Tag Archives: accessibility

The Web Standards Sherpas

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Just realizing that with the busy Spring I’ve missed announcing a recently launched project that I’m honored to be serving on the editorial team for.

Web Standards Sherpa’s experts provide helpful, pragmatic and up-to-date advice on best practices for web professionals everywhere.

Back in March, Web Standards Sherpa, the brainchild of some of the crew at the Web Standards Project and support from Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, the W3C, and others, was born. The new site aims to provide guidance on the real world usage of web standards and surrounding best practices through reviews and feedback on existing web sites. Now, with the 10th article published yesterday, I think we’re well on our way down this path of building a great, relevant, and current resource to help web professionals on their journey. Already I am finding that I’m referencing many of the pieces in conversations with clients or colleagues.

The Path We’ve Started On

Sherpa Current Issue

Current Sherpa Issue: Overlays and Lightboxes: Keys to Success by Derek Featherstone

Here’s an introduction to the current staff of Sherpas guiding you and the types of wisdom they’ve been dropping along the way.

Join The Trek

Feed Shirley

Check out the great team behind Web Standards Sherpa and learn a bit more about the project by watching Aaron Gustafson’s talk from MIX11. And if you have a project that you’ve recently launched or that you’re looking to redesign soon and you’re wrestling with a topic such as accessibility, performance, semantics or content strategy drop the Sherpas a line via the submit a site form. Or just come by the site and join the discussion.

Not Quite December Yet, But Here's 24ways

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Drew McLellan has for the 4th year running wrangled a bunch of great authors and launched the Web Development Advent Calendar 24ways.

It isn’t December yet [in this time zone anyways] but the first day’s article has been posted for your enjoyment — Easing The Path from Design to Development. This is a nice piece on interaction between different sides of the site building process, something I’m intimately familiar with. A few pointers from my experience that are worth adding to Drew’s comments…

On layout and page size

I think its quite helpful for designers to work in a much larger canvas size [both height and width] then some agreed upon base size. This forces the designer to look the size issues dead on.

On “content volume”

Depending on the type of site its important to also consider more then just text content, headers or username length. The impact of embedded content or 3rd party content — be it youtube videos, images from flickr, ad banner sizes — may drive the extreme or minimum sizes for columns and your general grid design.

On the “dance”

Every working situation is different, with some freelance situations the coder might come in after the designer has totally wrapped, but even in cases where the walls between disciplines are high I think that the best way to smooth out the handoff is to have walked through the designs before they’re approved and ready to hand off and discuss together some of the issues like form button design or page flexibility.

That out of the way, I do think Drew’s article is worth a read through for designers, developers and project managers alike. And I’m sure over the next 24 days 24ways will again prove to be essential reading for anyone who builds websites. Previous coverage on this site.

The Web's Greatest Advent Calendar Is Back

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Interrupting the dearth of posts to bring you this important announcement… 24 Ways is back this year with a round of daily web development related articles. So far we’ve got a few great pieces, with a mix of immediately useful information and some things to look forward to.

And don’t overlook the comments, which can be as interesting as the pieces themselves.