Archive for November, 2005

Styl­ish Access­ible But­tons

Anschlag

Anfang

But­tons that look good and the same in Fire­fox (PC and Mac), Opera (PC and Mac), Cam­ino, Safari and almost in IE 5, 5.5 and 6 (PC), scale with changes in font size and be access­ible, can be done.

You get remind­ers on usab­il­ity from the strangest places

I act­ively pro­mote elastic design, so the next step is elastic images. That is images that are pro­por­tional to your lay­out. So here is a little exper­i­ment. Apo­lo­gies to RSS read­ers, I have yet to work out how not to send images via RSS. If you are on the site, see how the images adjus­ted to fill the space, on both the sum­mary page and post page, by either drag­ging the browser window.

Sorry about the infre­quent post­ing, I Usu­ally write my posts on the bus, but with fre­quency of my cyc­ling com­mutes increas­ing, I am los­ing blog­ging time. Not that the ride time is wasted, it is a got time to think clearly and organ­ise my thoughts. Only trouble is by the time I get home after bat­tling the sea breeze all I want is a hot shower, food and sleep and not sit­ting in front of a com­puter. So I am going to have to find other time in day to blog and play with this site.

Which is part of the prob­lem, I need to play with the site, I wrote a couple of posts on the bus before the power­book took a vaca­tion and they both had prob­lems with my stylesheet, noth­ing dra­matic, but it just needs debug­ging along with an IE lay­out issue.

OSIG is back, there are a num­ber of activ­it­ies planned. The most imme­di­ate is the forum at the moment it is rough around the edges. The aim of the forum is to foster dis­cus­sion on sub­jects related to online ser­vice deliv­ery by the pub­lic sec­tor in West­ern Aus­tralia. Start­ing next year, there will be a monthly meet­ing with speak­ers dis­cuss­ing top­ics of interest, expect at least one on con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems in Janu­ary or Feb­ru­ary next year.

The Ore­gon state gov­ern­ment is attempt­ing to change all of their web­sites into a single look and into a cent­ral con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS). While I can see some advant­ages with their approach, I can see some prob­lems ahead for them and also I dis­agree with some of the meth­ods used.

Here are a few use­ful low volume mail­ing list for those involved in Gov­ern­ment web ser­vices in WA and Aus­tralia in general.