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Design

My main goal is to work up a portolio site, and I am looking for websites that just seem to really incorporate the Gestalt ideas with ease in usability. Gestalt and well thought out IA/Usability make my eye's and brain go 'ah...this is easy to figure out'.


I am finding myself drawn more and more to white-space and simplicity. My goal is to study these and incorporate many of the simple ideas to my own developing designs. If anyone finds additional samples, ideas - websites that they like especially because of Gestalt,IA and usability - please share! I will be adding to this - already there are PARTS of software out there that utilize this - such as parts of Harvest -online time/invoicing,FreshBooks -online time/invoicing, branding, much more than Harvest, Backpack (watch the small video under The Magic of Backpack on this link) - create pages that clients/coworkers can add to(pictures,files,lists, etc. online - only invited folks via email can access the secure page site - very 'client friendly' (from the folks that developed BaseCamp) and Cozi.com (calendar online).

Below is a screenshot of BackPack's calendar - color coded - extended color over series of days - and font to match the calendar list on the right - calendars can be toggled on/off and integrate - usually one way however - with Google and other calendars.


I kept my Google sidebar on this image - I love it...it shows (in order from top) the Cozi calendar (Cozi allows family members to each have a color code representation similar to BackPack )- BIG analog clock and temp,RSS feeds I want to see,Google Calendar, link to Google Docs, Scratchpad that Pete and I play with during the day to pass along notes; pictures from my computer that rotate through and finally a Google searchbox that I use when I am processing SEO keywords in 5 different browser tabs :/ . All of these have links to edit, and links to the online page using the browser of my choice...and many more Google apps are available, I just love these. The sidebar can be docked elsewhere, and I should have shown it - each app zings a side page or 2 telescoping out to the left side with expanded information - or a larger picture.



Gestalt


Every Sitepoint class is like this one. Everything is in one place, I immediately know that all class information is represented by one icon style - numbered, and the forum is accessible by one descriptive link. Lots of white space...lots of 'ahhhh'


Development Links

Chrome Web Store for Developers -Google is making it easier for me to jump into developing..which until now seemed like the deep end of the pool.

There are less than 12 hours left to download a free ebook from Sitepoint:
JQuery Novice to Ninja

I have been bookmarking a bunch of CSS layout pages for 960 grid tutorials, and came across this one today that just seemed to show it so well. I hope it is helpful to you too:
The 960 Grid System Made Easy - by Six Revisions
I attended both webinars yesterday and was most impressed with Avinash Kaushik from Market Motive. It was a bit of a pain to call the phone number for the audio portion of the presentation - but after seeing the technical difficulties of the second webinar by Hubspot, I could understand the decision. I must say that I am paddling as fast as I can in this ever growing body of information and feel a bit intimidated by all of the marketing numbers/info. To use this information wisely, and not waste time with numbers that don't mean anything is my goal. I have not played with many of these, so please let me know what you like/don't from your experience. I can't think of a better group to share this with, and wish I could work under some of these companies - but am digging in this week to start helping a friend's website business. He has an online class that needs to get more exposure.

The list is Kaushik's extraction of the usable part of 3 new Google Analytic tools - and I moved it over to the Cerro Coso Coders Forum section. I didn't want to lose it in blogland and I hope we can add to this list, or talk about the pros/cons of different 3rd party and search engine tools.along with some other tools that are either free or a very low cost, and how he uses them.
Web Analytics Workshop registration page by Avinash Kaushik author of Web Analytics 2.0 (2009) and Web Analytics an hour a day. This will be about 3 new Google Analytic tools, and I am signing up for this one too. I learned about this one from www.websitemagazine.com.
Link to sign up for the webinar Science of Facebook Marketing -

Dan Zarrella is featured on O'Reilly's website and has authored two books, Social Media Marketing and an upcoming Facebook Marketing book due out this august. You get a free ebook of Social Media Marketing for attending, and their is a link @hubspot to participate live on Twitter during the webinar.
I signed up for the PHP and CSS Live courses starting later this month, and got an email opening the 8 video CSS Crash course for FREE:
https://sitepoint.com/bookstore/go/86.87.88.89.90.91.92.93
Part of the email:
Our 8-part CSS crash course (normally $29.95) is free to download for the next 7 days. It's nearly three hours worth of videos that will help get you started with CSS. You can grab your free copy above.
This free download is available to everyone. So if you know of others that might be interested, be sure to send them the link.

All the best,

Shayne Tilley
sitepoint.com
'Social Media' recording - It took 38 years for radio, 13 years for TV and only 2 years for FaceBook to reach 50 million people. In this presentation (2009) there is a quote from (MegaTrends author) John Naisbitt 'We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge" (I don't have the source of that quote). So how do we filter the weeds out of this rush of information and cultivate the true knowledge? I am thinking we need an automated filter - imagine how this will grow in the next 50-100 years.
I had to turn down a nice paying Joomla job after looking at the project. In one way, it is good to see that people who do not spend much money on the job boards do eventually realize that too many web developer's patching things helter skelter make a mess. I was getting disappointed with all of the job board projects going to other countries and paying $1- $5/hour for major work, or entire web designs. I saw the results of this in the project I had to turn down....I could see months of work to rework it, and they dove in with no structure (no sections,categories,articles), no audience target - php and web developers with poor english skills doing things like div id = 'banner' belonging to a google AD banner, which is not a dig on the developer as much as the fact that their english skills probably kept them from knowing exactly where they were on the template.

In one way, it was empowering to be able to really study something and know you have the right to say 'no'. I did leave them with some information, installed Akeeba backup and tweaked one of their problems. I would still be knee deep in code if I had taken the job, and they were ready to add blogs, redesign the look and additional things, take apart forms.......to a $35 paid template that STARTED out Sect.508 compliant, but was already costing more money and limping along.

I was so glad Elaine was on skype to run my concerns by - you teachers, honestly when I DO (if ever) make $ on projects, I would gladly pay for advice. So Woohoo turned into BooHoo. One thing that Elaine brought up that might help the freelancers/small businesses is the website SCORE - a small business counsel/mentoring site with training and tools.


I just had a great online interview. Does anyone else have experience with a contract or any other legal information for design contracts? I did find an online contract example that covered many points in a free down-loadable Word file. I am just excited to start work on something!
I signed up for a free 'unveiling' of CS5 on April 12, 2010! So now I REALLY have to get serious about a new computer!
Well, I missed the interview - but here is a link from About.com Web Design - Jennifer Kyrnin's blog that has me really ready for this! Especially tools to help code CMS! WOW!

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