go.

My CSS technique for increasing link area was recently included in the book Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes by Russ Weakley (proof below). I’m honored and excited to be included. If I ever have time to read the whole thing, I’ll post a review.

I made Presentationless last week after wanting a similar tool for quite some time. Yesterday, I made it public. It is available temporarily from here, but resides permanently at http://www.dbenton.com/presentationless/. Try it out:

Presentationless

I posted this at Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom, and thought I’d mention it here.

It’s a bit of a thing that I’ve been working on. I’m thinking of making a CSS Zen Garden entry out of it. There isn’t a Christmas one yet, is there?

While creating images for a site I was working on last week, I had a problem:

I needed to create an image of the company’s logo
The logo needed to appear in the unstyled version of the page as well as the styled (naturally)
In the styled version of the page the logo would be overlayed onto other [...]

A recent post on mezzoblue talking about Fitts’ Law has sparked a bit of research for me. Fitts’ Law, says basically:
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
In the mezzoblue post, Dave Shea complains that Fitts’ Law cannot be applied to links within body copy [...]

I’m currently working on a site with some interesting needs, but I’m sure they aren’t unique. Specifically, the site has three separate audiences whose needs overlap almost not at all.
Audience 1 is by far the most important. Most of the site’s content will be focused on audience 1. Audiences 2 and 3 are less important [...]

Update: 8/31/2004
The site for which this logo was designed is online. Visit Little Creek Sanitarium.
Why I’m Painting
I’m in the middle of an exercise that I didn’t expect and I’m not qualified for. I’m painting. For a client. I’ll explain how I got myself into this.
I’m working on a logo for a nursing home. This logo [...]

I just read an interview [cioinsight.com] from CIO Insight with usability virtuoso Jakob Nielsen. I’d recommend reading the whole thing, but I’ll list a few things that jumped out at me.
“Bad search continues to be a problem today… It’s usually not unified search—no one search can search everything.”
“The other problem about search is [...]

Not Good Enough?
As a web designer working alone, SEO (like hundreds of other areas of knowledge) is of interest to me. Seth Godin, marketing pundit, wrote today about the The Promlem with SEO.
Basically, he says that SEO is:

potentially shady, and
may not produce results

The first, I agree with wholeheartedly. SEO buyers need to be made aware [...]

I’ll be incorporating ideas from this beaut [instone.org] in my usability testing. Yes I will.

Some thoughts on Andy Budd’s thorough article:
First, thanks Andy for the discussion piece. I think this is a subject that deserves more attention. Many are quick to cry witch at the sight of tables, though the quiet masses still seem to be (rather successfully) designing with them.
My first thought was man this is good - [...]

In the redesign of this site, I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to structurally mark up the global navigation. As you can see at the top of this page, what I needed was a vertical list of links and a vertical list of descriptions for those links.
In keeping with the current trend [...]