ServerBeach “Geek of the Week”
ServerBeach selected us as their “Geek of the Week” this week. They are the datacenter that powers our hosted applications including the previous beta release of Barracuda Suite (now Simpli5).
Why Flash is Mostly Bad
Adobe’s animation and multimedia technology, Flash, distracts users from a websites sites core content, and introduces a myriad of design problems. While there are a few occasions where flash is acceptable, and can even add value, typically the use of Flash makes websites harder to use.
One of the largest problems with flash is Search Engine visibility, and accessibility to those with disabilities. While these problems are severe, this article’s focus is on usability, not accessibility.
Typography on the Web
Typography is fundamental to clean design, and paramount to content. Bad typography will drive users away from your content, while good typography will keep things legible and draw your readers eye to important sections. Your content should be easy to skim for those in a rush, and also easy to read more deeply.
Typography on the web should stem from print media. People are used to reading newspapers, paperbacks, and other paper documents. Study these and keep your web pages consistent with these.
Reasons to Validate
Validation is the process of ensuring that your web pages (XHTML, XML and CSS files) meet the standard set aside by the w3c, the organization responsible for these markup languages. Validation is similar to running your documents through a spell checker for errors, ensuring that the data sent to the web browsers is well formed and syntactically correct.
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Latest Comments
- Robert → “ I have to agree with the design of the site being great. I am more interested in how the website got ranked so high and some keywords land first page in searches when the page it lands on has no page rank.…”
- Etienne Segonzac → “ Hello everyone ! I would love to have a chat with other Pomodoro users (and the mailing list is quite slow). The thing is for me the main takeaways of the technique are the rhythm + the motivation of visualizing my progress. BTW, the Navel Labs app is quite gorgeous (and the compliment is coming from a concurrent…”
- some guy → “ Nice work! Thanks...…”
- sirber → “ Is there a limit to the URL size? What if I want to create a massive chart?…”
- Randy Martin → “ I have used the classic 12 column grid for all my design tasks for nearly 15 years. 12 column grids came out of print, allowing one to set type full page, half page, quarter page, third page, sixth page, etc., extremely easy. More than that, keeping things on the grid puts elements in balance and…”

