The web has come a long way from its beginnings and the check box has basically never changed since those days, and most designers leave it alone and let the browser or operating system look after the styling of it. Most of the time this will work perfectly, but sometimes an extra bit of styling can add hugely to the design of a form, and thus make it fit in better with the rest of the web design.

Do we need radio and check boxes to look different?

This section was prompted while visiting the very excellent http://www.51bits.com, as recommended by Elliot Jay Stocks. The contact page on this site, uses the same excellent designed check box for both radio and check box form elements. At first, I was a bit put out by this. I wondered about the decision and whether it was the right one. I expected the behavior to be different when I saw the check appear.

I wanted to ask Chris Sealey (designer,developer of 51bits) about this, but I’m a wuss – and someone else got there first. Eric Eggert (http://twitter.com/yatil) pointed out the same thing:

Chris (http://twitter.com/51bits) replied back,

And after thinking about it for a while, I have to say I agree. Does the user care what it appears like? I’d almost go as far as to say that if you need to differentiate with UI elements then your options aren’t clear enough for the user to interpret correctly. As long as the options are intuitive the user will know how many or how few options the user has to click on.

The check boxes in question…

from 51bits.com/Contact

You can clearly tell from the options whether you should be clicking more than one option at a time. Plus the design is perfect, I really like those check boxes.

Conclusion

There’s two issues here I feel. As a designer, you owe it to your client to make their design be… well… beautiful. Even better if you are your own client as in this case. So in this case, the options are pretty fixed, Chris knows what the options are going to be and is smart enough to put them together in such a way that there is no confusion.

But then, if you hand your design to someone else (i.e. the client) and they have the ability to change things like this, then they might not be as aware of the issues that could arise if they make the options more ambiguous. We’ve all seen terrible polls and option lists so this isn’t as unlikely as we might hope.

Are there any other great examples of modified check boxes? What are other peoples feelings on the matter?

Jack of all trades…

Unfortunately in current times, people feel like they have to be able to do everything, to be able to offer every service to their customers. And to be honest I’m as guilty as the next person of this. I have a keen interest in the web, and I’m a half decent developer. I love design but I know that my design work isn’t great – so I don’t do any for clients. I outsource that for almost every job I do, as I owe it to my client to give them the best possible product.

… Master of none

Some companies however, take this to another level – I know of a number of computer repair shops, that offer “web-design” and pretty much every other computer “related” service that they could fit on a flyer. This leads to a distortion of the market, as you have these people offering their services at a very low price, so some actual designers, maybe starting out or whatever, feel like they have to be able to match this.

Along with this, some potential customers, looking to get a price reduction, will point out that these people can do it cheaper. You do not want these clients – if they can’t tell the difference between a real designer, and someone chancing their arm, then it does not bode well for the project.

Hopefully, people are able to tell what they are getting before they approach a designer.

Its for that reason that I believe there are two problems in the Irish equation – uneducated clients and bad web designers.

Uneducated Clients

The number of times that a small business owner has said to me that their 15 year old nephew/niece is a brilliant web designer is beyond counting at this stage. And perhaps I’m being unfair – maybe they are the next Chris Spooner, Meagan Fisher or Grace Smith. But I’ve heard it so many times that this is virtually impossible.

And unfortunately this boils down to the fact that although these business owners (apparently) know quite a lot about the subject matter they deal in, they know little or nothing about the web. This is of course a shame. But not the end of the world. I feel to really help these people you must be able to educate them as to why something is a good idea. Or a bad idea. And most of the time they will listen and understand and learn. And once we get to that stage the relationship can only get better. And your job then becomes much more rewarding. And hopefully you’ve earned yourself a repeat client.

Bad Web Designers

Full disclosure – I have made some really terrible websites in my time. But I never charged anyone for them – They were back when I started out and they were for friends. I never would have advertised the fact that I was a web designer. In fact – I still don’t. I love design but I love development more – And I’m much better at it too – In my opinion .

As I mentioned above more and more people are offering themselves as web designers, and they really shouldn’t be allowed. I’ll stop short of advocating that there should be some kind of test before people can call themselves a Web Designer… but only just.

