David Nielsen

December 16, 2008 2:57 PM

by David Nielsen

Website usage compared with last year

Using Google Analytics to compare 9/10/07 - 12/10/07 against 9/15/08 - 12/15/08:

Visits are up over 13%
Pageviews are up over 48%

Looking over these and other numbers, it seems clear that web use with the new design is much increased over last year. I'm a little disappointed that it's only up that much, but a huge number of our visits are because many district computers are set to have the district home page as their home page...I figure that it's not possible to turn these incidental one-hit visits into multi-hit visits.

Since we've added more at the district level, I also checked to make sure that we haven't just lowered the number of hits that our other pages get. Our CMS stats fluctuate wildly, but averaged over the fall semester they are basically flat with last year.

November 14, 2008 11:11 AM

by David Nielsen

Having a blog vs. Blogging

I saw a great quote from another school web support person:

"It seems a lot of the folks originally pushing us for blog capability liked the idea of HAVING a blog more than they like the idea of BLOGGING.

This is an important distinction. Although this wasn't always the case, websites now need to update frequently to be interesting and useful. The idea that you can put some basic information on a site, never update again, and expect a stream of visitors just because of the greatness of what you posted is no longer realistic. At the same time, a lot of people have information that should be shared but no interest in making frequent updates.

When someone asks me about making a new site or page, I work with them to find out what it is they're actually trying to accomplish. If they just want to share some general contact information about a department and maybe post a few documents that change every year or two, then I don't set them up with a 10-page site with news and archives and scrapbooks. Even if they're very ambitious and want a message board and a blog and all the trimmings, I always start them with something modest. "I've setup a blog page, and this is how to use it. Let's talk again after about a month and we can figure out where to go from there." I could immediately set everyone up with all the fancy pages, but it would be irresponsible of me. If they end up not posting on their blog again for a year, it would make them look bad.

November 11, 2008 2:53 PM

by David Nielsen

No, we won't change the homepage for you

Some reasons why we won't change the homepage based on requests:

There wasn't an actual problem. For example, you may have told us that you think it's too difficult to find your site, but there have been no situations when a person gave up on trying to find your site, or was so displeased by the process that it had real-world negative effects on your relationship with them.
We assume users have basic computer skills. If your request includes the phrase "but what if they don't know that the blue underlined words are a link" or "our visitors don't know how to print a page" then the answer will be no. We want the site to be easy to use, but teaching extremely basic computer skills is probably beyond the scope of our organization and definitely beyond the scope of my department. (In practice, we actually end up teaching a lot of basic computer skills.)
The improvement for a few isn't worth the disorientation to everyone. Even if you're right, changing a prominent part of the home page will disorient more people than it will help. Consider that we have over 2,000 employees, over 20,000 students, the families of all those students, and thousands each of community members, job applicants, employees of other districts, vendors, adoptrs, volunteers. Many of these people use the site at least a couple times each month, and a change that disorients even a small fraction of them could be a problem.

October 16, 2008 5:06 PM

by David Nielsen

Website Statistics

Here's some fun stuff about our district level site (i.e., most stuff on www.hebisd.edu) for people who are geeky like me:

The low end:

About 0.4% of our visitors use dial-up. (About one in every 250 visitors) Most people have a broadband connection, whether it be cable or DSL at home or faster connections at work.
About 8.6% of our visitors are using older browsers (IE6, FF2, etc). 88.1% are using IE7
About 9.4% of our visitors have their screen resolution set at 800 x 600. Smaller sizes than that represent less than 0.2% of our visits. (Everyone else is at larger resolutions.) These numbers have been changing rapidly in the past year, even before we implemented our new design.

The high end:

More than 99.1% of our visitors have a version of Flash 9 installed. About 0.5% don't have Flash installed/enabled.
3.3% of our visitors are using relatively modern browsers: Firefox 3, Chrome, Safari 525+, or Opera 9 (and, honestly, a fair number of those hits were probably Carolyn and I)
87.3% of visitors' displays are set to 32-bit color. During the same days last year, 35.4% were 32-bit, and 60.1% were 16-bit.

