Siolon

Recently, the Internet Explorer team released IE 8 beta 2.  It’s a monumental leap forward for not only web designers but also the Internet.  However, it is not without controversy, but first it needs a little background. A Little Background Internet Explorer has for a long time been the bane of web developers.  Every since they won the browser war over Netscape (nearing a decade ago now) with what were judged unethical and illegal means which led to a monopoly investigation.  That was settled and Microsoft allowed to continue.  Since then web designers have had to hack, glue, and curse IE due (read more...)

Navigation and IA Navigation is without a doubt one of the most essential elements of any interface, and as a result adequate time and thought is necessary to ensure your interface’s navigation is usable and comprehensive.  From the all important global navigation that stays the same throughout the site, to local navigation which changes based on the content of the page, to contextual navigation which exists within the content itself.  They all work together to form a powerful navigation experience. Information Architecture as an Extension of Web Design - features some good points on navigation and IA. Information Architecture Deliverables: Site/Navigation Structure - (read more...)

We live in a time that is far removed from the late 90’s battle with 640×480 resolutions with IE 4 (oh how I shudder at those days). Today, the web is an elaborate medium for artistic expression, and we have no shortage of talented designers strutting their stuff and receiving their due recognition. But I must admit that I, and most of the web designers out there, aren’t a “good designer” in the traditional sense of being completely original. In fact, I venture to estimate that the truly revolutionary ideas come out in web design is coming from a group (read more...)

Information Architecture (IA) is one of the most important and exciting concepts in designing applications, but it also one of the least understood by a majority of designers, programmers, business analysts, etc. Hopefully through the following overview of the major concepts and benefits you can immediately improve both the utility and finabitliy of information in your application. After all, content (information) is the most important thing to any application so doesn’t it deserve some foresight? Defining Information Architecture (IA) The Findability Flower The Information Architecture Institute has the following definition to begin our study. They define IA as: The structural design of shared information (read more...)

If you spend anytime at all doing interface design work you know the value-added from wireframes early on in the development process. It helps to point the customer to what’s important in the early-going, namely, labels, location of content, navigation, etc while not worrying about the font or what color the background is going to be. It’s this stage that information architects flex their muscles. I have created a wireframe for MOSS 2007. It is based on the master page that comes out-of-the-box with SharePoint 2007. If you want to make it WSS-specific, all you really have (read more...)