A few of my posts from the Flame blog archives from last year. Possibly worth a gander:
Books or online tutorials
A discussion on the benefits of books or online learning, the clue’s in the title!
There has been mild debate in the office recently over whether we prefer online tutorials or the traditional printed word. This has been sparked by a recent subscription to Lynda.com, an online resource of video tutorials.
It seems that Lynda hasn’t been used as much as hoped or expected. But alas, this is not because we’re all too lazy to learn, on the contrary we’ve all been too busy to participate in 8 hour tutorials on designing fonts, modeling gorillas in 3DS Max or building a spaceship using only PHP and a dashing of AJAX (yeh I have no idea how you’d do that either)…
Does anybody care what you have to say?
A muse about the value of blogging today and just how important is your voice?
Blogging has evolved, transformed and broadened massively over the years. I wouldn’t like to say ’since it was invented’ because, well it was never ‘invented’, it has just ‘become’, biologically… like a living entity. Anyway, enough semantics.
The origins of blogging have long since been lost in the mists of time, it is maintained that only scholars know the true reasoning behind the now extremely popular web activity and in some cases – business. I personally have only been blogging since January this year, and am constantly learning new tricks, styles and trends…
Navigating large blogs
Some advice for designers on how to make large blogs more usable and easy-to-navigate.
With the exception of news-exclusive blogs, pretty much the entirety of blogs on the net feature topical or thematic content that can be useful and informative not only at the time it’s written, but for many months or even years down the line.
So when a blog grows and expands, it’s easy for older posts to get lost and unseen. Sure they’re still there, archived or categorized, but once your post count starts to rise above the lofty heights of 100 posts… chances are your old work, regardless of how well-written or useful, is going to attract less traffic from either external or internal sources.
The importance of internal blog navigation cannot be underestimated. It may seem obvious but a lack of categorization, clear navigation and tidy layout can have massive negative implications on a site’s usability, and therefore readership.
The little things that matter
Considering how essential to the overall design even the smallest elements are, and how they should never be overlooked.
Sometimes it seems all too easy to simply throw up a contact form or a standard menu layout because at the end of the day – everyone knows how these things work, as long as they do their job, they don’t require much attention.
Oh how wrong that is. A recent string of articles from Smashing Magazine regarding Web Form Design Patterns emphasises the importance of the smallest design aspects, such as the placement of labels next to input boxes, wording, use of colour, shape, size and position and much more.
There’s some great stuff there, thanks for the refresher. I like the bit about online tutorials, and what you say makes a lot of sense, these things have gotten way to specialized, an overview on new programs or interfaces are great, but the crazy stuff that one crazy guy spent a year trying to do something that can be done in another media in 10 min. is a bit much.
Its good to see all those old posts and I always miss my own posts which are almost 1 year old on my own blog. I think we should have such functionality which could provide access to those posts because they are valuable content forever.
There is a ton of good information on here for anyone looking to learn more about web design.
Thanks for all the tips on this web site i have just started my new web site http://www.qtelltrader.com/ and blogging to advertise the new web site on the internet.Whats the best way for all search engine optimization
thanks
michael