Digital Arts Service Corps - web design

Month Seven: DIY Productions!

Melissa Niiya — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:10:37 +0000

Long time no field report. In the past few months, there has been a lot of progress and change. Tiffany is our new and awesome VISTA, and with her added support, DIY Media (a program to train youth in documentary filmmaking, social media, etc) has launched. I've been working with her and staff to develop the curriculum for this project.

We're also moving along with DIY Productions. As we build our base of creative and motivated teens through the DIY Media program, we hope to draw from this pool and build a social enterprise where teens make media for non-profits. I made a promo that will become one in our portfolio of films to show potential clients. You can view it here:http://www.youtube.com/user/digitalhistories#p/u/5/sp0t6U0PUJU

I've also been working on a website for DIYP. There was a little hiccup where we had disagreement on colors/design (of course, after building out the whole site...yarrgh) but I think it's now settled and we're running with the attached mockup.

Moving forward, I surveyed residents at one of our low income housing buildings and it seems that most are very pro-internet and don't want us to cut it off... so these results could support an effort to raise capital for wired internet at our buildings... I'm not sure it's feasible to do this in the remaining months, but we'll see. It will be difficult to get organizational support for what could be a lengthy and expensive project. But given that most of the residents surveyed cannot afford internet service and yet use and need it...well... I think it'd be worth it!

yeah 2011

Bill Brown — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:29:00 +0000

Things got a little busier over November and December. Expectedly I had an increase in phone calls/e-mails during the "Storming Phase" but nothing too out of control. I've been lucky that major issues with different VISTAs have not overlapped so I haven't had to juggle too many concerns at the same time. I've also gotten into a basic routine of e-mailing people about a month after I've last heard from them and that seems to be working alright. Everyone definitely has a different way they like to communicate and I construct my e-mails according to whatever standard thats evolved naturally with that person. I'd like to read more field reports but there has been a lot of artifacts and tangibles sent over so I think we are doing alright.

Howie and I finished this huge database of all 400 and some odd Digital Arts Service core members over the past 10 years and I'm now working on how to best display the database on the transmission project's website. I've been toying around with different custom google map icons but haven't yet settled on anything.

In November I attended Edward Tufte's class on information design and it had a very big effect on me and how I design things. I'd highly recommend going to one of his classes if you can get someone else to pay for it.

Projects Completed: Some info-graphics and normal-graphics, database of past DASC members and host sites, some google map icons, transmission project website redesign but not implementation, secret DASC swag design, increased Drupal knowledge, some conflict management action and some dealing with sticky situations action.

Projects in the works: Implement Transmission project redesign, more swag, increase Drupal knowledge further, do all that I can to help people when they ask.

Resolution of the Year: No TV (sit-coms/dramas mainly)

Websites

Bill Brown — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:48:25 +0000

This area is for any and all resources related to Websites.

Month 3: stepping up

Brandy Doyle — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:16:50 +0000

My third month at Prometheus has been a time of increasing responsibility. As a step towards my goal of improving the org’s communication reach, I’ve helped to build a press strategy team. We’ve gotten together some media best practices (writing press releases, etc.) and once we build a digital version of the file I’ll be happy to share it with others here. I’ve also taken on coordination of our web redesign, supervising our web designer with weekly meetings. Learning to supervise people & projects is a skill I’m hoping to gain, so I’m excited about this.

Another big project this month was helping to create a yearlong workplan for the regulatory policy team, as well as a 10-page descriptive list of our 25 or so regulatory policy issues. I now have a much better birds-eye view of our strategy and goals. We presented our work to the rest of the organization, and everyone felt it was enormously helpful in understanding what the regulatory policy team does. It was the first time anyone had ever compiled a list of all of our issues, so it was a big and welcome step. We’ll be adapting these documents for use on our website soon.

Almost a month late...

Donna Choi — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:44:49 +0000

Hellooo DASCorps!

Work at NAMAC has been busy, albeit running smoothly. I had the opportunity to take a Web Design Intensive at BAVC, and am currently relaunching our site's new look (it'll be finished on Sunday.. http://namac.org). The intent is to make it a bit more friendly for navigation and usage. I also attended a free Bay Area Drupal Camp in Berkeley...

Both offered me a better understanding of web development workflow, helpful tools of the trade, and language... so I feel more confident knowing what/who/how/when to ask questions, as well as how to best address issues on my own.

Now that I've gotten the techie stuff out of the way... I'll be developing our site's blog so that its more interactive... well, hopefully making all of our online communications more interactive in general. Any tips people might have would be helpful :)

Websites

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:18:42 +0000

Resources for working with the web for your organization.

Web Design Tips for Usability, Site Design and Accessibility

Morgan Sully — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:37:18 +0000

This is a resource I found for designing better websites. I took this from:

http://www.great-web-design-tips.com/ - a pretty straightforward url:)

Design better web sites by improving your web design skills and knowledge with Great Web Design Tips. This web site offers a FREE online course on how to create more user-friendly web sites, by incorporating good web usability, web site design and web accessibility design elements. Study the course to avoid the mistakes that other web site designers make. Written by Michael Wong and edited by Peter Cooper.

