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#webdesign

28 posts26 participants2 posts today

Professional Brands For Business
Quote: “Good design is good business.” — Thomas Watson
Message: Great design is an investment that pays off. Let’s work together to build your business’s digital presence.
Hashtags: #BusinessDesign #WebDesign #MarketingStrategy
If you have any questions or need assistance getting started with your website or digital marketing efforts, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Use our CONTACT US form to ask preliminary questions. You can even…

wp.me/pd8sUg-124?utm_source=ma

Jolene's Web Designs and More | Essential Tools To Help You Grow Your Business · Professional Brands For Business"Good design is good business." — Thomas Watson. Great design is an investment that pays off. Let’s work together to build your business’s digital presence.

Traveler - Blog WordPress Theme visualmodo.com/theme/traveler- A beautiful and modern blog theme, designed specifically for the travel blogger. The elegant, grid-based layout puts the focus on your featured images. The different post types allow you to choose the best way to display your photos and articles 🚐✈️🛳️🏝️
#WordPress #blog #travel #articles #responsive #theme #template #plugins #writer #posts #webdesign #builder

VisualmodoTraveler WordPress Theme - Responsive Blog WordPress TemplateTraveler WordPress theme is a beautiful & modern travel tour blogger template. The elegant, grid-based layout adds focus on images & articles

Truly random #offer
I have two domain names that I don't want/need anymore. If you'd like them, let me know. I'll try to figure out how to get them to you without any extra cost (you'll just start paying a registrar for them or whatever).

rook.house
xenologue.com

I suppose if I just fail to renew them and they go out into the world you can also probably get them that way. I don't really know all the ins and outs of domain pricing, so if there's something I can do to prevent extra prices for anyone who might want one of these, I'll do what I can.

#Web #usability and #accessibility ...

This is from crimethinc.com, but I'm not trying to pick particularly on them. There are many, many, many sites just as bad or worse.

This is a screenshot from an article on their site today, rendered in Firefox (Linux).

See the hair-thin font? See the fact that it's light grey on a white background? There's virtually no contrast between the text and the background.

This is an accessibility nightmare for those with any sort of vision problem. Picking the colour out of the screenshot (I didn't look at the CSS), it appears the text is basically 45% grey. This is ludicrous.

If the font face had some heft, it might be still be half-assed readable with contrast this low.

But as is... If I were to take my contacts out, I wouldn't even be able to tell that this screenshot *had* any of the normal-sized text in it, much less be able to read any of it.

Web designers, I beg you: please consider more than the appearance of what you're creating when you're making design choices.

Remember that not everyone is a 20- or 30-something with near-perfect vision.

Remember that people have cataracts or other types of eye cloudiness which necessitate high-contrast text to be able to read, even if they scale the fonts up by a huge amount.

Remember that vision degrades naturally in people in many ways other than "just wear glasses" can fix.

My IndieWeb blog carnival entry on “renewal”! I talk about reconnecting w/ what I most enjoy about composing & coding, and avoiding treating leisure & projects as if I need to impress someone. reillyspitzfaden.com/posts/2025/0... #IndieWeb #Blog #Blogging #WebDev #WebDesign #Coding #HTML #CSS

IndieWeb Blog Carnival — “Rene...

Pixel art of a radio tower and floppy disk, with pixel art text reading 'Reilly Spitzfaden'
reillyspitzfaden.comIndieWeb Blog Carnival — “Renewal”

My April IndieWeb blog carnival entry on “renewal”!

I often feel compelled to tweak and redesign my website at the expense of other things I value. I talk about reconnecting with what I most enjoy about composing and coding, and avoiding treating my leisure and projects as if I need to impress someone.

reillyspitzfaden.com/posts/202

Pixel art of a radio tower and floppy disk, with pixel art text reading 'Reilly Spitzfaden'
reillyspitzfaden.comIndieWeb Blog Carnival — “Renewal”

So, have you ever said to yourself, "Self, I wish that I could read online news more like a newspaper? Well do I have your ticket!

