Screenr

Ever wanted to show someone (or multiple people) how to use a website or piece of software but didn’t have time to visit them? Screenr is an easy way to create 5 minute recordings of your computer screen and voice. It works by using your web browser and optional microphone without having to install additional software.

Chalkmark

Chalkmark is an online prototype testing tool created by Optimal Workshop, the same folks that brought you Optimal Sort, the online card sort. This tool allows you to test the response time and efficacy of design prototypes, saving you time, money and (possibly) sanity.

10 Tools to Improve Your Site’s Usability on a Low Budget

Although this article isn’t necessarily new, it’s certainly timely, as budgets have continued to shrink and offices are expected to do more with less. Early usability testing prevents wasted efforts later and this collection of inexpensive tools should help.

Color Blender

Having trouble coming up with a web site color scheme? Plug in two colors and let Color Blender create transitions between the two.

If you’ve run across a great article that you think would be helpful to the rest of us, don’t be shy! Post a comment or send an email to our office e-mail account.

Card Sorting: Pushing Users Beyond Terminology Matches

Here’s the summary as it appears at the top of the article: “It’s easy to bias study participants, whether in user testing or in card sorting, if they focus on matching stimulus words instead of working on the underlying problem.”

Doctype

A free question-and-answer site for web designers that will allow them to find solutions to their problems.

Twitter Postings: Interative Design

“Summary: We made a timeline message more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign.”

10 User Interface Design Fundamentals

As @davemcfarland wrote, “Nice, short list of user interface design basics.” Couldn’t agree more!

Ten reasons to learn and use web standards

Like we said on Twitter, an oldie, but a goodie.

250+ Resources to Help You Become a CSS Expert

A great list to check out if you’re really dedicated to becoming a CSS know-it-all.

6 Ways To Improve Your Web Typography

Let’s face it, you can never read too much about typography on the web! You would be surprised how much the right font can spice up a web site.

25 Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career

While we’re on that previous note, check out this piece on classic, durable fonts.

Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6

Former UF Webmaster Mark Trammell was quote in this article about a campaign against IE6.

An Overview of The CSS Summit

If you didn’t get a chance to attend The CSS Summit, catch up with our overview of it here.

Jobs @ Web Administration

UF Web Admin is hiring! Right now, we’re looking for an OPS Web Designer and a student OPS Web Designer. Feel free to pass along the info if you know someone who’s interested.

• Brian Fling — Design and Development for the iPhone
• Kelly Goto — Workflow and Process
• Matt Harris — Using WordPress for Content Management
• Ryan Irelan — Incorporating Subversion into Your Workflow
• Dan Rubin — Great CSS Design
• Kevin Lawver — Introduction to Ruby on Rails
• Christopher Schmitt — Moving to HTML5
• Mark Trammell and Juliette Melton — Conducting Effective User Research

Christopher Schmitt and the team from Environments for Humans have offered us this webinar at a special discount. The best way I can think of to show our gratitude is to pack the room on September 17th from 10am to 7pm at the CITT and learn from these brilliant speakers. You must be present to view the content as we are not provided any additional streams.

To RSVP, visit our registration page and sign up as seats are limited. Also, this event is prioritized for UF faculty/staff, but if a student wants to attend, we’ll try to squeeze you in.

22 Questions to Ask Before Developing a Website

If you’re a practicing newbie with a direction in mind, don’t forget to have a project plan! Start with these 22 questions.

HTML Dog HTML Beginner’s Guide

Now that you’ve asked all the right questions, you can take a look at this HTML beginner’s guide to get up to speed on proper coding.

Web Developer’s Field Guide

A huge resource for designers and developers, including sections on topics such as design inspiration, AJAX, CSS layout, SEO tools, and much more.

Directory of College & University Facebook Pages

Now that social media is all the buzz, why not review what other schools are doing online. Varsity Outreach has compiled a list of Colleges and Universities with a presence on Facebook, including data on their fans.

Web Content Inventory Spreadsheet

Although not the most exciting, having a clear understanding of your site and how it is structured can certainly help when trying to improve the information architecture. Donna Spencer has developed a spreadsheet that can help you organize your website structure.

If you have run across any web sites that you’d like to share with the rest of us, post in our comments or message us on Twitter.

