Recommended reading

Written by Adrian Holovaty on February 11, 2003

  • WebWord features an interview with Andy King, Web Site optimization expert, who says, "For informational sites like WebWord.com or news-related sites, the graphics should be kept to a minimum."
  • Editor and Publisher reports USAToday.com, one of the most-visited American news sites, has begun including related text ads on its story pages -- much like Google AdWords. In the spirit of a recent weblog entry about labeling ads properly, I viewed a sample USAToday.com story in a text-only browser and handheld-browser emulator, and I'm pleased to note that the advertisements were, for the most part, not viewable by those means. The reason: The ads are in an iframe.
  • Simon Willison has written an "Image Drag" bookmarklet that, when clicked, makes a Web site's images draggable. Although it doesn't work in Internet Explorer or on some types of sites, it could be a useful tool in the design process.
  • Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox column examines "Homepage Real Estate Allocation." The gist: "In most cases, content and navigation do need the lion's share of space. It's a disgrace that they only account for 39% of the precious pixels on today's limited computer screens."
  • Having acquired my first cellphone three days ago, I found Marc Rettig's Design For Small Screens presentation (PDF file) particularly relevant and informative.

Comments

Posted by Jay Small on February 13, 2003, at 5:55 p.m.:

Adrian, I'm curious -- what mobile provider and phone did you select? One of the issues about designing for wireless is the vast difference in possible outputs -- from beautiful little color LCDs to crude monochrome displays only a few characters across.

Posted by Adrian on February 13, 2003, at 7:48 p.m.:

I decided to go with Sprint for the phone service, and the Samsung N400 for the phone. It has a decently sized display, and it's in color. I've played with the Web browser for a bit, but, unfortunately, it crashes due to an "out of memory" error more often than not. Haven't yet determined how big (or small) a site has to be in order to crash it. :)

Comments have been turned off for this page.