A lot of the improvement over last year is because the Technology Department re-imaged computers over the summer. The previous image was set to 800x600 and had IE6 installed. The new image defaults to 1024 x 768 and has IE7 installed. And since a huge percentage of our visits come from district computers, of course that drastically changes our stats. It would have been really nice, from my perspective, to switch everyone to a more cutting edge browser that could be updated from time to time, since we could have added some really nice polishing touches to the design. I could see how there might be logistical challenges with something like that, but I can dream, right?

(comment or email me if you want to know about a stat that I didn't mention.)

September 16, 2008 8:44 AM

by David Nielsen

Camera Image Iterations

7 Versions of the camera image

I just thought it'd be fun to share the iterations that the camera image went through. I added this image to the district site about a week or two ago. It's used next to the title of an article that has a feature-sized image (430px x 235px, fits Carolyn's homepage design) associated with it, when that article is in a list. For example, you can see it on the Recent headlines list on the News @ HEBISD page. Technically, these articles might not be featured on the homepage at any point, but in practice I believe all of them have been.

When I started, I wanted to clean up that News page, and I knew that one of the things I wanted to add was an icon to serve the exact purpose that the icon was used for in the end. I went through several versions of the News page itself, using "image.gif" as that icon. "Image.gif" is from an icon set called Sweetie, and made pretty good sense to me since I spend plenty of time online, using Web 2.0 sites, etc and since things you come up with always seem straightforward to you.

Of course, when I showed my new version of the News page to Carolyn, she pointed out that the icon was a little ambiguous (an image? a monitor? a playing card? a window?), and probably very ambiguous to less-savvy users, and suggested a camera. I did a quick search and couldn't find any tiny and legible camera icons, so I made my own.

"Camera1.gif" was lucky, I got the shape pretty well on my first go at it.
"Camera2.gif" makes the lense slightly smaller and blue.
"Camera3.gif" adds a flash and viewer window, which were almost universally included on the larger camera icons -- I really think they help a lot towards suggesting what the icon is.
"Camera4.gif" added assymetric light reflection on the lense -- this was a really important addition, to me. It's very subtle in the icon, but I think it's the extra touch that turns it from a fun project into a high-quality graphic.
"Camera5.gif" rounds the corners by cutting off the rectangle corners and adding to the width of the bump on top (turns out it's easier to see when it's wider).
"Camera6.gif" has several finishing touches: the left corners are squared off again and the left side is darkened a little (which I don't think is really noticable in the icon, but makes me happy), and the spot at the top right was brightened a little, just to help it stand out in the tiny icon.

Carolyn liked the final version, as did I. I double-checked it around the office by having people open the News page, pointing at the icon, and asking "what do you think that is?" Pretty casual user-testing, but everyone figured it out and no one has emailed us asking what it is, so it must be an OK depiction of a camera.

September 11, 2008 11:38 AM

by David Nielsen

When submitting pictures for the website

Another pet peeve is when pictures are submitted for the district's website, but are of un-usable quality. Our choices in that case are to tell the submitter that their pictures are no good, or spend half an hour doing magic in Photoshop to turn them into something acceptable. So, in the again impossible scenario that someone sees this before they take pictures that they might want to submit to the site, here are some tips:

FERPA cleared! Always, this is the top priority. Only take pictures of kids whose parents did not deny permission to take pictures. And tell us that everyone's cleared, just for our sanity.
Set your camera to the highest resolution possible. Yes, you can fit a billion pictures on your memory card/hard drive if you set the camera to 640x480, but the higher the resolution, the better we can make the final picture look. (Our camera is set to 1600x1200 and the highest quality setting because that's as high as it will go, and we can store over 200 pictures on a cheap 512MB card.)
Turn off the date stamp. Most of the time, we can work around it or edit it out if necessary. At best it slows us down, at worst it will make a great picture un-usable and un-fixable.
Let us choose what to post. Give us all your pictures, then let me find the one that is the best combination of showing what's going on and making the district/you/your students look totally awesome.
Take lots of pictures. More pictures, like higher resolution, gives us more options to choose from to make you look best. If you send us at least 20 pictures (or post them all on your site and give us a link) it's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them will look good. Aim to take a variety of pictures: different distances, different angles, posed and "action" shots, flash AND no flash. If someone's posing, you can try standing and sitting, in the middle of the room and against a solid backdrop, inside and outside.
Take good pictures. This is last, because as long as you take lots of pictures at high resolution and give us all of them, at least one of them is bound to work! If you're not sure what you're doing, you should always use the flash, always stand at least 1.5 arms-lengths away, and always take 2 pictures when people are posing for you ("whoadon'tmoveyetI'mgonnatakeonemoreokready123CHEESE"). Once you've got those ideas stuck in your head, take some time with your camera and practice taking pictures: find out how to take close-up pictures of something sitting on a table, try taking pictures of people in different lighting (classroom with no windows, classroom with windows, outside in shade, outside in sun facing the sun, outside in sun facing away from the sun, outside when it's cloudy, and any all of those with and without flash).

