Aug
16
Site Search: Nice feature or not?
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I’ve been reading “Don’t Make Me Think,” the widely acclaimed and recommended book by Steven Krug. Unless my interpretation is wrong, he seems to think that a site search is a necessary feature; but I’m not so sure I can agree with that.
Here’s a post on Future Now’s blog, GrokDot.com that clearly illustrates how useless site - or useful - a site search can be:
So you think you need an insite search engine?
After having done many searches on a number of sites recently, it was the exception rather than the rule that I found what I was looking for, even when the item or topic of the search was actually on the site, or on pages linked to from the site.
If users use a site search rather than the site’s navigation links, unless it works, couldn’t it do more harm tha good when the search doesn’t give what they’re looking for?
Jul
31
Maintainable Stylesheets
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I don’t recall how I found it, but here’s an excellent article on creating stylesheets that are easy to maintain and use:
CSS article by Jina Bolton at ThinkVitamin
The author also includes links to some other good articles on the topic, including one by Jeff Croft, who’s a co-author of a CSS book I recently bought from Amazon that has a section on building CSS Frameworks.
That’s something I’ve been trying to put together for both CSS and PHP, for things I use on practically every site - like automatically inserting “last updated” and a copyright snippet that updates automatically when a new year rolls around.
Jun
23
CSS and Current Browser Usage
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There are some interesting figures on current browser usage at W3Schools.com as of May, 2008:
IE7: 26.5%
IE6: 27.3%
IE5: 0.7% (not worth losing sleep over)
FF: 39.8%
That high a figure for Firefox surprises me, I thought it was somewhere between 15-20%. Of course, it may depend on the particular audience a given site has, but either way there’s enough of a spread between IE and FF to keep me from becoming a CSS purist and relying on a ton of hacks to make complicated layouts work cross-browser with just CSS positioning alone.
I’ve seen some brand name sites this past week with text dropped down below where the side navigation ends (including at the O’Reilly site, and a site with CSS tutorials, of all places). And I’m sure a 17″ monitor using 1024 resolution isn’t at all uncommon.
It’s definitely time to get rid of most font tags on pages and replace with CSS styling, but when pages have code bloated with classitis and divitis that rival the most profuse use of font tags, that makes a pretty poor case for replacing nice, lean tables to lay out pages.
I’m right now very conscious of this because I’m working on “cleaning up” a horrible mess on someone’s site that’s got (aside from the same off-topic , irrelevant titles and metas repeated throughout) a 24KB linked stylesheet, which is duplicated inline on some pages for a total of 24K to 48K of CSS - and *still* has had to have over 300 <font> tags and unused <span> tags removed from a good number of the pages - which all still used font tags.
The span and font tags have been stripped on pages that have been cleaned so far, and the stylesheet is now 1KB - and that includes comments so that the site is maintainable.
It’s a cleanup, not a redesign, so it’s a moot point, but the above still wouldn’t justify ditching tables on the whole site and going to pure CSS for positioning throughout.
Sep
13
Free Dingbat Fonts - no Popups
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Having stopped going to font sites altogether after long being a fontaholic because of the horrendous popups and fear of driveby downloads, it’s been so long since I’ve downloaded any fonts I’ve just about forgotten how to install them. But while crusing the Wordpress site for a new WP theme, I came across one linked to from a theme author’s page and it’s got NO popups!
Nice dings at Dingbat Depot and thanks go to Thomas Arie Setiawan, a blogger living in Jogjakarta, Indonesia who happens to be using Movable Type.