All the behind-the-scenes code that makes it all work

A Case for Requirements

January 5, 2009

People are by nature visual, and creative comps are often used to get across an idea of a product or service. However, as the web becomes increasingly interactive, a static image is not enough to capture the overall experience and functionality. We cannot simply pass a static image to a developer and say “build this” [...]

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Site redesigns, Section 508 Compliance and IE6, oh my!

August 26, 2008

Another question asked in the Q&A section of LinkedIn: I’m working on a site redesign, and a few questions came up in a meeting yesterday that have me my scratching my head. I work for a nonprofit, and apparently there’s a ‘feeling’ that we may be required to go 508 compliant in order to retain [...]

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what’s the deal with… personalization

July 10, 2008

Personalization is the idea of tailoring an experience to a specific individual. This is particularly prevalent in e-Commerce. There are a few ways to achieve this. The ATG e-Commerce platform uses ‘a scenario engine’ to provide personalized content. The engine uses a rules-based system, either based on user attributes or user behaviour. These can be [...]

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what’s the deal with…Agile Software Development

June 20, 2008

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics. When I worked at LexisNexis, I had the opportunity [...]

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Transparent gifs – will IE6 never die????

June 17, 2008

Last night I was on LinkedIn, and someone was inquiring about how to make a site backwards compatible for IE6. While I’ve been working on the web for close to a decade now, I forget that for many people, their development has really picked up in the era of IE7, and they are often shocked [...]

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HTML Templates

June 11, 2008

When I was hired at LexisNexis back in 2003, it was to develop HTML templates, often to take to Usability testing. I’d been building actual web sites professionally for four years, so initially I felt this was “a step backwards”. Soon, however, I realized that template building is really more of an art, and indeed [...]

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Scenarios vs Targeters in ATG

May 15, 2008

A key feature of ATG is personalization. We have had some internal discussion about “scenarios” versus “targeters”, and the appropriate use of each. From the 2007.1 documentation: How Are Scenarios Different from Targeters? Several features in the Scenarios module are also available in a different form in the Personalization module. For example, you can set [...]

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Making RIAs Accessible

May 5, 2008

My topic suggestion for Spring <br /> has been accepted. On June 3rd, I’ll be presenting the following: Topic: Making RIAs AccessibleDescription: Rich Internet Applications offer the site visitor a more interactive, engaging experience. But can this richness be conveyed to a user of assistive technologies, and how? This session will differentiate between DOM-based (AJAX) [...]

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Headers and Images – Alt Text and the Weight Factor

April 29, 2008

I am drafting an article for the RI:Technology blog on Screen readers and Search Engines, and was reviewing a paper a colleague wrote about Search. He mentioned sIFR as a technique “to bring content to search engines”. I asked another colleague about this, as I’d always just considered sIFR as a “stylability” technique. We started [...]

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