NED 24

Just finished one course and straight into the next. Seemed a pity to have to wait a year to do this again so will work though the holidays and take the computer where ever I go. I know there will be two weeks that I will be off air will just have to get cracking from the start.

I sent my web site final document to the company Evolved Analytics for comment and have had some good feed back todate. I am hoping this course will fill in the blanks on how to build the site. Fingers crossed.

Forgot a few things

So I am working my way though the many posts on the discussion page and realise that I have forgot a number of pages in my flow diagram.
Sitemap, site info, privacy, shop online and search are all items that appear on all pages either in the header or in the footer of the pages.




I think this is a better representation that the initial am sure it's not perfect.

Breadcrumbs to be or not to be?

Breadcrumb position?

Krug would have you place them at the top of the page.

But who puts them there?

A quick look at 50 sites randomly picked from google and my ballooning favorites found 1/50 who used this position.

Why would you put it there?

It is easy to see, it's the first thing you come to so from an accessibility point of view that's great, they know where they are without any problem. It does not get cluttered up with the rest of the page. It really does not impact the rest of the page in this position.

But NED23's don't like it and 49/50 other pages did not like it. Probably because it looks a little lost up there. It does not have any distinctive style as we are trying not to detract from the rest of the page.

If I move it to the more conventional position above the main content title...

I personally don't like it there as it interfers with my main title and in later pages you have the primary and local navigation plus the breadcrumb all in the same area.

So do you need it at all? For the home page and second level pages probably not. You can see where you are and what your options are but once you get to lower levels it is concievable that you could be in to a long article for instance covering a number of pages, and lose where you are without having a breadcrumb. By losing I don't mean you could not get home or back to the second level nav but rather have difficulty returning to the original list of publications you choose the article from and there is nothing worse than having to start over when looking though a list for something so yes I do need a breadcrumb and contrary to the "norm" I am going to leave it at the top of the page.

Logo musing

In discussions with the comapny they had some ideas of using the L in both words of their comany name:

I quite liked the italic style which lead to:

This did not go down well with the family critics so back to the beginning.

I started then thinking about what the company Evolved Analytics does-basically they manipulate data using computers. This got me thinking about numbers and come across a pic of binary code and thought that could be interesting.

Adobe stock photos

Tried using it in a variety of ways, small to big, sloped

Started to work on colors and using embossing on the background font.

I wanted to keep the font simple as the business is complicated enough.

Saw some graphs while looking into how they use there mathematics and came across these two:

Which lead to many hours working on:

But could never get the background graphical plane to really pop on the page and it lost all resolution when you went small. Back to the drawing board.

Went back to earlier

but it did not really do anything for me, though I did like the version where the text is in line with the numbers:

However it lacked pop so started working with filters to distort the image. I knew once I tried the sperical distort I was on to something I liked. Many versions later and tweaking of the font postion and we end with the final product. As an added bonus it worked well both large and small.

page design

Original thoughts. Not crazy about the pink but looking for contrast to meet blind standards using HP, “Color contrast Verification tool,” http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/accessibility/webaccessibility/color_tool.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN



Home page some many hours/days later. Much research into accessability (see last post) and more reading of Krug. Still no idea how to actually build many part so this hope ned 24 has some answers.


Subpage after reading on copyright:

Copyright Basics. http://www.copyright.com/ccc/viewPage.do?pageCode=cr10-n#registration

Legalzoom.com. “Trademarks FAQ,” 2007 http://www.legalzoom.com/law_library/trademarks/faq-faq_common.html

Much self debate on whether to go for standard blue links in the left side bar or black on blue background. The blue on blue did not pass the contrast test.



Black and white test.

Accessablity

Spent the better part of today following up on accessability. After reading through
W3C., HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0,
W3C Note 6 November 2000,
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/
html and css guidelines I think I have a feel for what is required and a large headache. Remembering back to NED11 and the first tables site we made I would hate to have to go back and make it accessable, would go cross eyed in the process and that was only a very simple site. I can see why many (probably most ) existing tables sites are not compliant. The examples were very eye opening.
Much of the rest of the recommendations made sense, especially with the examples they provided. Complying maybe time consuming but not impossible (thankfully) and just paying attention to images, the use of instead of text and alt tags, long desc etc and using valid html and css goes a long way to creating assessible pages.

Cynthia D. Waddell and Kevin Lee Thomason Is Your Site ADA-Compliant ...or a Lawsuit-in-Waiting? http://www.icdri.org/CynthiaW/is_%20yoursite_ada_compliant.htm 1998 was an excellent article on why compliance came to being, how to start etc. I actually started here and followed their links to W3C.

Krug's advise in Don't make me think! on the subject of accessibility was also very straightforward:
Use CSS
Add appropriate alt text to every image.
make your forms work with screen readers.
Create "skip to main content" link at the beginning of each page. A point not mentioned in W3C.
Make all content accessible by keyboard.
Don't use javascript without agood reason.
Use client side image maps.
Fix the usability problems that confuse everyone eg error messages. Test often as even if your site is compliant according to the guidelines it still may not be usable.
Plus read some good texts on the subject.

Tag lines and other musings

More plane musings for taglines.
Thoughts based on a company handout from Evolved Analytics. Aiming to keep the tag line simple but still say what they do, not an easy combination when your business is "Data Modeling". Most peoples reaction is what the ...is that?
And it gets worse when you start to see what they do - long terms like symbolic regression, particle swarm optimization???? Naturally paralleizable, model transparency etc and I have only quoted from one powerpoint slide. Hence the musing on possible ways to present the company in simple terms like The problem. Why and How and for the tag line looking more at the benefits than at the how or what.
I can see where not knowing an industry could be a benefit when designing a site as you have to focus on the usability rather than the detailed content as you often will not understand the content. Not sure that come out right, I guess I am saying there will be a place for all these long winded technical terms in the site but making it usable to everyone who enters does not have to involve these terms.
Basically it is a business that has a product or service to sell.
So the key questions are what is that product or servies?
How have they sold it to others in the past-portfolio or case history?
How can you contact them?
How can you buy their stuff?
Search
Something About the Company.

Then you can get fancy with blogs, news, company events, code of ethics, staff etc


-Use our technolgy to stop your company drowning in data. Does not say what they do.
-Data modeling and something
-extracting value from your data using data modeling too wordy
-Data modeling, extracting value from your data. Possible
-Specialists in data modeling, extracting value and insight from your data. Better
-The world is drowning in data, is your company? Too obvious sales plug does not say anything really.
-Turn your data into value for your company. the end result but not enough
-Data modeling, turing your data into value for your company. hmm a bit long
-applying data modeling to your company data. a bit dry
-leaders in data modeling. Are they?
-the future of data modeling. Yuck

What is data modeling? Applying technology to make sense of data, solve problems with data, develop predictions based on data.

-Specialists in data modeling technologies, applied and deployed. very military
Oh for an online theasurus.

Website Musings

While sitting on a plane for 12 hours you can get a lot done

Home page doodle

Navigation - tab headings maybe?
Check conventions for portfolio / success stories

Navigation musings with third level shown



Converting these ideas to frames etc

Home page

Subpage frames