Edit: another important tip:

Look at your pictures while you can still take more. After you take a handful of pictures and you're waiting for another good opportunity, click your camera over to view mode and look at the previous pictures. If you didn't capture the moment that you intended to, if they are blurry, if someone moved at the last second, if someone's hand is covering a featured item more than you thought it would, make a mental note that you need to try to capture that moment again, and then do it!

September 5, 2008 9:48 AM

by David Nielsen

When sending "Cold Call" emails

Lately, I've received several "cold call" emails: sales reps emailing me, out of the blue, to try and arrange informational meetings where they can show me what their amazing product can do for our district. In the impossible situation that a future salesperson happens across this post, here is some advice:

Tell me where you got my contact information, even if it was just from the district website.
Make sure it makes sense to contact me. I'm the Assistant Webmaster, I don't influence what copy machines we buy for the schools.
Don't try to sell us lame products. Your code doesn't validate? You'll only charge us $199/month to add an 80GB drive to a server in our server room? No thanks.
Don't send a form email. Yes, even though you're a mail merge expert, I can still tell.
Show me why I should be interested, including numbers measuring ROI to other organizations. If you have an idea how your product would help us, explain that in your email, don't waste my time with trying to schedule a meeting because your rep happens to be in Big D or Funkytown.

I work for a high-quality, fiscally responsible school district. Your sales communications with me should reflect that.

May 1, 2008 11:39 AM

by David Nielsen

Accessibility (Blog Against Disablism Day)

Blogging Against Disablism

Today is also Blog against Disablism Day. (Disablism is discrimination against people with diabilities.)

Accessibility is one of my top priorities in web development. It's important to me that everyone be able to access all of the information we put online. I try to provide alternate text for visual and aural information and for technology like JavaScript and Flash which can also be difficult to make accessible.

However, it's often an awkward discussion to bring up. I think that's because everyone agrees that accessibility is the right thing to do, but they almost never factor it in to their initial plan. Should I use the tools I'm supposed to and stick to the project plans, but end up with final products that aren't as accessible as I think they should be? If we assume there isn't a problem because no one has ever complained, are we being realistic or unethical?

I push for accessibility, and, as a web developer, I would welcome comments that would let me know and share actual problems that people have had with accessing information on the sites I work on.

May 1, 2008 11:28 AM

by David Nielsen

RSS: You really should be using it

I use RSS, and you should too!

Today is RSS Day. RSS will change your life if you are interested in keeping up with current news in any field. In short, RSS lets you read updates from many websites in one place, rather than going to each site individually to check for new articles.

In practice, RSS lets me easily monitor over 200 sites on a daily basis in a relatively small amount of time. I'm able to browse through news about web design, education technology, and other school districts, and read the articles that are actually good and useful.

Again, if you try to stay current or already monitor any website, adding RSS to your tools is the number one, best thing you could possibly do. I can't say enough good things about it.

April 24, 2008 2:53 PM

by David Nielsen

Changing Edit Modes (School Center)

Edited screen capture of new mode SC menu

Earlier this week, a couple of School Center reps contacted us and let us know that now would be a really good time to change the School Center GUI for 1000+ of our 1300+ users. Now now, as in "is this afternoon ok?" I gathered that the point of changing the GUI now is to make the actual new version rollout on June 27th -- when all of our users will have changes to the GUI -- a little smoother.

Miraculously, I didn't pass out and my hair didn't go gray, and we decided that two weeks from now, rather than now now might also work. The switch is minor, but based on what I've seen, I'm very concerned that it will result in confused teachers and a flood of Monday morning calls to me (not exciting but managable) and to other staff (not exciting and not fair to them). I've got about a week to get the word out it, and here's the plan:

I already setup a webpage with the details.
I added a Global Message which shows up on the first page everyone sees after they login.
An email should go out to everyone today.
Over the course of the next week, I'm going to try to email all of the Tech Dept people who don't officially support School Center but probably end up getting questions about it anyway
Again over the next week, I'm going to try to send out special emails to the Campus Web Site Administrators and Department Web Site Administrators letting them know that the change is minor and that they can switch early.

