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August 18, 2008
Speaking today @ An Event Apart SF
I'm currently at An Event Apart San Francisco, where I'll be speaking this evening on Responsible Web Design, a meme I've been following for the last year or so without sharing the slides. Although it started as a 'Cliffs Notes' preso on web design and development best practices, it's now started to incorporate some of the new features of Dreamweaver CS4 that support said practices. I'm all for closing loops, honestly.
As this will be the last time I give this particular presentation (I really mean it this time!), I'm uploading a PDF of the current deck for anyone who's interested. It's gone through several iterations, for what it's worth, so I can't guarantee it's the same deck you saw beforehand. Feel free to ask questions here in comments if you have any?
Download the "Responsible Web Design" PDF
You're welcome to repurpose anything within as you'd like, all I ask is if you'd like to do that- please drop me a line here and tell me how you'll be using it. However, the code/design assets I use in the DW sections can't be shared yet (we'll be using them for a new series of presentations I'm working on), so sorry about that- just slides this time.
Posted by sfegette at August 18, 2008 12:39 PM
Comments
Thanks for sharing the deck, Scott. It's succinct and offers a good outline for thinking about 'responsible web design.' (& I like the notion of responsibility in this area.)
I read the CSS workflow slide, and thought, right: overflow issues--I don't have any standard practices for dealing with this and have run into trouble with zoomed text lately. Do you (or any readers) have any fave articles or resources about best practices for handling overflow?
Posted by: strottrot at August 18, 2008 04:52 PM
Nice! Sums up the same stuff I taught in my web design and my dreamweaver courses at SVA.
Posted by: Daniel Schutzsmith at August 19, 2008 07:27 PM
Thanks!
@strottrot: Overflow covers two scenarios (at least the way I discussed it). First, how layouts can get wonky with different text flowed into them via dynamic back-end systems (PHP, CF, etc), so I generally test these 'flexible' areas of the page with different length strings to make sure that the container divs don't blow up if too much text is flowed in. This happens a lot with blog templates and such, FWIW. Second scenario is the one you mentioned- when zooming text can blow out layouts. Quite frankly that's VERY difficult to fix without going to a browser, zooming text and then addressing the specific issues that result (sometimes you need to rethink the design, sometimes you have to rethink the container structure, etc). Best resource I know of for tips on this would be Dan Cederholm's most excellent book 'Bulletproof Web Design', in which he covers a TON of ground on building well-formed sites that can accept zoomed/minimized text. Aside from picking up the book (which I highly recommend), here's a sample:
http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=482332
@Daniel: thanks! It's pretty fundamental stuff, but bears repeating a lot, IMHO. ;-)
Posted by: Scott Fegette at August 19, 2008 07:37 PM