Virtually Attend the 2008 IA (Information Architechture) Summit
Those of us who focus on the user experience try to stay up to date with the latest trends in information architecture, but many of us weren’t able to hop down to Miami in April to attend the 2008 IA Summit. Fear not, fellow IAers. Maybe it’s too late to get that Miami tan, but you can still catch up on the conference from your home computer and chime in at the next IA cocktail party.
The IA Summit’s website does an excellent job laying out the different sessions. You can search:
While many post-conference sites agree to share the slides with non-attendees, the IA Summit is kind enough to share videos of several of the slideshows accompanied by audio from the actual event.
| Here’s an image of slide from James Robertson’s presentation What do innovative intranets look like? The player on the conference website allows you to paginate to a particular slide and jump to that section of the audio as well. Some presentations are even available for download. |  |
The conference boasts a wide range of topics such as:
- Creating career paths for UX professionals
- How to be a user experience team of one
- Inspiration from the edge: New patterns for interface design
Another great resource is Boxes and Arrows, which recently posted a nice summary of Day 1 at the conference with embedded audio for each one. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before summaries of the subsequent days are there as well.
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10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
“Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.”
Smashing Magazine published a great post on 10 principles of Effective Web Design. If you are planning on designing or redesigning your website, make sure you follow these principles:
1. Don’t make users think
2. Don’t squander users’ patience
3. Manage to focus users’ attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Don’t be afraid of the white space
8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often
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Free High Quality Wordpress Themes
Wordpress is an excellent open-source and free blogging software that is being widely used by many bloggers around the world, including Webgrrls.com.
Online, first impressions are made in a blink of an eye (1/20th of a second). In my blogging presentations, one of the topics I discuss is the importance of having a well designed blog and the obvious question that comes up is Budget.
If you have $5000, $3000, $2000 budget that may allow you to get a custom design that perfectly reflects what you want. If you don’t have a large budget, you can get pre-designed templates that were designed by professionals and then customize them to reflect your goals and ensure usability.
Finding good quality Wordpress themes that are free is very hard. Smashing Magazine just published a list of 100 free high-quality WordPress themes that I would recommend you check out. They categorize their themes into 8 categories: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog. Continue Reading “Free High Quality Wordpress Themes”
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