April 21, 2008 10:36 AM

by David Nielsen

Problem with School Center documents

It looks like there is currently a problem with documents in School Center. Specifically, it's likely that documents that have already been uploaded can't be downloaded. It's also possible that new documents can't be uploaded. The problem may have started on April 19th and sporadically occurred through now.

Speculation: I think the problem is that the automatic backup tool that School Center has set-up keeps filling up the server's space. Between when problems were reported on Saturday and this morning, the server probably deleted a few old files, but once teachers started adding files again today, the server filled up again. On about February 15th, we had similar symptoms and that's what I was told when School Center was able to fix the problem.

If you see this because you are having problems with School Center, please contact me! I'm happy to help you out, and it's always helpful for me to know more about the problem, how widespread it is, and even whether anyone notices.

April 8, 2008 1:15 PM

by David Nielsen

Web development considerations

Website development is a very interdisciplinary field. Most sites can get by with general consideration towards just two areas: design and organizing content. As sites grow, so do the opportunities for failure. Just to give an idea of the complexity that can be involved, here are a bunch of things of various levels of importance that have run through my mind while working with Carolyn on our current project. I stopped at about two pages, but this is nowhere near complete.

Accessibility

Are we using Flash in a way that would prevent people without Flash from accessing parts of the site?
How many of our users have the Flash player plug-in? What version?
Are we using JavaScript in a way that would prevent people without Flash from accessing parts of the site?
How many of our users surf with JavaScript on?
How are we going to handle ALT tags on images pulled from the database?
What’s the proper way to use ALT tags on other images?
Can I create a text-only version of the site in a reasonable amount of time without breaking the ‘normal’ site?
Do the behind the scenes admin tools need to have strong accessibility?
Does it affect our accessibility goals that students with certain disabilities are very likely to go to private schools?
Does it affect my accessibility goals that no one but me as ever thought of accessibility as a goal?

Content & Features & Information Architecture

What content are we putting on the site?
Are we going to duplicate content that’s already on department sites?
Are we deprecating department sites?
Are we aiming our content mostly towards district staff? Parents? Are we going to gear anything towards students? Should we spend much time worrying about community member who aren’t parents, students, employees, or volunteers?
Is anyone else going to be able to post content to our new project?
Are we going to allow comments on articles? What would that take technically? How long would it take each day to moderate them? Would there be a comments RSS feed?
What happens to the old databases? How much content do we move to the new databases?
What images do we need to accompany articles?
How long is it going to take to setup those images?
What database tables do we need?
What fields do each of those tables need?
Do I shoot for a specific normal form for the database?
Where do I balance database complexity against ease of use with Dreamweaver?
Which features do we try to have for the release and which wait for later?
How do we handle old pages? Is it worth contacting tech to try to get a custom 404 page setup that would give a link to new versions of old content? How many hits are we getting on old pages?
What resources do news media want to have? Do they want RSS feeds? Do they want articles about individual schools and teachers, or only major, major information? Which media outlets do we talk to answer these questions?

Design & Aesthetics

Background images
Page layout
Headline styles
Body text styles
Link styles
List styles
Quote styles?
Image styles
Menu / navigation styles
All of the above for each different type of page (around 3-10 page types)
All of the above should support flexible text length as well as possible
All of the above should be done with external CSS to help filesizes, etc
All of the above should be done with semantic HTML/XHTML and class/id names, as much as possible

Technical Concerns

What browsers do our visitors use now?
What browsers will our visitors be using when we go live?
What resolution do our visitors surf at now?
What resolution will our visitors be using when we go live?
What are the details of the new image rollout by the Tech Dept? When is it happening? What browsers will be included? What will the default resolution (and color-depth) be?
As web experts, should we try to influence what browser(s) are included in that image?
What percentage of our visitors are from HEBISD computers?
What connection speed do visitors from non-HEBISD computers have?
How many of our visitors are using mobile devices?
Can I create a mobile version of the site in a reasonable amount of time without breaking the ‘normal’ site?
What database are we going to use?
What server-side language are we going to use?
What HTML/XHTML version are we going to use?
What CSS level are we aiming for (or do we work towards browser support)?
What’s an acceptable range for filesize on HTML? Images?
Should JavaScript be external?

