For the final session of day 3, I elected to attend CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines.

Jonathan Ashton from Agency.com kicked off the session with an overview of standards and accessibility. He took us back in time to the origins of search and Flash and reminded us all to “design for grandma” and you’ll automatically do well in search (GoogleBot is basically blind). Specifically, Google outlines technology types they have trouble indexing and thus recommend downloading the Lynx browser to evaluate readability.

Ashton also clarified for Flash designers that while Flash is technically indexed by search engines, it carries little to no weight or visibility. Another key element of site design is information architecture (IA) and it has a tremendous impact on visibility. As such, SEO must be factored into the entire process. [Read more →]

Microsoft dropped a bomb at the Game Developers Conference, announcing that it is extending support for its XNA video game programming language to its Zune media device.

That means that XNA games (which are easy and mostly free to design and can run on Windows and the Xbox) will be also able to run on the portable music/video player, with developers only needing to code it once to run on all three platforms.

Microsoft’s Chris Satchell made the announcement at GDC, showing a demo of a new side scroller (or, technically, up scroller) space shooter called Zauri. The game is controlled using the touch-sensitive “squircle” pad on the Zune, an excellent gaming control for a small device. Take a look:

Video: XNA Game Running on a Zune
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Here’s some news of the First OpenWeb Developer Summit for Web Developers Leveraging Google APIs.

In the 2-day Summit in New York (April 21-22, 2008), delegates will hear from leading developers and industry experts about the impact Google’s multifaceted initiatives are having on the world of Internet technologies today and on what the future is likely to bring from Google tomorrow.

Topics covered will include:
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I’ve been tracking recent news and following discussions pertaining to web site planning, user experience design, and usability testing that are good reminders that there’s no such thing as a cozy, orderly, agreed upon approach to any of those things.

Not only this, there are grumblings about why user centered design is probable at all.

Pure Baloney

Conglomerate Tests? offers one man’s opinions that usability testing is a crap shoot.

To his way of thinking, the only way to get accurate results in user testing is to test everybody, not 5, 10, 20, or 100 people. User personas are a joke. Methodology is too, because usability testing is performed in various ways. He feels there is no way we can justify a set of usability guidelines for such a gigantic vast of user circumstances.
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Ok, this is not new. I’ve also written about this a few times in the past.

The thing is that removing whitespace is a very tricky discipline that is different from site to site. At least that was what I thought until very recently.

For some unexplained reason I started working on a little simple method to remove whitespace in a way so it works on all websites without breaking any HTML. Maybe not unexplained since I’ve written about it so many times that it would seem I got a secret obsession.

Obsession or not, here is the code I ended up with after a few hours of hacking. Just copy the code onto your base page or master page and watch the magic.
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