Unfortunately, these “designers” cause a distortion or blur the market for young good web designers. When starting out and looking for a steady amount of work or in the current economic climate, you may take on work that you would never have taken on normally – and these clients can sometimes cause problems because they can’t tell the difference between these cowboy designers and you – the excellent designer.

Not Specific to Ireland?

The more research I did on this I realised that Ireland is not really the only country that suffers from this. You have the same issues all over the world. But Ireland is in a fairly unique situation, we’re a tiny country – with a population which is punching well above its weight in the creative world. You just have to look at all the world renowned poets, musicians, artists and authors. In the business world, you can look at all the Irish companies doing very well around the world, or all the Irish CEO’s of leading companies around the world.

We have an excellent and unique opportunity to educate our business owners on usability, on accessibility – to ensure that they get the website that they need to further their business. The website that their users deserve.

(Main image attribution: uggboy on Flickr)

We’ve all, at one time or another, needed to find a phone number of a local tradesman, or business. Now, the first thing I do is google it. However, before the advent of google, the first thing you picked up was the golden pages or some other local directory. Even now, alot of local businesses just dont have a web presence so the only way to find them is through the Golden Pages. And even the companies that do have a web presence, can’t totally cut their directory listsings as many people’s first port of call is still the local directory.

Recently however, that has started to change. More and more companies (especially companies that conduct their business mostly online) have been foregoing a listing in the local offline directories and even the national directories like the golden pages. This is because they believe it is impossible to tell whether they have achieved anything from their ad in the golden pages. They don’t have the same transparency that they get from their visitors coming from Google, Digg or Twitter.

I believe this trend is largely similar to what we are seeing in other industries like advertising. A large number of advertisers are focusing on the forms of advertising where they can easily track their results. This is why big online ad companies like google aren’t seeing the huge hits in revenue that printed advertisers are seeing.

However, just the other day, during a discussion someone asked me if it was possible to find out how much traffic was coming from these offline resources. And although it might take a little bit of work I think it might be possible to tell. All you really need is a little creativity and some way to track your websites statistics – like Google Analytics.

The easiest way, first off, if you haven’t already run the ad, is to use a slightly different URL for your offline ad. I’d even go as far as to suggest a different domain. You can then redirect from this URL to you normal address with little or no fuss. You can then easily work out numbers coming from offline resources. And even if for some reason your offline URL is being used somewhere online, you’ll nearly always have a referrer. Since all of your ‘offline’ customers, will show as a direct connections, you can work out whether your offline ads are worth it. I believe a number of companies already do this. However it seems to be more tailored to specific advertising campaigns then to particular ads but the premise is still valid. You’ll often see companies like Coca-Cola have a different URL on certain ads – A different URL for each campaign. Its a way of seeing how successful a particular campaign was. I’m sure huge advertising companies have completed studies that are able to work out the number of people who actually see an ad from the number of people that actively go out and type out the URL, however this is beyond my means as a one man development team. Plus in our case, only the people that use the URL are important as they are potential sales, or offers, or whatever it is that you do. Coca-Cola also have the luxury of being able to correlate sales to campaigns, and I’m sure have very intelligent statisticians working it out for them.

This is not always going to work though. And it’s not always good in every situation. One situation where I’d advise against providing users with a different domain, is when the brand is ultra important and you’re trying to create brand loyalty. While its ok for Susan who owns and graphic design company to have a couple of domains, as its her name and work that is important not exact brand recognition. And its definitely ok for a huge brand like Coca-Cola because they already have all the brand recognition that they’re going to get. If you have to keep the exact brand, you could offer your offline resourses a slightly different landing page. In the offline ad list http://example.com/golden as your domain name. Again this has a couple of problems in that it has a much better chance of being found in the wrong manner and if that happens it might take a lot of effort to work out the approx numbers coming from offline resources.

