Academic Web Blog

Here's the "studio version" of a 5-minute talk I gave last night at O'Reilly's Ignite event in Sebastopol.

During the course of 2011, mobile-optimized sites have gone from being a rarity to becoming a standard part of what we do. Last fall, we began using jQuery Mobile, and we're now using for most of our new sites.

Open-sourcesoftware has made an enormous impact on the web. From operating systemsto database software, open-source software has been a driving forcebehind the growth of the web. Despiteall the benefits of open-source software, however, its advocates oftenunderestimate its costs and fail to recognize the value of alternatives.For many applications, SaaS solutions—which typically are built upon an open-source foundation but include a substantial layer of proprietary software—better meet users' needs.

Unlessyou've been hiding under the proverbial rock, it's no surprise that themobile web has exploded in the past year. It's a huge shift in theInternet landscape, and it changes the rules in a variety of ways. We'veput together a webinar to share some of our experiences creating mobileand table websites and apps. Our goal is to help designers createmulti-platform solutions, making the best of phones, tablets, andcomputers.

When you're designing a mobile site you must pare down your information to the essentials. Jacob Nielsen has a good post today on this topic, Defer Secondary Content When Writing for Mobile Users.

Some sites that have amobile-optimized version with automatic device-type detection willdeliver the mobile version of the site to iPads and other tablets. Usually,this delivers a poor result. Tablets are better thought of as beinglike desktop browsers with some modest differences, rather than as beingin the same class with mobile phones.

In investigating our customer's needs and looking at a variety of design approaches, we've found that responsive design is the answer for some situations, but that a separate set of pages is more appropriate in many cases.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you already know that we’re big fans of An Event Apart. The world of the web is moving quickly, and attending a conference like this is a great way to make sure you’re on top of the trends and current with the latest techniques, as well as to meet like-minded folks.

The last of the interviews we did at An Event Apart in Seattle was with Jeffrey Zeldman, the cofounder of the event. Jeffrey has been a prominent figure in the web design world since its earliest days.

JeremyKeith gave a great talk at An Event Apart about design principles. Inthe talk, he shows how everything should start with goals, which thenlead to principles that reflect those goals, and finally result indesign patterns to implement them.