Mark sent a link around the office to Enterprise Search Center, saying “This is a new site dedicated to corporate search technologies. Should be more and more useful as more articles are contributed.”
Did you know the W3C has a standard for taxonomies and other classification schemes (Simple Knowledge Organisation System)?
Neither did I. But apparently, Jay Fienberg did, since he just mentioned it on the IA Institute mailing list. I doubt it would be of any use in communicating with clients, but I wonder if it might be useful for delivering machine-readable hierarchies to site developers?
Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users writes about how Good usability is like “water flowing downhill”:
I’ve talked about this many times before; my horse trainer’s mantra is, “Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard” - but the opposite is everywhere. It’s ridiculously easy for me to screw up the settings on my digital devices. The API methods that intuivitely feel right turn out to be dead wrong. I click the button I think will do X, and instead I get… WTF?
A month or so ago Dan sent me a link to Gliffy.com, an Ajax-y OpenLazslo-driven browser-based collaborative diagramming tool that could conceivably give Visio a run for its money (someday). Even with its limited initial feature set it makes fairly crisp looking diagrams with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
Knowledging Across Life’s Curriculum has a brief review of Gliffy, and (of course?) Gliffy has a blog as well.
One thing I have to say is that I hate the product’s logo and its web page looks a bit clunky too. The whole brand presentation would benefit from a makeover by a good designer.
Extractable is proud to announce the launch of the redesigned Contango Capital Advisors web site. Nice work on a fresh design, team!
Contango’s redesigned web site is live at http://www.contangoadvisors.com
ColorBlender is a cool Ajax-y service that suggests an entire palette of colors for you based on a dominant color that you enter (using RGB sliders). I’d still prefer a great visual designer come up with color ideas, but if you were on a budget and if you didn’t know the first thing about how colors complement each other, push forward, recede back, are cool or warm, etc., you could do worse than consulting this tool to put together a pleasing palette for a website.
Prototype is “a JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications,” sporting an “easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around.”
Ruby on Rails features integrated Prototype support, the famous script.aculo.us library is built on Prototype (but I curse Joshua Schachter for ever starting that ridi.culo.us URL trend), Rico offers Ajax components and effects built on Prototype, and so on.
Extractable today recognized the launch of the redesigned IDT (Integrated Device Technology) corporate website. Extractable completed a thorough strategic business evaluation before redesigning the site’s information architecture, navigation, and user interface to increase visitors’ awareness of IDT’s product offering while reinforcing its brand identity. IDT’s internal eBusiness team handled production of the site, including page buildout and system integration.
IDT’s redesigned website is live at http://www.idt.com.
Subject says it all. (Here’s some of the thinking that went into the blog launch.)
And if you are doing “traditional”* Visio wireframes for a rich web application, this article at Boxes and Arrows has some suggestions about how to narrate the interactive sequence in a slide presentation to your client.
* Yes, I realize it’s ridiculous to talk about traditions for a medium that is only 15 years old.