As I pointed out earlier, Coca-Cola have correlation between sales and ad campaigns as a perfect measurement of ad success. If you’re deciding whether to drop that offline ad and suspect its doing absolutely nothing for you then the easiest thing you can do is drop the ad and see if there is a correlation between the amount of work you lose. Risky, especially if you’re wrong. But in certain businesses you’re going to be able to do this with very little risk.

One last thing to take into consideration however is demographics. And what a huge thing to throw in at the end. I could have written a whole post about demographics and will do so in the future. The key is to think about what your normal customer is. Are they an old couple from a rural town? Don’t bother with the web (unless of course you’re looking to change your normal customers – again depends on the business). Are they young “bebo-ers”? Don’t bother with offline directories – They’ve never picked up the golden pages. You need to look at your customers and work out who who want or need to target and work out your advertising from there. Not the other way round.

This year is an especially good year for me… I’m in the middle of buying a new house with my girlfriend, just got a new puppy yesterday, and got relatively good job news from a couple of people in the family. Unfortunately not everyone is as lucky as me or most of you. And this time of year can be especially hard as its supposed to be a good time of the year. And the people that feel it the hardest? It’s the children. This is where the Save the Children organisation comes into play.

Save the Children

A Global aid organisation, its aim is to create “real and lasting change for children in need in the United States and around the world”. The organisation spans 28 national organisations and works in 110 different countries. You can read more about the organisation and its mission here. A worthy goal, no doubt about it.

What can I do?

You can donate over here of course, or if Christmas is hard for you financially, you can give to the community and let the community donate for you. The good people over at tutorial9 are running the Gift of Knowledge Giveaway where the technical, witty, and excellent writers and bloggers among you can submit entries, and give to the community, and in turn a very, very, worthy cause. It could be a very easy and excellent way to maybe help your good karma at this time of year! Their aim is to give $5,000 dollars away to this excellent charity, and I think that everyone should help, in any way that they can. Remember, it doesn’t have to be monetary, and everything helps! Even if you don’t have enough or don’t want to help in this way, there are many other charitable organisations or ways to help and in the end it will all, hopefully, help someone who needs it, especially at Christmas.

So there you go, to all those that read this – a very Happy Christmas to you and yours.

Thanks, Dan.

Let me explain a little: When I browse around the internet I rarely click on any ads unless they really appeal to me, I don’t really do the social networking thing(apart from twitter), and I never say anything to someone online that I wouldn’t say to their face. I was also taught as a child that “It’s better to be thought a fool, then to open your mouth and prove it”. So I really only comment on things that I understand and have an interest in. But I’m starting to think that its just me.

Go to any really mainstream site that people comment on – YouTube or The Boston Globe for example and take a look at the comments on some of the articles (The LHC Gallery is just one hilarious example). What is wrong with these people? Abusing each other and talking rubbish about a subject that they have seemingly no understanding of. In that example about the Large Hadron Collider on the Boston Globe Site, there are 4200 comments and after a brief read, I’ll take a stab in the dark and say 95% of these have no material value at all. They don’t add anything to the debate about the device or help anyone else to understand it.

I am by no means against people having an opinion or wanting to talk about it. I merely want people (probably naivety on my part) to think about what they are going to write first and decide if they really want to comment. I think that people should use a three step process before deciding to comment.

- Decide if they really want to comment.

- They should also question whether where they are writing it is really the best place to be adding their opinion.

- Then, if after passing that step, they should endeavor to write their comment thoughtfully and in a way that everyone can understand.

Hopefully I can elaborate a little on each of the above points…

Decision Time

Comments follow you around. They are nearly always permanent little insights into the type of person you are. And, in the real world, can sometimes come back to kick you. So much so that certain organizations and companies want to know your “handles” and nicknames and the various forums that you browse. The White House is one extreme example where as part of the application process for they ask for almost every internet posting you’ve ever made… but that’s in the extreme case. You have to think before you post as your comments may have consequences that you just can’t foresee.

