It's Coming Together with CSS!

Webpage Development Progress

Home page 12/2/10



 A lot has happened with the web page since previewed here in October.  CSS has stepped up our game.  I have learned the necessity of well-coded HTML and the beauty of page manipulation with CSS.

Building a page really made it clear how helpful it is to map it out before-hand and create a template.  The real crux lies in text formatting and image sizing within the differing sections of the webpage.  It takes hours of tweaking to get the look above.

Content Management

CMS - the overall management of many webpages and content is accomplished through a content management system.  My employer (Washington County) uses Clockwork.  It saves time and money by allowing a unform look and enabling many users to make incremental changes without needing to have countless web administrators and HTML/CSS manual manipulation.

On the downside, a user may find a CMS page to be dull and lack creative user input.  There are resitrictions and limitations to what a web developer can do.  As our readings indicate:

"...most CMS software does not cater to the diverse library needs..." (Fulton, C. (2010). Library perspectives on web content management systems. FirstMonday, 15(8-2)).

Given the amount of time it has taken to personally create a webpage from scratch and the outcome I strongly believe a system-wide CMS makes sense for most libraries.

 

Web Languages & Design Challenges

Languages

I am intrigued and amazed by the vast number of languages one can learn for web applications.  Here is a list on Wikipedia.  It seems there may be as many computer languages as there are human languages.  I had no idea.  They do share two things in common: syntax (arrangement) and semantics (meaning).  From there the differences are astounding.

I think Perl, C, PHP, Java and JavaScript would be essential languages to learn if one wanted a good foothold in the web design world.

Design Challenges

I am still struggling with learning how to model and layout the divs and blocks of text and images on a web page.  I understand the theory but lack the confidence in implementing the CSS and HTML to accomplish the layout without flaws.  I will keep at it though!

Banners, Sideboards, Text Sizing and Main Body

Well the time has come.  I have learned strict XHTML.  I know some designing via CSS and I have plodded through theoretical text about user design and structure.  Now I think I know how I want my page to look (the group graphed it) but putting all those CSS commands to work is the real crux of the issue.  It takes a lot of tweaking.  And when you have the page looking just how you want you find changing the size can mess up the layout!  Sighh....

I focused on the banner and navigation bar today and made some headway.  Here's the code this week:

body {background-color: beige;}
h1 {color: orange;}
h2 {font-stle: sans-serif;}
#banner {
background-color: beige;
width: 100%;
margin: 0px;
}

#logo {
padding: 5px;
float: left;
}

#bannertext {
height: 100px;
font-family: ariel;
padding-top: 8px;
margin-left: 400px;
}

#navmenu {
width: 100%;
height: 80px;
margin: 0px;
background-color: blue;
}

#navmenu ul {
list-style: none;
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
}

#navmenu li{
width: 180px;
text-align: center;
float: left;
}

#navmenu a:link {
text-decoration: none;
line-height: 50px;
}

#navmenu a:visited {
text-decoration: none;
color: orange;
line-height: 50px;
}

#navmenu a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
display:block;
width: 180px;
line-height: 40px;
background: yellow;
}


Next week let's see what improvements I make and if I get the side menu created and some work on text size options for visually disabled.

Whither Intellectual Property?

Good, Bad & Ugly

The internet and digital media converses the rather archaic notions of copyright intellectual property.  The law has been slow to respond to the ever-changing and fast-paced digital realm.  Thus came about the open access and creative commons paradigm. 

This free access vs. creative rights debate rages on. 

I personally feel it is largely the result of a generational shift in society.  People have become accustomed to free and instrant gratification without understanding the true nature of the work and creativity needed to produce the items they are pirating.  And this applies to coporations as much as individuals.

Services like Napster and BitTorrent as well as other sharing services and freeware and open access have been the thorn in the side of publishers and media kings but now may be actually hurting the actual creators of the content.  Where's the money?  Time will tell if this new model will survive.

Librarian turned Web Services Director

Shane Nackerud presented on recent trends and applications available at the University of Minnesota Libraries.  Shane demonstrated how a librarian without formal web design/web programming educational background can become a web usability and informatics expert in the library field.  He is a powerhouse.  He advised future librarians the absolute need to at least be familiar with web design and the theoretical understanding of the planning and creation inherit in web design. 

I have often thought that there will be a blending of IT and MLIS skills and qualifications in future permutations of library jobs.  At times Shane seems to indicate an MLIS degree would not be needed for what he does but I believe it is very helpful since he focuses his work for libraries and has the educational understanding of the field and the needs of librarians and patrons.

I found both hope for future librarians and concerns about those in the profession ("reference librarians are a dime a dozen"). 

Style, Validation and Indexing, Oh My!

Major Challenges

OK so I was delusional.  Making a web site without web authoring programs is hard work.  It's not for the feint of heart.  A team of three of us turned in our simple web page and this is what it looks like on the left.  It's small so it can fit.  It's not pretty but it works on two browsers, has navigation, simple images and working links.  It's in XHTML strict but it doesn't pass W3C validation (the home page had 12 errors, many of which seem related to the URL links we point to).  Wow - I have great respect for coders who did this on their own, back in the day.  I need to read up on the DIV command! 

On top of this, a web designer needs to be cognizant of the meta data, key words and effective registration of their page so it can be found on the internet by the spiders, bots and browser indexing protocol.  There's plenty to consider when designing a webpage, as my previous posts hinted at. 

Well I better get back to making this page look nice.  See you later!

Social Software: Privacy and Misuse

So Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are hip and cool, I know.  Add to those, Amazon and eBay.  But what about all the private materials you post and all those recommendations and reviews you post?  You think it's totally private and without a "cost"?

