Inside the Fold

Rethinking Web Form Design

Last week I began reading “Web Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski and I haven’t really put it down. It’s a thriller with great examples and well thought out and tested practices.

Everyone has had both the good, bad and ugly form experience. As a front end designer and developer I have had the pleasure of taking the shopping cart on Chroniclebooks.com site from painful to fluid and usable.

I spend the majority of my time on the computer and surfing the web. Hours come and go but when I have decided to make a purchase and it takes longer than 2 minutes I feel frustrated and I usually abandon the sale.

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All things Expression Engine

I am reading all things Expression Engine lately.

I have been working on familiarizing myself with this really powerful CMS and gearing up for a few projects. I have developed a workflow which begins out with the usual suspects of site planning.

I think this CMS encourages a designer to focus on design and the ease of chopping up the design into respective elements to dynamically build pages. Custom fields are really powerful and the tags, although unfamiliar at first, really help clean up the tag soup of other CMS’s.

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People talking AJAX

I have heard more an more muggles mention AJAX in their conversations this past week than ever before. Yesterday at the elevator I heard it come up in casual conversation and a few hours earlier on the Muni ride to work.

On my way through Duboce Park to buy groceries a young fashionable hipster walked by in her knee high leathers and bold framed sunglasses and yup, she was talking about AJAX too.

The air is a…buzz with AJAX. I mentioned this to my to my 75 year old father and asked him what AJAX meant to him. “Clean, tough stains, scrubbing and elbow grease,” were his words.

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Down to earth reading

Web, web, web…I get into the trenches and read, work and digest web. Well I am happy to say I also try and balance my obsession with some history, fiction and science too.

I had been reading/listening to Andy Rutledge’s Design View posts and thinking about maintaining my well rounded world view. I now have a simple but wonderful email in my in-box daily from Merriam-Webster entitled “Word of the Day.” Now it’s part of my morning ritual as I crunch away on my cereal to read the word with my wife and the etymology of the word.

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