Articles

Hell froze over the other day. Well, momentarily anyway. Steve Ballmer, in an apparent moment of befuddlement and rare “truthiness” seems to have opened the door a crack to the possibility that there’s something about open source that may actually not be a commie pinko plot.

What are favicons? Why should you use them? How do you make them? Where do they go? What is the meaning of life? Read on, as I gamely tackle these vexing questions. Well, the last one I can answer now. It is of course, forty two.

Learn how Loud Dog uses Print Style Sheets to make sure our websites look as good on paper as they do on the screen.

We recently had a conversation at the office, which amounted to posing and attempting to answer the question, “what’s the best way to show our clients the value we offer with our client side coding expertise”? Using the web, we decided, is an experience that’s become exponentially familiar as we all rely upon it more and more, yet everything that happens behind the scenes, is for most people effectively still quite a mystery.

As part of almost every web-related project, we write code. Here’s a brief description of the different types of standard deliverables we frequently use in our process.

Haphazardly written code is difficult to read and maintain, while using a consistent style contributes to readability, reducing long-term maintenance costs.

Last month, I wrote a post effectively skewering Microsoft over their decision to make their forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser render websites by default as if it were the non-compliant IE7 and forcing developers to add extra markup to their sites to tell IE8 to render in standards mode.

A website redesign can leave you with nightmares of broken links. Learn how to sleep easy and keep your visitors happy.

The following post was originally written early in February 2008, but was never “posted” on our website because we were in the middle of a re-redesign. I’m posting it now as a kind of back story to my other post today and as evidence of the speed at which things can move in this crazy, mixed up world wide internets!

If your website is important to your business (and we hope it is), it’s critical to have a disaster plan in place. Josh takes us through what happens in a disaster, and what plans we should have in place.

When most people think of design, they think of Visual Design - the stuff you see - rather than other aspects, that I’ve addressed elsewhere. Still, the value isn’t always apparent. My friend Jon uses a great analogy to explain the importance of visual design.

When it comes to design, less really does equal more. If you have a great product, you don’t need to plaster it with bells and whistles.

Kathy Sierra writes about “The Happy User Peak” on her blog. Not only do I love diagrams like that, but I love that diagram! It nails it: we are so obsessed with new features that few things are easy to use.

Good communication is part of good design, and part of good corporate communication is a pithy tagline. Our tagline is “We make websites easy to use.” An article in this month’s UPA Voice gave me some food for thought.

The article is nice, short and to the point.

Roy Peter Clark, a “Senior Scholar” at the Poynter Institute gathers together his Fifty Top Writing Tips for our purusal. Recognizing that design is more than looking good leads naturally to embracing good writing as an integral part of good design. Thanks, Roy!

E-mail is definitely one of Loud Dog’s critical business tools. It touches everything - from project management to developing new business. In fact, our first contact with new clients is frequently through e-mail.

Unfortunately, if your company displays an e-mail addresse on its website, it will be found by a spambot - an automated program that scours the web for e-mail addresses. This article explores how we can defeat the spambots!

I don’t like spam. I don’t know anyone that does. Luckily, there are a variety of tools and techniques that help me win the spam wars. The most obvious - or at least the most well known - are the variety of programs that filter, sort and block spam headed for your inbox. Less obvious are the ways you can prevent spammers from getting your e-mail address in the first place. Since the first is really the domain of IT folks and System Administrators, this article focuses on how to prevent spammers from getting your e-mail, or at least lessening the possibility.

One of the most important challenges facing owners and managers in our user-centered world is moving design to the forefront of their company’s culture.

Many decision-makers still think that design is about “making it pretty.” Companies with this attitude are shortchanging their customers and will be left behind as design-centric organizations continue to surge ahead.

Webster’s Dictionary defines information as: “The act of informing; the communication of knowledge.”

Information design is a highly specialized area of design that involves making large amounts of complex information clear and accessible to audiences of one to several hundred thousand.

From the AIGA website.

I recently saw a prominent blogger post a request for “diagramming software.” He wants to illustrate a concept for a book he’s writing. This is a good thing: diagrams and illustrations are particularly adept at communicating complex concepts; while scenes and emotions can be communicated through words alone (frequently poetry is more emotive than a picture), when it comes to a concepts, a diagram can make the difference between a logical maze and clear communication.

We talk about usability a lot here at Loud Dog - it’s the foundation upon which our designs are built. Our philosophy is that attractive designs can be easy-to-use and usable designs can be attractive. We rarely talk about accessibility, however. I’d like to clarify what we mean by accessibility (versus usability), why it’s important, and how we can make sure our sites are accessible.