July 2004 – Infinite Web Design

Site Update

July 24, 2004 Kevin HallWeb Design

I’ve made a few changes to the site, including creating some icons for the main navigation bar and styling the plain text navigation a bit better. I’ll likely make a few more tweaks to the design soon. The nav icons were built from scratch in Fireworks, zoomed in to 1600% and drawn pixel by pixel. I’m pretty happy with the result. Next I may try to make a set using some color to liven things up. You may notice some new content going up in the coming weeks in other sections. I’ll be finishing up a few projects and they will be added to the clients section along with a new case study or two. The sites are being written […]

Correcting Other People’s Mistakes

July 23, 2004 Kevin HallWeb Design

Zeldman wrote about redesigning web sites for companies that muck it up at no charge. I think this is an interesting topic, related to the topic of redesigning your own old sites to meet today’s standards. I am all for redesigning poorly built sites. You don’t need to do it for the money or exposure or anything like that. It is a good exercise to take big web sites that are poorly built and to redesign them to be standards compliant. Flex those CSS muscles a bit and find creative, elegant solutions to replace scary JavaScript messes or table hacks. It is good experience and training and having a project where you can apply all of those neat tricks you’ve […]

New Web Site: Applied Safety & Ergonomics

July 20, 2004 Kevin HallWeb Design

A new site that I designed has just launched. It is for Applied Safety & Ergonomics in Ann Arbor, MI. The site (at least the template) is valid XHTML Transitional. The design is pretty simple and fits nicely to what they asked for. You can view it at http://www.appliedsafety.com. This is a fine company that I’ve had the pleasure to work with for the last year or so and should you ever need someone to review your safety manual or warning labels they are the ones to go to.

W3CAG [EDIT]

July 14, 2004 Kevin HallAccessibility, Ethics

I’m removing the entry on the W3CAG due to a mistake on my part regarding the scope of a non-disclosure agreement. I had thought that the material would be okay to post since it was taken from the W3C guidelines, not realizing that I had transformed it into an internal process that was protected under my contract. This was an unintentional breach of professional ethics and should serve as a lesson on how a little ignorance can harm others. To compensate for my mistake I promise to create a new tutorial on accessibility on my own time (using my own material) that will go up here this week. I apologize for any inconvenience this mistake may have caused. In the […]

Work at Ford

July 12, 2004 Kevin HallAccessibility

I’ve started work at Ford in the Creative Design & Usability group. I’m working on ensuring a number of websites comply with the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (W3CAG). I’m going to try to post about my experiences without violating any NDAs that I’ve signed so please understand if I sometimes avoid getting too specific about my projects. Anyhow, I’m also trying to follow up on the request for more information on process so I’ll try to kill two birds with one stone by describing the process I am currently putting together for testing web sites for compliance with the W3CAG. I’ll be posting a step by step process that will walk you through the relevant guidelines, the (mostly free) tools you […]

Outlook 2003 Memory Problem

July 7, 2004 Kevin HallHCI

Want to try something fun? Open up Outlook 2003 and then hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete to open up your process monitor in the Windows Task Manager. Clickon the Mem Usage column header to sort by memory usage. Now locate OUTLOOK.EXE in the Image Name column. Make a note of how much Ram is being used. Good now you’re looking at the amount of RAM that Outlook is hoarding for itself. Now let it sit open for a few minutes, while you get a cup of coffee or stretch of something. Done? Good now compare the Mem Usage column to your notes, it should be way higher and still climbing. This is because whenever Outlook is open and not minimized (this doesn’t mean […]

New Job

July 6, 2004 Kevin HallHCI

It appears that I’ll be starting a new contract position at Ford on Friday. This may mean that I’ll be covering some slightly different topics on here a I tend to write about whatever I’m working on. Right now details are sketchy about what I’ll be doing but it appears it may involve European accessibility laws in the beginning so that should be pretty interesting. Beyond that you may see some more on usability and HCI coming soon depending on the projects I work on. On the down side I likely won’t be able to post a lot of details on confidential internal projects but I’ll try to abstract the concepts out of the work and provide my own examples. […]

The Induce Act

July 6, 2004 Kevin HallEthics

There is another bill before Congress, proposed by Sen. Orrin Hatch, Patrick Leahy, Bill Frist, Tom Daschle, Barbara Boxer, and Lindsay Graham are all sponsoring a bill titled the Inducting Infringement of Copyrights Act which is essentially designed to roll back all of the progress that has been made since the Sony Betamax decision on the legality of VCRs. This is a stupid idea. I hope that is clear enough for a Senator to understand, apparently the group listed above has little to no grasp of how copyright law is meant to work, or how any of the digital media technologies function. This law is an egregious example of how a few groups like the MPAA and RIAA can make […]