Web Design Critique: Consistency and Homogeneity of the Blog Layout

Blogherald.com is a blog featuring news from all around the blogosphere since 2003, and is run by a dozen of contributors and writers. It was founded by Duncan Riley from Australia and is now owned by Splashpress Media. The Blog Herald has gone through multiple design and layout variations, including the latest one made by Brian Gardner.

Web design and design in general should never be judged from the aesthetic viewpoint or by how much one likes/dislikes a particular color scheme, typeface or the layout of different content elements. The purpose of design is to make the content organized and accessible to the widest target audience possible. Design should be the information highway without traffic jams and clearly marked road labels which don’t require any Design Positioning System (DPS) in order to navigate. Read more »

Podcast of the week: WordPress Weekly

If you are a WordPress user, you should definitely check out the WordPress Weekly podcast hosted by Jeff from Jeffro2pt0.com. It covers the latest and greatest in the world of WordPress — from news, plugin and theme reviews to general discussions about the online publishing.

The show is recorded live every Friday evening at 21:00 EST using the TalkShoe recording platform. It follows the round table discussion format where apart from the panel of guests also any of the listeners can call in and have their own say about the topics being discussed. Read more »

Browser Version Targeting vs. the Web Standards

The following articles in the latest issue of the A List Apart magazine explain the necessity of browser targeting with the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8, which is expected to be the most standards aware browser from Microsoft to date.

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 by Aaron Gustafson,
• From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey by Eric Meyer.

To me the idea of browser targeting seems absolutely absurd, and reasons for that are so many that it will require another post to explain them all in detail. Here are just a few. Read more »

Podcast of the week: Boagworld

Every week from now on I will suggest a podcast that I have been enjoying and you might too.

Lets begin with the Boagworld — a weekly audio podcast by Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington discussing the issues of web design, development and related news. Over 100 (and counting) episodes of the Boagworld are much more than just the Web design and development 101 course for someone starting out on the Web — it is The Late Night with Paul and Marcus for everyone involved in the web design.

Home page (and blog): www.boagworld.com
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/boagworldpodcast

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Logos and Names Are Not <h1> Headings

It is a common trend among many web designers and developers to use h1 tag for a logo of a website. Although such decision has no impact on the visual presentation of the content, it drastically diminishes the semantic power of h1 tag.

Every page on the web can be viewed as a single document. Hypertext enables linking and organizing them into groups and sets, which requires that each document has a clear purpose and structure.

Domain names are unique identifiers of those different groups of documents and are the broadest description of their content. Therefore usually they already include the name of a business, person or product (I will refer to them as ‘logos’). Read more »