5 Techniques that Will Take your Design to the Next Level

Want to know what the top designers are doing to take their web site designs to the “next level”? Webitech.net has broken down five of those techniques so you can add them to your design arsenal.

The Journalism Now Podcast

Sponsored by the Center for Media Innovation and Research at UF and the Poytner Institute, this podcast discusses “multimedia, data and social aspects of modern news”.

Check My Colours

Check my Colours is a “tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits.”

Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF)

Instead of guessing what Google is looking for in order to maximize SEO on your web site, why not go to the source? Google has provided this wonderful guide that aids site developers in creating the most search-engine-friendly site possible.

Smush.it

Image optimization is a terrific way of improving site performance, and Smush.it is an easy way of slimming your images - yes, even compressed JPG images - without any loss of quality. Also, it’s free!

10 High Fliers on Twitter

“On the microblogging service, professors and administrators find work tips and new ways to monitor the world.”

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

“This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.”

30 Photoshop Video Tutorials

Learn Photoshop techniques from professional graphic designers with these tutorials.

Build Your Own WordPress Themes the Easy Way

Using “WordPress’s parent and child theme feature is a fast and easy way to start using themes.”

5 Rarely-Used CSS properties

“a list of 5 useful but rarely-used CSS properties that work in all modern browsers.”

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

A link to the study cited by Carl Smith of nGen Works during his presentation at Spring of Web.

Special thanks to Prentiss Ladkani (College of Education) and Al Kirby (University Relations) for sharing some of their links.

So I started poking around a few offices and department Web sites to find some examples of unique designs that still establish a connection with UF.

Two sites I thought met the description were the Office of Sustainability and College of Business.

In my usual fashion, I asked some questions about how the designers and developers were able to do it and where they found inspiration.

First I e-mailed J.C. Marvin in the College of Business some questions. Here is what he had to say:

What challenges did you face in tackling this kind of site design?

When the College of Business began working on a new site, UF was just beginning to consider a redesign of their site. The timing was unfortunate for us, knowing anything we produced would look different in the end. Making our site look “UF” wasn’t as easy as it would be today, but luckily the College of Business fits into the UF umbrella fairly well.

Besides UF Identity considerations, our biggest challenge was creating a site structure that better integrated our 13 departments, 14 research centers, and about 30 academic programs. Navigating our old site was a nightmare, so this was one of our primary focuses for this project. Our design team decided to conform to familiar menu conventions to make our users feel as comfortable as possible. We are far from perfect, but our users can generally find what they are looking for. My team was fortunate to have two amazingly talented web designers that appreciated information architecture. Generally speaking, our current site fixed the horrible birds nest that frustrated our users.

Did you run into any problems with management?

Before our web team grew to the healthy size it is now, we depended on college staff throughout the many departments to handle web updates and design. When our team grew and before we started the new site, we decided to handle web design and maintenance ourselves. Therefore, we had to convince the entire college to let our team handle it all. Faculty and staff throughout the college are content owners, but production is now centralized. This was not any easy task, both in terms of selling the idea and developing a production service to handle everything internally. Today, our web team is properly structured to handle day-to-day maintenance and allow for future development. This took many years to get right and probably wouldn’t have been possible without the leadership of our Web Manager, Mary Homick.

What made you want to make the site look different in the first place?

Our team was tasked with creating a unique presence. The UF brand is important to the College of Business, but having an Identity of our own was just as important. We see this as a partnership that is strengthened by one another. Again, the trick was to create a site with little understanding of the new UF site, still in development at that time, and evolving the College brand. In many ways we are lucky that the two sites work well together.

Where did you look for inspiration?

We first looked at our peer group of business schools to evaluate competition. We learned from their mistakes and successes to help focus our design goals. We also reviewed businesses with outstanding websites to help understand an important aspect of our audience expectations. We needed to merge a “business feel” with a “university feel”. I think we reached a decent balance, but not an easy objective.

When did the new design go live?

Our current website went live in August of 2005. Almost 2 years of development. The new and current UF site was already up and running, but influence from that effort was too late. We spent over a year in content production alone and committed to our current design. The timing was good for the college, but ideally we would have leveraged UF’s web design successes. Specifically, the UF DOM is really solid and our accessibility sensitivity is weaker than we would like. Both are priorities in future designs.

Anything else you would like to share?

