Every weekend, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• Adobe and Open Government

  Adobe recently launched its Open Government initiative. As a tech giant, how can Adobe help government agencies to deliver their data to the general public?

From Elsewhere

• Obama Team Challenges Web Developers

  White House new media director Macon Phillips, deputy director Dave Cole, and creative director Nick Lo Bue announced plans to make WhiteHouse.gov more customizable and increase their usage of RDFa. Plus, the new media team is “working with the White House legal counsel to determine how to contribute that code back to the community” which means they would not only be using Open Source Software, but contributing to it.

  We covered their switch to Drupal and RDFa in our post Structured Meaning in HTML5. (via RDFa.info)

• Re-mapping the future for Ordnance Survey – making public data public

  UKPrime Minister Gordon Brown announced the Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, “will open up its data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information.” He added “Today’s announcement responds to the demands for better use and access to data held by government. In this new world, smarter government is not an option but a necessity.”

• World Wide Web Foundation Launches Global Operations

  The W3C summarized the launch:

  World Wide Web Foundation was created with W3C’s support in September 2008, and focuses on advancing the Web as a medium that empowers people to make positive social and economic change. Web Foundation’s first two projects [...] are consistent with W3C’s own work to ensure that One Web is available to all, including work on mobile Web for social development, accessibility, and internationalization. W3C looks forward to collaborating with World Wide Web Foundation to further lower barriers to access and to promote the development of free and open Web standards.

• City of Fargo, North Dakota Must Have Accessible Web Sites under DOJ ADA Settlement

  “The US Department of Justice (DOJ) settled with the City of Fargo, North Dakota on November 16, 2009 under ADA Title II non-discrimination provisions. Among the various agreements, there is specifically a requirement ensuring that official City websites be accessible to persons with disabilities, including individuals who are blind or low vision.”

• Tim Berners-Lee on Government Data

  At the W3C Technical Plenary (TPAC) 2009, Tim Berners-Lee spoke to Anne van Kesteren, Lachlan Hunt and Marcos Caceres about his goal for governments to put their data on the web.

  (via Standards Suck)

Every weekend, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• Learn Online, Connect Offline

  Attending to web conferences is a great way to connect with our peers. Not only do we get to exchange ideas and the latest practices with our peers, we also get to expand our personal network. There are planned national/international events, as well as the informal ones held locally. Take advantage of them.

From Elsewhere

• New Drop Caps

  Mark Boulton commissioned his sister-in-law to create a set of custom drop caps for his blog and they provide a potent reminder of the power of typography.

• 40 years of the internet

  The internet just turned 40 years old! This article gives a great overview of how it began.

• A Roundup Of 25 Advanced CSS Tips And Tutorials

  A great list of CSS techniques.

• Mockingbird

  Mockingbird is a web based wire framing tool.

• Steve Smith on HTML5 and CSS3

  Another great speakers’ series from Carsonified.

• Javascript Objects 101

  Good explanation of OOP in Javascript.

• Mobile Frameworks and Development Tools for Creating iPhone Apps

  If you’re thinking about developing an Iphone version of your site, you may find this list helpful.

• Get started with Closure, Google’s Javascript Library

  A good overview of the new JS library from Google.

• Department of Justice

  Check out the newly redesigned website of DOJ! Nicely done.

• TED TALK: Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet Enables Intimacy

Every Friday, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• Structured Meaning in HTML5

  HTML4 provides limited ways to give meaning to content through markup alone. In this post, we examine Microformats that provide real-world design principles, RDFa which enables extensible vocabularies and the new Microdata features of HTML5. All three seek to combine machine-readable data with human-readable content.

From Elsewhere

• Advanced Photoshop Techniques

  Photoshop has a lot of features, but we tend to stick with the ones we’re familiar with. This article reveals some excellent tricks you may not be aware of.

• UnderCover – Detect Below the Fold Views

  This is a useful JQuery plugin that detects when the user scrolls pass the page fold.

• www.css3.info/

  This is one of the best sites to get information on CSS3, complete with examples.

• typegoodness.com

  As the name implies, you can find some nice typography inspirations on this site.

• Firefox 3.6 beta Available for Download

  The latest Firefox beta is out. Lifehacker lists the new features.