Backstory: I frequently read news headlines/stories for a friend no longer able to read. Among the news sources is CNN, particularly its "lite" headlines page. Though I found myself frustrated that 1) there is no context other than the headline, 2) the headlines themselves are utterly unorganised, and 3) a huge portion of them are fluff (sport, entertainment, style, food, etc.). I was hoping I might be able to do better. I'd hinted at this a few months ago on HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4.

One bright note is that CNN's URLs contain much of the organising information already, with section heading as well as the date (YYYY/MM/DD). Parsing those is a Simple Matter of Programming (SMOP). Organising them takes ... a bit more work, but what I ended up with my Mark I implementation was the "lite" headlines page organised by section, with the sections themselves ordered by my own interest in them. That alone was a vast improvement.

I still wanted to go further; in particular, I wanted to include lede 'graph context for stories. Which meant pulling down the related articles themselves. ...

... Which I've spent the past few days doing.

Mark II such as it is consists of a few shell scripts to pull, parse, and generate the website. What I've laid out is very much styled as a classic newspaper: all text, no images, and of course, no ads. It takes a few minutes to update the page, which I then view locally, or copy to my e-ink tablet. For those wondering, no, this is not publicly available. (Yet?)

What's curious for me is how much saner this presentation is than virtually any current online news site, most of which far more resemble picture galleries (with utterly gratuitous images) than information services. The ability, as with the days of print newspapers, to glean the main gist of a story without having to click through, and then ward off cookie, paywall, TOU, nag, autoplay video/audio, dickbars, etc., etc., provides a cognitive ease that's hard to express.

This is also giving me pause to consider why online news looks and acts the way it does, both in terms of UI/UX and content, to which I can only suggest that virtually all the incentives are perverse, on both the publisher and reader perspectives.

Screenshots show a general sense of the layout as well as detail views of parts of the page. There are still some layout glitches (I've been writing Flexbox CSS for approximately a week now 😺 ), but I'm pretty happy with it, and much happier than with the original. Oh, and the design is remarkably responsive even without @media queries.

(There's more design work in the page itself, including internal cross-references and URL rewrites to the lite.cnn.com/ page itself, some of which I'm fairly chuffed about, but ... screenshots for now.)

Thoughts are now toward a news-page generator which incorporates a number of different sources, with some sense of categorisation and prioritisation applied to those. Still sorting how to proceed on that.

Oh, and preempting questions about why this particular site and its quality:

CNN is easily parseable and not paywalled. There area other options which fail one or both of these tests, e.g., NPR has nonsemantic URLs, the NY Times is parseable but paywalled, etc. I'm working with what is to hand but am more than open to better alternatives.

The HN link above includes stats on the section distribution itself, which ... is less than ideal, as well as the substantvity of much of what remains (dittos). F'rex, a couple of days ago, one of the three "Science" stories ... largely revolved around a spaced-out pop singeress. Not exactly what I'd call hard-hitting content. Three months on the relative percentage still hold. Aggregating those to larger groupings, the overall article breakdown as of this posting is:

  • US: 1984 (29.94%)
  • World: 1311 (19.79%)
  • Business: 977 (14.74%) (Economy|Business|Markets|Tech|Cars|Investing|Media)
  • Science: 557 (8.41%) (Science|Climate|Weather|Health)
  • Trivia: 1796 (27.11%) (Travel|Food|Homes|Entertainment|Sport|Style|CNN)
  • Total: Total: 6625

(For those summing totals: there's one "unclassified" story, an opinion piece.)

I’m fortunate to have worked with a lot of amazing designers over the years. Some were curious about designing in the browser with basic #HTML and #CSS, but weren’t sure where to begin, or felt discouraged by a lot of developer-centric content.

This is the advice I gave that seemed to resonate most: cloudfour.com/thinks/designing

The author smiles warmly next to five floating icons representing concepts from this article
Cloud Four · Designing in the Browser: Five Tips for Beginners
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