So I recently came across the idea of Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) at An Event Apart San Francisco this year. The speaker was Nicole Sullivan, who is the leader in evangelizing and developing Object Oriented CSS. She makes a solid argument that best practice CSS techniques should be used and that we can build on those techniques to create even more efficient CSS for everyone involved.
An Event Apart is from our smart friends at A List Apart. Popular web designer/developers such as Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Jason Keith, Jason Santa Maria and others were on hand last year to unleash a can of knowledge whoopass on us eager attendees last year. Now that a year has passed and I’m preparing for this year’s version, I’ve decided to reflect and share on some of the practical tips I learned from last.
Most of you will be surprised by some of the CSS selectors that I’m writing about today. For instance, did you know can select a element based on a ending substring such as “.pdf”? BAM, add that selector to your a element and you can make all PDFs on your website italic and purple without any addition HTML! You xan do that with other substrings too!
We’re also going to go over some of the differences between more common selectors just so you know you’re efficiently implementing your code.
There is more to a website than just designing it – you will also have to get a hosting plan that will support it. To make life a bit easier for you we have gone through the most popular types of web hosting on the market today and what to look for in their respective hosting plans.
We’re always on the hunt for new techniques, better solutions and just some good ol’ fresh ideas. Here are a couple of simple concepts I found in use on the web that I think help us look at a standard solution and offer a non-standard answer.
Knowing your demographic is crucial to designing an effective website. You can hone in on the unique characteristics of that demographic and deliver a quality user experience that’s effective. However, you want to avoid blatant pandering because it can be offensive. That’s exactly what has happened with Dell’s mini-site for women — Della.
Television is still one of the most powerful media outlets today despite the increasing popularity of the Internet. How do the networks represent themselves online? At the best, ESPN and CNN represent the best destination for their type of specialty for both television and the web… and at the worst, MTV and BET are leaders in youth culture yet are not very provocative in their websites. Here are 20 very popular network websites that I categorized into Best, Average and Worst:
The one common factor of all these websites is that they should make you excited about the programming for that network. As usual, the more innovative, usable and aesthetically pleasing along the way the better. I think these are the best:
FX Network
FX has a unique layout while clearly highlighting their unique programming.
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Email marketing is as popular as ever in these economically turbulent times. It’s inexpensive but when done correctly can yield tremendous results. There are some tricky pitfalls such as spam filtering but what better way to directly connect your audience to what you’re trying to say? Here are ten simple tips that will help you understand the world of email marketing and how to hopefully turn out some successful campaigns.
Drunk designer that I often am, beer coasters really catch my eye sometimes. Which got me thinking of how effectively breweries are marketing themselves online. To my surprise, virtually all of the beer companies I know of and wandered through in my research are very competent. There are some that offer exceptional examples either aesthetically, being innovative or in its overall presentation.
I admit some favoritism, but the overall experience and energy of the website was executed very well.
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I was deciding between two places to eat today and had both websites side by side in browser tabs. I could have gone either way in terms of what I wanted to eat but the convenience factor of finding the location and/or being persuaded along the way of data finding made all the difference. As usability theories predict, I patronized the company that didn’t waste my time. So I thought applying that same exercise to major rivals in the business world would be interesting.
This is NOT a in-depth design review of the websites. Judging based on usability, creativity and overall impression based actual task performance on the websites — I choose a “victor”.
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