• Drupal Knows Best? The White House Debate Continues

  Whitehouse.gov switched to Durpal as its CMS last week. This article from Techpresident.com has some good links to the critics and supporters of this move. Tim O’Reilly shared his thoughts last week.

• FEC Launches Data Catalog

  www.fec.gov/data/ just launched its data catalogs that contain campaign finance information.

• Facebook Widgets

  If your agency is already on Facebook, you may find the widget page useful. It shows many ways to integrate Facebook into your page

• Entering Digital Age an Expensive Proposition for GOP

  A Breakdown of GOP’s spending on their web presence.

• Open Internet

Every Friday, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• Helpful Resources

  This article contains a lot of our favorite blog and resource sites on web design, development and social media. We will eventually create a Resource page and keep updating the links.

• What You Need to Know About Page Fold

  “Put everything above the fold, because users don’t scroll.” As web designers we probably were told this at least once by clients or managers. In this article we take a look at the no scroll myth, and how to design the homepage intro area appropriately.

From Elsewhere

• After Firefox 3.6 – New Font Control Features for Designers

  Some great font control features in Firefox 3.7.

• 10 Incredible JQuery Navigation Menus

  JQuery makes front-end a lot easier these days. If you happen to use JQuery on your site already, these are some great plug-ins to spice up the navigation menu.

• 10 secrets to staying informed about web design

  I’m a firm believer in reading design and development blogs to stay sharp. However it can get overwhelming sometimes. Paul Boag shares some great tips on how to read efficiently.

• Patterns for the Color Blind

  A great site for references when designing an accessible website.

• The Mystery of the CSS Float Property

  When switching to a table-less layout, using DIVs can be a bit intimidating. This article explains the Float attribute in great details.

• W3C’s New Accessibility Page

  W3C just redesigned their site, finally! Check out the new accessibility page.

• The Myth of Usability Testing

  While I think the title of the latest ALA article is somewhat misleading, there are is good information to digest. P.S. usability testing definitely serves its purpose, when conducted properly.

• Treating User Myopia

  Jeff Atwood shows an example of how users don’t see instructions designers put on the web. I do agree with him that users do read very little instructions. The key is to place the instructions at the right place.

• OpenInternet.gov

  If you’re interested in the topic of Net Neutrality, definitely check out the Open Internet site by FCC. Chairman Genachowski held an open commission meeting this week. Recorded live blogging and video available here.

• GovGuru.com

  This is a newly launched site that helps people to access government sites easier.

• The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson

  Bruce’s presentation slides and examples of HTML5 elements can be found at carsonified.com

Every Friday, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• Accessibility Camp DC

  As web designers and developers, we need to make sure the sites we build are user friendly to everyone. This is why accessibility is very important. This past Saturday, we attended the Accessibility Camp DC. We had a great time interacting with the experts and advocates in the field. Here’s our recap of some of the sessions we attended. We hope you find it helpful.

• Scott Thomas ~ Designing Obama

  Scott Thomas was the design director of the Barack Obama presidential campaign last year. His work on the campaign last year has defined a new standard for government websites to better serve the public. In that regard, I consider him one of the influential designers out there today.

From Elsewhere

• 8 Ways to Make Wordpress Easier to Use for Your Clients

  Wordpress is one of the most popular CMSs out there today. While designers and developers don’t have any problems using it, the Wordpress admin panel can be a bit over whelming for non tech savvy clients. This article offers some good tips to make it easy for them.

• 9 Useful jQuery Calendar and Date Picker Plugins for Web Designers

  jQuery makes front-end development much easier. This article contains some very nice Calendar picker plugins.

• 50 Time Saving Photoshop Actions for Enhancing Photos

  A nice post processed photo can add so much more mood to your site. These free Photoshop actions will come in handy.

• Web Design is 95% Typography

  An oldie but goodie. Proper typography should be used in every medium, and the web is no exception.

• Social Media and the Federal Government: Perceived and Real Barriers and Potential Solutions [pdf]

  If you work in a government agency, this policy document on the usage of social media is an interesting read.

• CSS Differences in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

  Since Internet Explorer is still widely used by the public and government sector, this article is very helpful for web developers to debug IE. (Don’t forget about our Comprehensive Test Strategy for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8.)