Our future…

We are currently in production of the new college website. Many of the problems of the past have been eliminated in our current site, which will allow us to focus on other important goals. The Web changes faster than many of us can keep up with, but it allows so many possibilities that will benefit our users. We are excited about our web plans and look forward to offering our Faculty, Staff, Students, and Alumni a better online experience.

Then I e-mailed the same questions to Al Kirby, who designed the Office of Sustainability site, which went live in September:

Q: What challenges did you face in tackling this kind of site design?

A: Great… another UF template.

Challenges:
1. How to make it look different yet keep the UF branding.
2. How to get all the content to fit on the home page in a easy-to-read manner.

How did I meet those challenges:
1. Green and grey color scheme and kept UF branding by using a UF template.
2. (Services from Google. See below.)

Q: What made you want to make the site look different in the first place?

A: The site has a lot of info that needs to be shown on the home page. With that said, I needed to make use of white space. White space allows for the user’s eye to take in the info in an ordered fashion. It’s easy on the eyes and makes for a cleaner looking site.

Q: Where did you look for inspiration?

A: UF templates (because of) time constraints, but mostly my head. We really didn’t have to design the site from scratch … so all I had to do was skin an existing UF template.

Q: Anything else you would like to share?

A: I was happy I didn’t have to work with orange and blue. I liked that I could make use of whitespace due to the amount of content. White space makes for a clean, easy-to-read design. All in all, I do like the design of the site.

I also contacted Joe Spooner, the web developer who worked with Kirby. Here are some highlights:

Q: What made you want to make the site look different in the first place?

A: It was a decision derived from the need to display a lot of information on the page at once, while representing the office that’s responsible for making sure UF focuses on sustainability.

Q: Why the redesign?

This site refresh was done in an effort to match their internal business processes with a tool or set of tools that would allow for them to easily communicate what they’re doing. Google made it easy because the services were free and easy to connect into using prebuilt .net libraries from Google.

Well, the group — which has reached almost 50 members — is finally gearing up for their first official meeting. If you’re interested in going, we have all you need to know right here.

When: April 16 from 1 - 2:30 p.m.
Where: Reitz Union, Rm. 361
Why:
Discussion topics

• Why are we here?
• The purpose of the CDG
• Branding the CDG
• Social and Community: What’s the best possible method of communication?
• Any other topics that you want to discuss

From Kirby: “Take some time to think about how we, as a group, can make the CDG a success. This is a great opportunity for all of us to make a difference and to learn from one another. I hope you share my enthusiasm.”

Creative Design Group Flyer

Thanks to Al Kirby, a designer working in University Relations; Prof. Dave Stanton in the College of Journalism and Communications; and Ken Schwencke, a UF journalism senior.

34 Amazing Tumblr Themes, Twitter could never look this good!!!

Thirty-four cool themes for Tumblr.

Typeface Anatomy and Glossary

A glossary of common type terminology.

101 High Quality CSS And XHTML Free Templates And Layouts

A ton of free (and beautiful) templates.

Twitter And (Not) Monetizing The Attention Economy

A piece from Business Week about how a lack of advertising is not smart for Twitter.

Service-Oriented Architecture: Using Our APIs Internally

In Stanton’s words: “NYTimes builds its site by using its own API instead of direct-fed from the CMS. Love this concept of ‘eating your own food.’ Great SxSW panel on this topic.”

On D.C. Streets, the Cellphone as Lifeline: Homeless People Turn to Technology to Track Assistance and Opportunities

An article on how essential some technologies have become.

Atlas: a visual IDE for desktop-like web apps

From the site: “With its Atlas IDE for building web apps in Cappuccino and Objective-J, 280North is set to make web app programming as easy as drag-and-drop. Ars talks with 280North’s Ross Boucher to get the skinny.”

Bargain Basement Usability Testing

If you think user testing is time consuming and expensive, ThinkVitamin.com will change your mind with their article on cheap, effective testing, allowing you to get back to designing for your audience.

9 Common Usability Mistakes in Web Design

Once again, Smashing Magazine has posted a gem. This article points out common design mistakes that create obstacles for your users.

SpoolCast: Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski

If you have forms on your site and wish you knew how to make them easier to use, then visit Jared Spool’s site and listen to his interview with Luke Wroblewski, author of “Web Form Design” — a book that teaches you how to improve the most interactive parts of your site.

If you’ve come across any links from March, let us know. We would love to share them!