Are legal pages critical to websites?
February 9, 2010 by David Olsen · Leave a Comment
I received the following question from a reader:
I have made a community based website… I often see the “accept terms” that you have to check mark to register to a forum. Will it be necessary for my forum?
And while many people put up forums and other websites with no terms or disclaimers or other legal information, this may not be the best way to protect yourself and your business. There are many legal pages you can have on a website. Not all sites need all of them, but many sites could benefit from one or two. Which ones do you use?
More Help with Legal Pages
- Legal Pages for Websites
- What legal pages does your site have?
- Copyright on the Web
- How to Fight Copyright Violations – Get Your Content Off Other Sites
- Share Your Content – With Copyright – Creative Commons
Are legal pages critical to websites? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 09:58:14.
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Why Are Web Pages So Ugly?
February 8, 2010 by David Olsen · Leave a Comment
I was thinking about the Reader’s Choice Awards and specifically the Best Web Designs participants when one of my friends was complaining that some of the nominees were (in his words) “downright ugly”. He wondered why, when there were so many good looking sites on the Web, ugly ones seem to get more prominence. So I asked him who he nominated for each of my design categories. And he laughed and said “well, I couldn’t think of any for all of them.” And I began to wonder, are beautiful Web pages more or less common on the Web than their ugly brethren? So I devised this completely unscientific test. I went to a random word generator and had it generate 10 words for me. I then went to Google and input those words one at a time into the search engine. I clicked “I’m feeling lucky” to get the first result for that search term. I decided ahead of time that if I got any About.com sites (I didn’t, by the way), I would get a new word – as no matter what I think about About.com sites beauty or lack thereof, my opinion is biased because I work for them. I also decided to only accept one page from any given site, so if a site came up for more than one word, I went back to the word generator and asked for another (this happened three times). Once I had my 10 sites I evaluated them based on principles of design and my own aesthetic. The results are as you see them in my article Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? As you might guess, none of the pages were something I would really consider good looking, although a couple were okay. Most were downright ugly, and one was almost frighteningly ugly.
Bad Web Design
- Why Are Web Pages So Ugly?
- Little Web of Horrors – Scary Web Designs
- How to Drive Away Your Readers – Design a Web Site People Will Hate
- What Design Scares You? – Examples of Bad Web Design
Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 08:53:37.
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Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Stock.Xchng
February 7, 2010 by David Olsen · 1 Comment
Stock.Xchng, while not really software, is a tool I use for my Web design work all the time. It’s a stock photography and images site, and the best thing about most of the images? They are free. You can find standard stock photo iconic images like the ubiquitous handshake signifying a business deal and abstract photos like these lightbulbs and many other types of photos. It’s my favorite stock photo site.
- CSS Tool: Stock.Xchng
- Where do you get your Web photos?
- How to Find Photos for Web Pages
- Get Scanned Photos onto a Web Page
- Protect Your Digital Photos Online
- Taking Great Pictures for Web Sites
- See all the Software Picks
- Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week
Web Design Software Pick of the Week: Stock.Xchng originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 13:38:54.
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JavaScript Menus Don’t Have to be Hard
February 4, 2010 by David Olsen · Leave a Comment
If you’ve ever tried to build a JavaScript drop-down menu from scratch, then you know how hard it can be. They can get very complicated very quickly, and unless you are building menus all day, everyday mistakes will creep in that can be challenging to find and fix. One solution is to use a tool like FlexiMenusJS to design and build your menus.
More About DHTML and DHTML Menus
- FlexiMenuJS
- Standards Based DHTML Menus
- How Do You Build Dynamic Menus?
- DHTML Menu Scripts and Programs
- Show and Hide Blocks of Text (or Images) with CSS and JS
JavaScript Menus Don’t Have to be Hard originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 14:49:06.
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Poll: With the coming of the iPad, are you going to focus more on HTML5 than Flash?
February 4, 2010 by David Olsen · Leave a Comment
There is a lot of hoopla going around the announcement of the Apple iPad. I admit that I’ve been hooked as well, and the complaints that it’s nothing more than a “giant iPod touch” suit me just fine. That’s not a complaint in my book, that’s a benefit. But all swooning aside, I am wondering how the iPad will affect my work as a designer. If you had asked me last December what I thought was going to change in 2010, I would have said that Flash was going to get a lot bigger as more sites started using it for games and features. But then the iPad came out and Apple is beginning to make it fairly clear that Adobe Flash is not going to be present on their devices. It’s not available on the iPhone or iPod touch, and it apparently won’t be on the iPad either. Apple is instead focusing on HTML5 as a way to deliver video an other content that Flash delivers a lot of now. Is this going to change how you build your websites? Are you going to focus more on HTML5 and less on Flash now that the iPad may be a game changer? I know it really depends upon the device itself, but what do you think right now?
IPad image Courtesy of Apple.
Poll: With the coming of the iPad, are you going to focus more on HTML5 than Flash? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 08:34:36.
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