Advices for devs who MUST be designers on their day-to-day duties (even they don’t want this)
This is a summary WUX02-IS of Pete LePage’s talk on TechEd EMEA 2008.

10. Lousy & Out of Date Content

Is the content new, relevant? What is new? What is old news? Can I differentiate that?  (http://teacherxpress.com/ )

Avoid by correct layout and correct sort of content;

09. Errors in code

Decent and close to valid HTML according to W3C. There is no use in getting 100% HTML correctness.

Example https://www.continental.com 31 erros, 4 warnings

Avoided by W3V valid, A-Journal (?), Developer Tools

08. No easy navigation

Saman Zerin (magigcian) http://samanzerin.com/ (bad)

www.sitesthatsuck.com (?!?) check referals guys :D

Avoid by navigational structure upfront designed (sitemap feature).

07. Inconsistent site design

Seattle FlowMaps quite different from this one

Statewide Traveler Information

Avoid by master-pages, site templates (www.oswd.com),

06. Bad user workflow

- www.twitter.com focus wrong after posting the micro-blog

(with JS off you cannot sign out from twitter)

- www.toyjoy.com

Avoid by user – testing phase not at the end of dev-cycle.

Minimize the number of clicks required for the user to do something.

Dev must sit back AND just watch the ***user*** doing tasks.

Dev must LEARN how user is doing it, because is “slightly” different;

05. Only providing rich media

- dial-up vs. DSL internet connection (still many users have dial-up or low speed connections)

- High school web site

- http://www.miniusa.com/  Try browse that site with JS turned off.

They provide a text-only site-map but with lots of 404s.

Avoid by providing both (like MS Download site does).

Both **functional**.

04. Obtrusive Ads

Ads that fills over the pages.

- www.barcelona.com

- www.hotnews.ro (this is my example)

- www.seattletimes.com (left ad)

Avoid by more creativity, a good way to place ads on the web (still “on research” phase). Basucally we do not have an answer on how to avoid that, because there is a strong business-case (there are some people that click on these ads, and there are companies paying for every and each bloody click).

03. Not optimizing for search (no SEO)

“Pete Lepage” the ms vs the stand up comedy guy … hmmm….

- MSDN website itself has BAD URLs

this url (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531205.aspx) is about CSS … grrrr…

Avoid by: Metadata, links to yourself, keywords, getting links to you by others. Page titles. URL must reflect the content.

Content. Good (a.k.a. usefull, a.k.a. making readers link to it) content. Sitemap XML standard.

mental-NOTE: course for photographers; most common mistake: they forget to put titles

02. Non-designers designing

- http://users.hunterlink.net.au

- http://www.havenworks.com/

- POSX – use tags as they meant for (H1 is for title and so on)

- no “sales driven design”. bad colors. inconsistent colors. ugly fonts.

- IE8 have more than 2 connections per client (as in IE7)

Avoid by using common sense fonts, colors, layout, etc. Or buy a good designer. Use color cheat sheets, color templates (www.colourlovers.com).

01. Not planning with the future

New browsers, new standards, or versions of standards.

Browser detection wrongly done (check the latest version detection).

Instead of checking the browser, check for the features of the user agent.

One CSS file impossible to address all browsers (there is no thing like “hackless CSS”).

www.CSSzengarden.com – Dave Shane (www.brightcreative.com)

Avoid by using conditional comments for IE.

X-UI compatible meta-tag (used also as a http header). In the IE8 beta version.

IE tester tools lets you install multiple versions of IE. “Franked build” = rendering engine of IE8, but IE7 JS engine.

Good way of testing with IE6, IE7, IE8 VPCs (timebombed every 4 months – 450MB each – XP SP3, IE7 on Vista). No IE5.5 (v. less then IE6 = less than 1% of the marketshare worldwide).

PatternTab.com (?!)