Usability

How much emphasis will there be on designing to common usability standards versus doing user testing after the fact to make improvements as necessary?
How much time would user testing take up? Can we find neutral users?
Does usability ever trump design?
How are we going to make sure that titles are usable?
How long should article teasers be?
What is our target for contrast ratio between text and background? This applies to headlines, body text, links, visited links, hover links, etc etc.
Make sure the search feature is usable and returns useful results
Does usability & web writing ever trump copy – can we rewrite for the web, adding emphasis on keywords, lists, subheadings, etc?
Does it affect my usability goals that I’m pretty much the only one pushing for usability?
Does our JavaScript / CSS / HTML / etc gracefully degrade?

March 27, 2008 4:03 PM

by David Nielsen

Improve your website by listening to your audience

A recent article by UX Matters gave a very relevant example of web communication as part of the entire user experience:

While working with a company call center receiving about 300,000 calls/year, the article’s author found that about 55% of callers were asking one of three questions:

Where can I purchase product X
I have a broken product X; where can I get it repaired?
I have product X; how can I get a new copy of the product X manual?

Of course, all of this information was available on the company website. As a temporary solution, a message was added to the on-hold music to remind callers about the information on the website.

The result? The callers became more irate – it turns out that many callers had tried looking on the website and hadn’t found the information. In the end, the design of the website was adjusted to feature the information that visitors were most likely to need, resulting in 25% fewer calls to the call center.

The story emphasizes two great lessons:

First, online information must be easy to find or it might as well not be there. It’s not enough just to post information online.

Second, we should be very aware of all communications with stakeholders, whether they come through our department or not.

What are you doing to make online information easy to find, and where are you finding guidance on what information stakeholders are actually looking for on your district's website?

March 11, 2008 12:10 PM

by David Nielsen

Internet Tip: Making shortcuts

You probably know how to add a page to your Favorites / Bookmarks. This is a great way to keep track of pages that you might want to revisit in the future.

Sometimes, though, there are webpages that you go to all the time. For me, those pages include the School Center login page and the Google Reader login page. For pages like this, I like to make shortcuts in places that are even easier to get to than my Bookmarks menu.

The key to easily making shortcuts is the icon next to the URL:

Example of a URL icon

Example of a URL icon

If you click on this icon and hold the mouse button, you can drag the cursor to several different places and automatically create a shortcut to the page you currently have open.

Make a shortcut on your web browser's "Links" toolbar by dragging the icon to a place on that toolbar (shown below).

Example of the Links Bar

Make a shortcut on your desktop by dragging the icon to an open space on your desktop. If you double-click the icon, your computer will open the page in your web browser.
Make a shortcut on your computer's "Quick Launch" bar by dragging the icon next to (not on top of) the other icons at the bottom left corner of your computer screen (shown below). Like the desktop shortcut, if you click this icon, a web browser window will open and automatically go to the page you made the shortcut from.

Example of Quick Launch bar

A piece of advice: be judicious in creating shortcuts like this. If you create too many, it can easily become disorganized and you'll lose the benefit of having them in the first place.

February 28, 2008 4:02 PM

by David Nielsen

School Center Tip: Creating useful links

Chain link fence Links are what separates the web from other media. If you want to use your website to its full potential, you should be using high-quality links to share high-quality resources with your visitors.

Actually use links. It can be tempting to just give directions: "Click on..., then click on..." There are a lot of reasons why this isn't a good idea (it takes longer, can get confusing, etc). Whenever you can, link straight to the information.

Write useful link text. The words that are linked should describe what you're linking to. For example, instead of saying "Click here to contact me and I'll help you out", say "Contact me and I'll help you out." Sometimes you can use the title of the page or document you're linking to. Sometimes, you'll have to re-write your sentence so that it has a good, short phrase you can use as a link.

Warn visitors when linking to something unusual. If you link directly to a PDF file, a Word file (.doc), or anything else that isn't a webpage or an image, warn your visitors. You may also want to warn visitors if what you're linking to is a really big file. For example:"Mr. Nielsen's Guide to Websites (PDF, 4MB) is very dry reading."

