basis that the person was an elder.
I fully agree with Avinash’s arguments set forward at that time and this article is part of an answer to his question and statement: “Can we still succeed? I have some doubts.” Cyber Island project was an aim and miss. It all ended up with Mauritians crying for better connectivity over their landline ADSL.
Giromon analyses DCL‘s corporate rebranding. A great example of failure with text ripped off the Unysis website along with wonderful examples of bad design and coding. Great article by Giromon on this. Mauritian web designers: this is what you should never do!
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Most site owners need to know (an eventually live to the rythm of) the traffic their website is gaining. Some years back, this was not a prior element in terms of web usage especially when the Web 2.0 machine started going forward. Users such as bloggers were not interested in traffic because their main way of driving people to read their blogs was in making comments on other blogs, talking about their blogs on social medias or being stated in other blogger’s blogroll.
*quirks mode on* The way bloggers usually evaluated their traffic was by evaluating the number of comments a post got. *quirks mode off*
Then came the implication of all web services on blog-cmses. Current web practices started cropping up and tools like XiTi started gaining ground before being crushed by Google’s acquisition of Urchin which was then tranformed into Google Analytics. Analytics is “free” and has the option of being easily coupled with Google Adwords for advanced ROI.
It was to be expected that other groups would try to get on the market and who else but Yahoo! would have tried this. Today Yahoo! opens up its Analytics Project and surfs on Google’s waves by using “analytics” for its own tool: Yahoo! Web Analytics. It seems still in beta version but the screenshots seem to be quite interesting.
Popular designer Andy Rutledge takes arms against son bad layout conventions usually accepted as popular and well designed. His analysis and proposals are to the point and a good read for any designer wishing to optimise user experience.
“[...] it will be capable of downloading a full film a continent away in 1-5 seconds. It is the end of the Internet as we know it. So what is The Grid and why does it sound so worryingly like The Matrix?”
Will this really replace the Internet?
Done the job? Coded it all? Styled it all? Tested it all? Validated it all? And now want to brag a little bit about it with an icon? A nice validation icon kit is available over at Validation Icons (with PSD files please).
I was reading Anthony Zinni’s post on aliasing in design comps. This might seem to be a minor issue to many a mauritian, especially budding, designer but experience has proved that there is more to it. The main problem is that,as a designer replying to an offer, you don’t know what type of web/graphics habits and gear your client might have.
In the case of MS Windows users, some use the “cleartype” option while others don’t. This means that the client will have the habit of either seing aliased or anti-aliased type. Those using Apple gear are used to having Helvetica and all with sharp anti-aliasing. So what is aliasing choice to make when setting up a comp?
For me the answer is simple as I have experienced client anger due to non 100% comp copy site integration namely when it comes to fonts and gradients (as I wasn’t the person having done the comps). Many clients do not understand the issues related to using images nor do they understand everything about standards or CSS. You can’t blame them, its not their field. If you have time to explain in details that the website will not be a 100% copy of the comp, good for you, but be sure to have the right arguments for this. So if you show heavy anti-aliased fonts in your comp, be sure to explain that fonts will not be the same.
For me, the best solution is to leave aliased text as it is and let the client have either a good surprise when seeing the site with cleartype activated, else no surprise but you’ll still be on the right track transforming your comp into HTML/CSS.