The Devil's Kitchen Design

As someone who has used many applications across the entire spectrum of computing tasks, I maintain a healthy interest in user interface design—especially as it has applications to my real world job in which, surprise surprise, I am currently tasked with overhauling the entire user interface of our product range.

As such, I found this article to be particularly useful in outlining the principles involved in establishing good practice throughout application design...

Having been engaged in some more web work recently, your humble Devil visited the Website Baker site to check that I had the latest code—and found that a new, bleeding-edge version has been released.

For the last few years, almost all of my websites have been built using this little-known content management system—nothing else (that I have found) beats Website Baker (WB) for sheer ease-of-use across the board. Plus, its small but enthusiastic development community keep putting out excellent add-ons—both templates and, more importantly for me, functionality modules—that are incredibly easy to install and use.

WB 2.8rc2 adds a number of useful features...

As some people will know, your humble Devil recently got married to fellow blogger Bella Gerens. For various reasons, speed was of the essence and the budget was rather restricted. As such, when we got married in Cyprus, we had no wedding rings.

A such, I am very pleased that Tungsten Rings Online sought me out and offered me two rings for a modest exchange...

For those of us who design websites with Accessibility in mind, the question of fluidity—that is, the resizing of the site to accommodate differing screen resolutions—is a vexing question.

Should we design for a fixed width? Or should we design for flexible widths, or a totally fluid width? And if we do a fluid with, how do we ensure that the site maintains its look and feel at different screen resolutions and, indeed, at different text sizes?

Via Daring Fireball, I have found this rather excellent article on the compliance modes of IE8.

If you’re a web developer, you’ll already know that Internet Explorer 8 (Final) was released to the public recently, and with it comes the “X-UA-Compatible” header, a mechanic that the IE Team devised as their way of “not breaking the Web”.

Uh-oh. This sounds like another Microsoft (M$, in developer parlance) hash-up...

As some of you may know, web developers do not like Internet Explorer (often known, in the industry, as Internet Exploder). There are several reasons for this, but the most common—and annoying—is the rendering engine. To explain what this means requires that I go into a little technical detail...

There's an interesting article over at A List Apart—many web designers' online magazine of choice—about defining goals when designing websites.

Creativity breathes life into successful websites. However, creative ideas and solutions can sometimes seem like guesswork—and guessing is risky business. So what can designers do to show clients they’re using a solid strategy and have the best intentions?

The article lays out some key tips for ensuring that your site deploys design in order to achieve key objectives.

I always find it a little tricky trying to find good print pieces. I have two portfolios of my work, both full.

The first is my primary portfolio, displaying the stuff that absolutely cannot be left out.

The second—which is literally full to bursting—contains work that was good enough to keep but that, for some reason, doesn't quite make the cut.

Drop-down and pop-up menus have always been a problem from a Web Accessibility point of view, but now internet guru Jeffrey Zeldman argues that drop-down menus are, in and of themselves, almost always a bad option—and not simply because they impact on a website's useability.

I have never been a great fan of Adobe's Dreamweaver: it is very cumbersome and takes up far too many resources for what is, effectively, a text editor with added tips. I also find that its way of tying sites together is far too inflexible for the way in which I work—especially since almost all of my web design work is now done with Content Management Systems (CMS).

A few months ago, when I was out and about with my laptop and needed to do some editing, I suddenly remembered a favourable review of Panic's Coda, so I decided to have a look.