Matt Heerema

CSS in Content Management Systems

About two-thirds of my time at work is spent banging my head against some sort of content management system. One that I am in the process of developing, and another hulking behemoth that I have been asked to “help” with.

If I were ever to build another CMS up from scratch (which I am currently in the process of), this would be a very useful article:

Integrating CSS with CMS.

Thanks, Digital Web. I love you.

Creative Conflict

I hate conflict. I try to avoid it. When it comes up, I usually take the role of peacemaker, sometimes even giving up what I see to be a good solution in order to resolve the conflict.

D. Keith Robinson of Asterisk has recently posted two great articles on dealig with conflict:

Dealing With Creative Conflict and Clients and

Dealing With Creative Conflict Within a Team.

These are great suggestions for Web professionals.

Eyetrack III – How people scan a site

An interesting (if unscientific) investigation (I won’t call it a study…) into how people look at/scan/browse a Web page was recently conducted by several media agencies. Eyetrack III, sought to answer a few questions of great interest to Web designers:

Is homepage layout effective? … What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? … When is multimedia appropriate? … Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience?

Their findings, while not scientific, and therefore not very useful, were interesting. I point to it only as food for discussion.

Several intersting observations they made:

• Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning.
• Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page — especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right.
• The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.
• visual breaks — like a line or rule — discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break
• Navigation placed at the top of a homepage performed best — that is, it was seen by the highest percentage of test subjects and looked at for the longest duration.
• Text ads were viewed most intently, of all the types we tested.

Now, as a personal observation, as I read this “investigation”, I got the sense that they are trying to figure out where to place content so that it is most likely to be viewed. Example, they make the statement: “We found that ads in the top and left portions of a homepage received the most eye fixations.”

This is the wrong approach. If this were an actual study, advertisers would soon begin demanding that their ads be placed at the top left of a page. I guarantee that we would start ignoring them there as well. My theory is that the reason they got the most views there is because that is typically where the branding of a Web site goes. I’m willing to be that the user was very annoyed when they found an ad instead of site branding.

Peoples’ viewing patterns will tend to flow where they expect to find content. Write content that people will want to read, and they will read your content! It sounds pretty elementary, but I hear entirely too many conversations about where we should put links and ads and logos so that they get noticed. People go to a Web site hunting for information, and they ignore anything that doesn’t look like the info they are hunting for.

I believe that these findings (er, observations, this wasn’t a study) are the result of the way Web pages are currently being laid out; they way people have come to expect information to appear; rather than some ergonomic, screen reading tendency of the human eye.

If we change the location of content on a Web page to try and make things “more visible” based on the observations of this investigation, I’ll bet we will see a shift in the Eye-scanning patterns of a user.

People will look at the information they are looking for, not what you want them to see. If you don’t have what they are looking for, they will leave. End of story.

Critiquing design work

Dave Shea of Mezzoblue (who is a great designer btw) on design critics:

I�m almost convinced that anyone whose critique of a redesign is as substantial as: �I don�t like the green.� �is someone who absolutely fails to understand the purpose of web design, and should give up any aspirations in the profession. And my conviction would be just oh so much more forceful if I weren�t so damned guilty of doing it myself.

My sentiments exactly.

Web Standards ARE the fiscally responsible way to go.

Well, here we have it the first (of many, I’m sure) lawsuits against inaccessible Web sites (in America anyway; there have been lawsuits in other countries before).

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today announced settlements with two major organizations that will make the web sites far more accessible to blind and visually impaired users. In addition to the steps outline, Ramada.com and Priceline.com will pay the State of New York $40,000 and $37,500, respectively, as costs of the investigation. The Attorney General emphasized that once the companies were notified of the accessibility issues by his office, they worked cooperatively and creatively with his Internet Bureau to correct the issues.

The full press release can be found here: SPITZER AGREEMENT TO MAKE WEB SITES ACCESSIBLE TO THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED

Designing Web sites according to Web standards is (and has been for the last couple years) the easiest, most financially responsible way to go, as you only need to create ONE version of the site, and it will work in ALL browsers, text readers, and other devices that can access the internet (the same version can even be your “print version” with the inclusion of a second simple style sheet). Now there are some legal precedents putting teeth in the standards.

It’s not that hard people!