• Remove the outline from links on :active only

  By suppressing the outline from only the “active” state, keyboard users will retain the outline when the link is focused. (via Roger Johansson)

• Experience Design and the State of User Experience

  In this fascinating video from the recent Adaptive Path UX Week 2009 in San Francisco, Jesse James Garrett moves beyond medium-specific design – which he refers to as “mediumism” – to a broader concept of “experience design: the design of anything, independent of medium or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.” He goes on to explain how our designs must evolve to be not only visual but perceptual, which is to say not only limited to sight. As we engage with our users through increasingly diverse media and channels, each interaction is an experience which is an opportunity for design and we must “orchestrate the facets of experience design to accomplish our goals and deliver the kind of experience that we want our users to have.”

• HTML+RDFa First Draft Published by W3C

  The W3C has published the First Draft of HTML+RDFa, which adds “attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints” and “bridge the human and data webs.” This is based on the W3C Recommendation RDFa in XHTML. (Note this is different from the Microdata section of HTML5, which is still in progress.)

• Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain
  

  Bestselling author Seth Godin argues that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.

Every Friday, we recap our articles and round up other useful articles we read during the week on web design, development and Gov2.0. We hope you find them helpful. If you have article links you’d like to share, please post in the comment section.

ClearType☆Press

• A Comprehensive Test Strategy for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8

  We show you how to install multiple, legitimate versions of IE to speed up testing by taking advantage of two no-cost products available from Microsoft: Virtual PC and Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images. When we’re done, you’ll be able to confidently test in IE6, IE7 and IE8.

• The State of Government Web Sites

  Are government websites doing all they can to best serve the public? In this introductory post, we take a look at the state of the government sites, and areas in which they can be improved.

From Elsewhere

• The Myth of the Page Fold

  Putting page content “Above the Fold” was proposed by Jakob Nielsen back in 1997. It made sense back then, since many users were new to the internet and frequent usage of computers. However 12 years later, “Above the Fold” is still being used as a reason to cram everything on the screen, making websites cluttered and user unfriendly.

• Typography & Fonts Cheat Sheets & Quick Reference Pages

  Web content is mostly text, that’s why proper use of typography is very important. Good typography enhance readability and the elegance of the site.

• Becoming a Font Embedding Master

  A great article by Jonathan Snook, looking into CSS3’s @font-face and other way to embed modern fonts.

• Fighting the @font-face FOUT – Quicken the load time

  Ok, you’ve gotten your fonts working. Paul shows us how to load them quickly to prevent the “flash of unstyled text.”

• Questions (and Answers!) About the Federal Register

  Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org: “imagine my surprise when I got a call from the White House saying they were making Raymond Mosley, Director of the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) and Michael L. Wash, the Chief Information Officer of the Government Printing Office (GPO) available just in case there were any technical questions from the net.” Wonderful.

• Turn Any Web Form Into a Powerful Wizard with jQuery

  Let’s face it, no one likes to fill out long forms both online and offline. But sometimes they’re necessary. Janko has a good tutorial on how to divide a long web form into a wizard format by using jQuery.

• 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

  Dmitry writes an excellent article usability best practices. Many good points to consider when tweaking or launching your next site.

• The History and Evolution of Social Media

  Social media precedes Myspace. It’s been around for quite sometime even before the internet as we know it today. This article definitely brings back some memory.

• A Sampling of EPA Social Media

  When it comes to Social Media usage for government agencies, EPA is definitely in the forefront. In this article, Jeffrey Levy, the web director of EPA talks about how his agency uses different social media outlets to reach out and converse with the general public.

• Revamped Recovery.gov Web site Review

  Recovery.gov recently re-launched. How is this 9 million dollar site doing? Some interesting reviews.

• Policy Database via Social Media Governance

  A good resource on social media policy by various organizations.

• BC Budget Visualizations – DIY Transparency & Local Government

  Jer Thorp writes “about data visualization, open government and accountability” with useful data visualizations showing “how the cuts to arts funding stacked up against the rest of the spending reductions” and concluding with “a video capture from the visualization tool in action, showing some of the interface and transitions between states“:

  (via information aesthetics)

Photo by blprnt_van / CC BY 2.0