Chapter One: Web Usability

In this chapter you'll discover how to create a more user-friendly experience for your visitors by improving your Web site's usability.

Chapter Two: Web Site Design

In this chapter you'll discover how to create a more accessible Web site for users with disabilities by improving your Web site's accessibility.

Chapter Three: Web Accessibility

In this chapter you'll discover how to create a more user-friendly experience by improving your Web site's design, layout, navigation, and much more.

Project: Web (part one)

John Miller — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 05:46:44 +0000

Back in January, the folks at the Community Software Lab were asked by a university-based non-profit if we could translate an artist's Photoshop mock-up into HTML and CSS. Eager to please (and needing some money to keep the budget balanced), we said "sure" and submitted our estimate for 20 hours of work. It's March, and we're still working. What's the deal?

For my part, I gratefully ignored things until the last week of February, content to let Dan, my boss, manage the project. He had subcontracted the work to Erich, our soon-to-be VISTA, and for the most part, let things be, receiving changes from Erich every few days. It worked great--as long as changes didn't need to be made immediately. Erich put together some pretty good code and certainly earned his 20 hours' paycheck. Then things began to pick up.

Dan and I met with our clients and their contractor, hired to handle eZ publish, the content management system (CMS) behind the existing website. At this point, we were asked to clean up a few errors in our code, and Dan asked me to take over managing our end of the project.

"Sounds fun!" I thought. This initial enthusiasm has kept me at times from tearing my hair out.

First task: talk with Erich and find out how many hours he's worked. Seventeen. Cool. He can fix the styling errors and fill out his 20 hours. I can stay detached from the actual coding and work on learning server virtualization, adding Gallery to another client's website, debugging our Samba server, and installing SMTP authentication on our mail server. It hasn't turned out that way.

Behind every website is HTML. Perhaps that's a bit of a simplification, but it's not too far off. HTML is the end product of every website designed for a personal computer. The web browser knows HTML, and the web browser is boss. It then stands to reason that a large part of any website's success is based on what sort of HTML it gives to the browser. Wonderful HTML doesn't guarantee a good site, but improperly written HTML throws a wrench in the works. It causes some browsers to balk while others work fine. Text turns into links; links turn into text. Cats and dogs live together. Well, it's not quite Ghostbusters-bad.

A big chunk of the issue hinges on the very first line after the server tells the browser "Content-type: text/html<CR><CR>" -- that pesky <!DOCTYPE> declaration (man, I hope Drupal escapes this sentence correctly!). This guy tells the browser which version of HTML is being delivered. There a few different versions these days, but the big ones are XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01. XHTML is newer and more programmer-/machine-friendly; HTML requires fewer tags. The crux of the issue, though, is how the browser handles each. Most browsers these days display content differently depending on the <!DOCTYPE> declaration they receive with each page. Give them an XHTML 1.0 declaration, they do one thing; give them an HTML 4.01 declaration, they do another. Thanks to the trial and error of many web developers, this behavior is pretty well documented. Give a browser one declaration, but give it code corresponding to a different declaration--then you have problems.

The old site used the HTML 4.01 declaration, but which declaration to use for the new site? We chose XHTML. It's definitely easier to spot flaws in an XHTML page, and stylesheets work differently with XHTML than with HTML. Mostly, though, it's an aesthetic thing. With XHTML there is no ambiguity. Every tag has a beginning an and ending, and its content is determined by the beginning and the ending of the tag, not by the browser's interpretation of the tag, as is sometimes the case with HTML 4.01. Ask someone else, though, and you'd likely receive a different answer. The point here is that there are pitfalls involved with converting a site from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0. Beware of this. Don't do it just because it's trendy. Even though we're using a content management system, we'll still be uncovering small bugs a month from now.

Back in January, I first received the artists' mock-up as an e-mail attachment. I was cc'ed on the e-mail. Trouble was, in addition to the mock-up, there were two other image attachments along for the ride--a pdf file of the entire mock-up and a gif file of five pictures, arranged in a row, artfully merged together. What to do?

Well, as a bystander, I did nothing for a month. Fortunately I kept the e-mail, though I must say I rarely delete e-mails. When I finally started working on the project, we were asked to smooth out the site's banner image. It seemed a bit blurry, but I wasn't sure why. I asked Erich to take a look and send me an updated image.

Still in error-fixing mode, we needed to keep the left-hand navigation links from resizing if a word got too long. We also needed to keep the main content from dropping below the left-hand navigation when the browser window got too small. Where it existed, we also needed to update the right-hand column.

(End of Part One)

A quick note on usability

cheryl jerozal — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:59:07 +0000

Am I the only one who doesn't necessarily always fill out online forms from top to bottom? The way some forms are designed makes it seem so.

For example, visit the free Basecamp account signup page. At the time of this blog post, if you fill in item 3 and then fill in item 2 with something different (and then click in a new field to have the change to item 2 "sink in"), what you have entered for item 3 is replaced.

There should be a check for this. I've seen this problem on other sites too. (Though it is kinda fun to pick on the, in my opinion, mostly well-designed Basecamp.)