Appropriate forum

Is the Boston Globe website really the best place to learn or talk about the LHC? Will any people who have any say in the matter be able to read or respond to your concerns? Nobody is going to read through 4000 comments. Are you just posting it for the hell of it or do you want someone to take note? Then post it in an appropriate place! If you don’t want tax money used for a certain process, there is little point in writing about it in the wrong place. And it’s not just this example. People the world over complain about things online where nothing is going to be done rather than write to their local representative or appropriate person where something might be done!

Give me grammar and punctuation!

I understand that for a lot of people that comment on the Internet, English is not their first language. And I appreciate the effort that they all put in to try and post in the language that I understand best. However, I have often been stumped on the web by English speakers that have written unbelievably badly written posts/comments. As a commenter or author it is your job to get your point across as well as you can. This means reaching the biggest audience possible without them having to decrypt what you mean from what you’ve written. I think everyone can ignore mistakes, because we all make them. Missing an apostrophe here or a comma there isn’t going to make your post unreadable. However, writing the entire post in caps and with no full stops or punctuation except for exclamation marks makes little sense and importantly, will make a lot of people discount you without even reading your point.

So what can we do? If people can’t do the whole self moderation thing do we introduce a BBC type moderation on every comment on these sites? Is that even possible on many of these huge sites? Its certainly true that comments will start to have little value unless something is done.

Edit 17/3/2009 Well, I can’t say I didn’t bring it on myself. This post unfortunately gets about 500 spam comments a day. and while Akismet catches nearly all of them, every couple of days I have to go through a few pages of spam to delete them all. And as much as I love the keyboard shortcuts in WordPress 2.7 and how easy it is to go through the spam, I’m closing the comments on this post in an effort to stem the tide.

Eric Meyer

I’m pretty certain it would be impossible to exclude Eric Meyer from any list on CSS. Any list at all, because he is probably the best, most world renowned CSS expert there is. Having practically eaten two of his many books on CSS (“Eric Meyer on CSS” and “More Eric Meyer on CSS“) I can’t recommend them enough. Presumably does not suffer from stage fright as he speaks regularly (indeed founded) a travelling web design conference called “An Event Apart“ and most recently at this event in San Francisco and Chicago, along side a number of other names on this list. You can find Eric blogging at http://meyerweb.com/ and otherwise dolling out his genius in the form or amazing tips and helpful hints there too.

Andy Budd

I first found Andy Budd when I bought CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. It quickly became one of my favourite books on CSS and has become a excellent and well used reference. His website has also become an excellent resource – especially his extensive bookmarks at http://www.andybudd.com/links/. He can also be found blogging at http://www.andybudd.com/ too, a popular weblog where he writes about his personal hobbies and also about web design and web standards. Another branch in Andy’s CSS work is also his efforts at http://clearleft.com/ (btw they also have a ridiculous trademarked tag line – “We make Websites Better™”). Clearleft have a good few web applications and web sites under their belt and one very interesting project that they have is http://www.silverbackapp.com/.

Dan Cederholm

from http://www.simplebits.com/ – One of the books I’m reading right now, “Bulletproof Web Design” was written by Dan Cederholm, and from what I’ve read – he uses techniques and has a style of code that I really admire and now aim for myself with my projects. He is a big proponent of lean markup and CSS, and apparently in every project looks to “minimize markup and embrace the flexibility of CSS”. This is something that I’d like to be able to do and his book seemed like the obvious place to start. Having said that, “Transcending CSS” is also pointing me in this direction as its mantra of content being king is helping me see the benefits of avoiding unnessary divs, and other markup that adds nothing to the semantic value of the page.

Jonathan Snook

at http://snook.ca/jonathan/ – Having heard of Jonathan over the years and having read a couple of his articles and things, when I first found out that he’d written a book, I pretty much had to buy it. The book was “The Art and Science of CSS“, and what a book it was. It was a book that really made me turn a corner, that made me realise how much I could do with CSS and good markup. I enjoyed this book immensely and learnt a great many things from it. He does the big web and development conferences too and has graced SXSW, Webmaster Jam Sessions, and Future of WebDesign. His personal website http://snook.ca/jonathan/ is where he shares his “tips, tricks and bookmarks on web development” and I often venture there for inspiration ideas and excellent ideas. One of the handiest tools on his website is also one of my favorites – The Colour Contrast Checker at http://snook.ca/archives/accessibility_and_usability/colour_color_co/. His list of accomplishments is long and they are many, check at the about section on his website to find out more.

