templatedata

I was having a look at our corporate website statistics and thought I would share some numbers.

The percentage of website visitors who use Internet Explorer 6 is now 27.7%. If we exclude internal University traffic then this number drops to 23.2%. This is good news for web developers who have for a long time suffered from the headache of having to code for a browser with such poor standards compliance.

It's a bit 'old news' for those on the bleeding edge of web technology but Microsoft has released the second beta of Internet Explorer 8.

The Seed Conference website is a beautiful example of the use of typography on the web. Proof that you don't need images to make a website look good.

Here is a few quick tips on designing HTML forms.

• Use the <label> tag to name your fields - this makes your code more semantic and also makes forms easier to fill out (e.g. browsers often process a click on a label associated with a radio button as a click on the radio button)
• Use different input field types when appropriate e.g. radio buttons, drop-downs, text areas etc
• Place field labels above the related field and left align them - eye tracking studies have found that using labels above their related input field allow users to capture the field and label in the same eye movement
• Indicate required fields and special input requirements. The de facto standard for indicating required fields is to place a red asterisk (*). Also try and alert the users of errors in their input before they submit the form (can be achieved via JavaScript). However do also build input validation into your server side form processor just incase the user doesn't have JavaScript turned on
• Use helpers - use javascript to help the user to enter certain types of data. For example you can use a JavaScript date picker/calendar to help a user enter a date, but be careful to allow more advanced users to enter these values manually.

More:

• CSS Tricks - Label Placement on Forms

In an effort to try and balance out this blog a bit away from all the <insert Google product> posts, I though I might post about some usability testing software DPM has been using as part of our interim review of the University's corporate site. The app is called Silverback, runs on Macs (sorry Windows guys) and cost about $50.

Silverback helps you track how users use your website by recording what they on screen as well as using the built in web camera and microphone found in most Macs to capture facial expressions, the direction the user is looking and spoken comments. Admittedly it's not quite as advanced as (very expensive) eye tracking software/equipment but for $50 who is complaining.

Also for fans of easter eggs have a go at resizing your browser window and see what happens to the vines at the top of Silverback's website.

Those renegade funsters at Google today released their own web browser called Google Chrome. You can read all about it it on their site so I won't go into to much, but I do want to mention two things.

1. The Chrome rendering engine is based on WebKit, the same rendering engine in Apple's Safari browser so theoretically web developers should not worry to much about coding for another browser.
2. It's fast! In my limited testing viewing our beloved Uni site, Sydney Morning Herald and YouTube, it loaded pages extremely quickly.

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Google has launched Google Maps Street View in Australia. The amount of time and resources this would have taken to create boggles the mind.

Perhaps unusual contenders in the world of web design, Business Week have handed down their 10 Commandments of Web Design. Generally they provide some good advice but I can't quite believe the put "Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections" (position 4) above "Thou shalt make content king" (position 10).

For a long time one of the big problems with the use of Flash in websites was that search engines could not 'craw' Flash files. Well the good news is that Google have developed an algorithm that allows them to index textual content in Flash files. Heres hoping other search engines develop this ability as well.

The clever folks at Mozillia recently released the next major version of their Firefox Internet browser. Firefox 3 has some cool new features like:

• Improved performance
• Security & privacy with anti-malware and anti-phishing features
• Platform-native look & feel
• Improved compliance with web standards

Go on download it! I dare you ;)

If your a web techie you may also be interested in finding out more info about Firefox 3 for web developers.

I thought I would celebrate my first blog post by letting our loyal templatedata readers know about a new search engine called Cuil. Pronunced 'cool', Cuil claims to have the largest index in the world with 121,617,892,992 web pages indexed and is run by a group of ex Google staffers.