Inside the Fold

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.

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.