Andy Clarke

from http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ – Another recent addition to my list of really really good people is Andy Clarke. In fact I hadn’t really heard of him properly until I read Transcending CSS – A book that has literally changed how I look at new projects, and really got me thinking about the way I design websites. And although I only found him recently, it would appear that the man is a bit of a legend! He also speaks at the big conferences (like An event apart this year in Chicago…) and runs his own business from a studio in North Wales. But his book is becoming my most read book on web design(over and over again ). I really enjoyed reading it and appreciate all the work that went into it. Hopefully, I get to put many of the techniques and things learnt from this book to good use in the future.

Dave Shea

at http://mezzoblue.com/ – I first started to read Dave Shea’s website a good while ago after it was brought to my attention as a really good example of a website design, and although its changed quite a bit since then, it still holds true as a really good example of professional website design. Good use of changing themes/colours, great layout and interesting content. Also the creator of CSS Zen Garden, arguable one of the best known places for web designers to show off excellent CSS designs. Not always my cup of tea (I prefer less graphics intensive designs personally), its hard to ignore some of the really excellent things that sometimes appear here. As for Dave himself, I think he says it best himself(from the about section of http://mezzoblue.com/) – “If you’re looking for the professional bio it’s over here. In short, I do a bit of speaking, a bit of writing, but mostly it’s about the design.” He links to a differen site here and its one you should take a look at as its really excellent – http://brightcreative.com/.

Conclusions

In reality while writing this piece I could have listed about 50 more people. In fact I started off with three and it grew after looking at the books on my shelves. However I feel like these are the people that I really look to for CSS stuff and think most people will find it useful. At the very least your should be adding these people’s websites to your RSS feeds, however, then you lose one of the most important aspects of going to these websites and that’s for the great work that they’ve done on their own websites!

The next article should come soon enough on the same topic of voices that matter to me… but with a slightly different subject.

Tutorial9

An absolutely superb website. I use it primarily for Photoshop tutorials and don’t think I’ve come across a better website for this purpose. Regularly updated with posts and great tutorials, I go here first for subtle ideas that really shine to use on new projects. Written by David Leggett, it’s a very good resource for multimedia designers. Personal favorite : 5 Pixel Popping Techniques

Smashing Magazine

I really cannot give this website enough credit. Scarily helpful and useful, it is unbelievably good at what it does. So good in fact that I would pay to read what they write about… but lets not tell them that . Maintained by two legends – Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz, It is hard to leave this website once you’re there. More articles than you can shake a stick at, this website is one of the best on the Internet. Seriously. Personal favorite : Excellent Blog Designs

Fuel your Creativity

Along the same lines as smashing magazine except obviously not as big. Still has a great selection of articles though and can often turn up some real gems. Does some really good designer interviews aswell and these can be really interesting. Personal favorite : Typography is SexyThe Blog at Elite By Design – A web design company that also runs a very nice blog. There is a 5 part series that I’m currently going through that really caught my attention and brought me to Brian’s (that’s all he refers to himself as…) site. Personal Favorite : Design articles to keep you motivated and follow the rest!

Sitepoint

An great resource for web developers and designers, Sitepoint covers everything from the business side of things, through to the purely design side of it. They also include a CSS and HTML reference section to their website that is very useful. Their news section tends to be quite a good read to and the forums are always busy. In fact I liked this website so much that I bought a couple of books from them which I can definitely recommend – “The Art and Science of CSS” and “The Principals of Beautiful Web Design“. Though as you can see from my website… I lack the creativeness to gain much from this book However it did taech me alot about typography and layout so I’d still recommend it.

Alistapart

One of the best resourses out there for web devlopers, it often leads the way on cutting edge techniques that are perfect to be your next subtle (but killer) addition to your website. Everyone knows the list apart sliding doors method of adding background images to lists.

