A Case for Usable Content

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

Every time you venture to a website that gives advice about websites, you’re bound to run into the line “content is king.” In truth, the value of your site is by and large that of your content. Aesthetics and marketing only go so far. People come to a site with a goal, and that goal is always content focused. Yet we seem to often sacrifice this in the name of design.

Our evangelism for semantic code is all in the name of usability, many of us spend time in design critiques or wireframe discussions about the usability of workflows, the proper words to describe a key menu element, or even going to bizarre lengths to keep out that one last wrapper div that we feel we could find a way around. But at the end of all this, we’re using image replacement on header text, and leaving content handling in the hands of the questionable practices of rich-text emulators. Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s a pretty standard practice on the web today.
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Posted in Design, Usability | 5 Comments »

Why Other Designers Are Not Web Designers

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

Granted, you may be a most excellent designer in your field, whether that be newspaper layout, graphic design, or whatever. Odds are, however, you don’t have that same level of expertise in the world of web design. So why not? You have the essential skills in your mind, the capability, you’re capable! However, being capable is great when you’re designing your personal blog, your MySpace profile, and that site for your neighbor’s book club. However, clients tend not to see this and figure that since you know HTML, hey you can make them a website too.
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Posted in Design | 31 Comments »