What about the state looking to see if you are paying your sales tax on those books and DVDs?  A New York Times article says Amazon has the data and the state may get a search warrant for it.  

What about the data-mining Facebook does and shares with its advertising vendors?

Or what about the fears of overshare?

For those of us who came of age, technologically speaking, in the Web 2.0 Era, it may be too late to cancel, delete or otherwise redact what’s out there. Basically we have to deal with cards we’ve dealt ourselves. One could argue that if you choose to live your life in public you don’t get to control what other people do with this public information. You can, however, choose how much of it to put out there.

And add to all this the possibility that HTML 5 may implement more aggressive data-mining practices embedded into the internet.

Browser Wars and Web Design Ramblings

Browsers

OK so I lived through the browser wars and was vaguely familiar with them.  I knew Microsoft was sued by the Dept. of Justice for using their industry influence to force IN on users and I recall using Netscape Navigator in the 90s and remember all the free Netscape CD-ROMs I received in the mail and in magazine subscriptions.  And I even will admit to being an AOL user and reveling when AOL purchased Netscape.  I am a computer geek and lived these years with my eyes not completely shut.

But I was surprised to learn that Firefox (a distant cousin to Netscape) had surpassed IE in use on the internet in Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010.  IE has sense regained usage but it seems it is merely a player in the browser market, not the King.

And so I look forward to standards (kind of like the rule of law - something a lawyer is cognizant of) helping all these various browsers play nice.  I am a big proponent of the free market so let the features, bells and whistles ensue as long as the browser is stable - for, yes, I also recall the early days of browsers that routinely crashed - something that digital natives are less familiar with. :-)

Web Design

It takes a lot of separate html files and folders to make a decent-sized, functional website.  It's a maze out there, boys and girls.  And it's great to have maps and plans before embarking into Web Creation Land.  I think I will be coding right up until Christmas - so much for overambition!

Usability or deep thoughts about equal access

Here is a good tool to check if a web page meets various accessibility standards:  EvalAccess.

I checked my website (http://www.huffmanlegal.com/) and found these errors:

Report resume

                        Priority 1         Priority 2         Priority 3

Errors                    2                      0                     1

Warnings               16                    19                   21

 

I was amazed that my site has 2 priority 1 errors and 16 warnings but I guess I never thought enough about accessibility when I created my site.  I used commercial software to design my page based on a template.  Apparently the original template designer did not concern themselves with W3C/WAI or accessibility in general.  I suspect many pages have similar problems.

My sister-in-law was an executive director for a non-profit that specialized in helping people design accessible web sites and use technology that allows them to live productive lives.  It amazes me when I read all the accessibility issues that a web designer needs to consider when creating a fully-accessible page. 

But the work pays off!  Accessibility means equality.  People who could not fully appreciate and use your site can not get far more out of it.  They can see the text better or have the images read to them so they can see what they are missing or they can navigate around the site better if elements for assistive technologies are integrated better into the site framework.

Information Architecture

Creating web sites is like constructing a building.  It encompasses everything from the core materials to the eye-catching design and all the detailed work that's done in between to accomplish the goals of the structure and the needs of those who will use it.

I have friends who work in this profession.  I will admit there are times I thought "oh yeah, such hard work - right. You make sure the we page looks like a web page and you make sure the colors match the company stationary and the right buzzwords are peppered throughout the site."  Well, I am wrong.  There's much more to it than that.  In fact, it take to the extreme, one might say designing a web page takes a village.  Planning, committees and standards are at play here.

IA is defined as:  "...the categorization of information into a coherent structure, preferably one that the most people can understand quickly, if not inherently. It's usually hierarchical, but can have other structures, such as concentric or even chaotic."  (Thanks, Wikipedia)

And, surprisingly, this field has some grounding in Library Science.  Librarians are adept at categorizing and organizing information.  Before I decided to enter the world or librarianship and get my MLIS I would never have thought librarians were masters as designing the structure and strategy of web pages.  Amazing!

That's all I have for this week... back I go to planning and plotting a web site...

Discoveries this week

Major Learning

This week involved more in-depth understanding of how the internet works.  It’s amazing how much goes on behind the scenes when someone pulls up a single web page.  Apparently your computer uses a router and modem to send packets of information to a server which hosts the information via a domain name directory.  The domain name is a easier way for us to communicate and remember because it’s actually translated into numbers called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. 

My “Aha!” Discovery:

I will borrow from Jeff Tyson to explain how an IP works:

A typical IP address looks like this:

216.27.61.137

To make it easier for us humans to remember, IP addresses are normally expressed in decimal format as a dotted decimal number like the one above. But computers communicate in binary form. Look at the same IP address in binary:

11011000.00011011.00111101.10001001

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IP addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or zero), the total number of possible combinations per octet is 2⁸ or 256. So each octet can contain any value between zero and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 2³² or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values!

From Jeff Tyson, How internet infrastructure works, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/basics/internet-infrastructure5.htm

Major Challenge:

I have little reason for challenges this early in the course.  I suspect my biggest challenge in designing a web page will be compartmentalizing the information and translating the look and feel I have to a workable structure.  I hope my left and right brains play well. J

Introduction

About Me
I am a lawyer-turned-librarian.  I have a BA in International Relations (Drake U.), JD in Law (Drake U.), and am working on my MLIS at Saint Catherine University.  I was a library associate at a health sciences library for eight years, lawyer for over 10 years and now the Washington County Law Librarian (Stillwater) since 2008.

Web Design Experience/Goals
I hope to learn rudimentary HTML, XHTML skills and a broader understanding of web page design.

I have created a couple of web pages - here's my law firm page which I used an editor to create (so that's cheating, right).

I have a very rudimentary understanding and experience with HTML. I am on the MALL Web Committee so I hope to learn skills here I can use right away  :-)