Max Design

An Austrailian web design and development company, based in Sydney, they have also set themselves up as a bit of an authority on CSS, accessibility and Web Standards. What sends me to this site? The writers, Russ Weakley and Anna Gregg and an un canny ability to find some really good articles etc. on what we should be reading. Personal favorite: The “Light Reading” category always has something interesting to read.

99 Designs

Unlikely as it seems to have a site dedicated to the buying and selling of logos and designs but you can learn alot from the very many talented people on here. It used to be the haunt of design students etc., a kind of place where they could earn some money on the side – however it tends to be very much dominated by graphic houses in the almost devloped (india, china… ) world that are able to do great work for that little bit less money. Still there’s alot to learn from these talented people.

CSS Zen Garden

I tend to find many of the designs here too graphic heavy. However there are a lot of very good ideas on display, and these can be very useful for any projects that you have. It’s a useful resource but I don’t feel you could really use any of the designs, however I don’t think that’s the point. It s more of a place where designers can show off what they can do. And there are really some out of this world designs in here.

Freelance Switch

What? Im recommending this for inspiration? Well… Yes. The purpose of the site is teach people how to make the switch to becoming a freelancer. And to help those who already are… and you can see where I’m going. They have some really good articles aimed at keeping freelancers out at the front on their industries so its for that reason that I put it in last here. It’s one of my places to go but it may not suit everyone!

The End

Well, that’s it. When I have a new project coming up, the first thing I do is go scrapbook hunting. Then I trawl the above sites for things that I’d find useful and might be able to add to my site or add to an old site that I’m still maintaining. Let me know if I’m missing anything though…

I believe from reading his further comments throughout the page that he means that it is unprofessional to use them on client sites or on a… say… web designers/developers main business site. In this case I kind of agree with him. I however disagree with him over a number of his points.

…their use should be considered nonprofessional in every seemingly professional context.

I only agree with this statement if our definition of professional context is the same as I mentioned above. What about on a web designers/developers personal blog or website?

He also states:

Do these claims make “professionals” look professional, or does it make them rather untrustworthy?

By this he is referring to his analogies about various professionals (doctors, soldiers etc.) claiming to be proficient at their job. He is trying to say that if a doctor tell you he or she knows what they are doing then they obviously don’t… However Doctors do this all the time! Take a walk down to you local GP or Hospital Doctors office. See all those letters after their names? They all mean very specific things, and should be taken quite seriously. Would you allow a doctor to operate on you if “B. Ch” wasn’t in there? No. Why not? Well how do you know that he or she is a surgeon, and not just some Obstitrician that got bored? I know, I know, unlikely to happen – but all of this is very important.

Assuming too much?

I think perhaps Jens is assuming too much knowledge on the part of the consumer. The client who wants a new website. By looking at your website they’re not going to know, and whats more likely is they’re not going to care. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be teaching them. Or making them aware of the need to be accessible and compliant. Jens is assuming that just because we’re in the business that we should be doing it already. However if you take a look at the following examples that clearly isn’t the truth. I’d also like to point out that Jens Meiert probably has a better type of consumer than the rest of us  He is a very intelligent man and I appreciate the other stuff that he has written for the community.

• http://purcellplant.com/ – Someone paid someone to do this to them…
• http://www.orbrio.com/ – they make websites… like this one – http://www.takeawayfood.ie/
• http://www.flynns.ie/ – Again someone paid for this.
• http://www.budgetwebdesignlimited.com/Portfolio.html – And the money comes in to keep them going… to be able to make perfect sites like this – http://www.chostaekwondokilanerin.com/

I could go on. Most of the examples came from this thread on the Irish Webmaster Forum. Its good for a laugh.

Raising Awareness

For me, making your website standard compliant is a big thing. Its not really that difficult, and the more people that do it the more inclusive we become as an industry. So that’s why I love seeing valid CSS, or valid html or even better – WAI-AAA valid, badges on websites.

As long as its used in the right context – to raise awareness and to get more people doing it, and if you’ve taken the time to do it, then why not?

Wear your badges with pride.