Don't underline or turn blue any text that isn't a link. On the web, underlines and the color blue universally mean "this text is a link", even if you don't use both. Any time you turn text blue or underline it when that text isn't a link, you are probably confusing and frustrating your visitors.

Only link to truly great resources. How many links have you clicked on that took you to a page that didn't really help? Or, how many times have you followed a link to a page full of ads? This is your chance to make a difference. On your site, only link to sites that are high quality, helpful resources.

(If you don't know how to create a link with School Center, you can follow the steps I've written or School Center's Advanced Content Editor tutorial, or you can contact me and I'll help you out.)

Photo credit: Chain Link Fence by clairity

March 11, 2008 2:26 PM

by David Nielsen

Effective Presenting with PowerPoint

Lawrence Lessig

I don't frequently give presentations, but when I've got one on the horizon, I think back on all the boring presentations I've had to sit through. I'm sure those presenters spent a long time adding all those slides, bullet points, animations, and sounds, but I'm pretty sure they didn't spend any time thinking about what would actually be the most effective way to present.

So, I constantly try to learn about effective ways to use PowerPoint-style slides. In the interest of saving presentation audiences from hours of boredom, here are my two favorite methods so far:

10/20/30 Rule

Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, has heard hundreds of lousy pitches from people who want to spend his money. As a response, he developed The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint:

"a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points..." (emphasis mine)

It turns out that reducing the amount of information in your slides is nearly universal advice. Your slides should be talking points (and maybe visual aids). If all you do is read from your slides, you are wasting your audience's time -- you would do better to hand out copies of your slides and let your audience read on their own time. However, you should not reduce the amount of information in your slides just to force people to listen to you.

Lessig Method

Lawrence Lessig, a renowned academic specializing in law (and pictured above), faces the challenge of explaining complex legal situations to a wide range of audiences. He has developed a presentation style (now known as the "Lessig Method") which is very visual and fast-paced but requires more preparation and practice.

Example 1 - Lessig's presentation at TED (described as "standing-ovation" good). Video that cuts back and forth between slides and Lessig himself at the lecturn.
Example 2 - Lessig's announcement video for Change Congress. Video that shows slides with recorded audio from Lessig.

The Lessig Method is difficult to describe. Lessig seems to take a truly excellent speech and add hundreds of slides that each accompany or illustrate a key point or idea. This is a sentence from a Lessig's talk at TED: "[slide with sepia-tone photo of man in uniform] In 1906 this man, John Phillip Sousa, traveled to [slide with photo of US Capital building] this place, the United States Capital to [slide with photo of small brass-colored machine] talk about this technology, what he called the quote 'talking machine'." The slides sometimes feature pictures, but often they feature a single word or phrase in large letters. Later slides often cross out or add words to help show the relationship between "old ways" and "new ways" of approaching the topic.

Conclusion

Although the 10/20/30 Rule and Lessig Method are opposing styles, they both are effective because they take into account the main idea of presenting:

As a presenter, your audience expects you to take a large amount of information and give them the key points that they need to know.

With this in mind, here is how I recommend approaching a presentation:

Know your topic inside out. Read relevant blog posts (and blog archives). Read articles on websites about the topic. Find one or two key books that the blogs recommend and at least skim them. Ask your friends what parts of the topic are relevant to their lives and their work.
Identify the most important key points for your audience. - This is truly an art. If you get this right, you'll know it, and everything else will fall into place.
Choose a presentation style that suits you and the circumstances of the presentation. Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule is a good guideline for nearly all situations. The Lessig Method is very impressive when done well, but requires much more preparation than most presentations ever need. Of course, there are other methods out there, but these seem to be two of the most popular and successful.
Develop your presentation & slides, trying hard not to add any more information than you need to.
Practice your presentation. Don't be afraid to change it! If something doesn't feel right, you should change it until it clicks.
Present!

February 28, 2008 1:32 PM

by David Nielsen

Web Usability and Accessibility Presentation

Slide 1 of presentation

"Web Usability and Accessibility" (no login required, click "View published presentation in a new window") is a presentation I gave in October (2007) for a group of local school district webmasters. I'm a big fan of web usability/accessibility, so my biggest challenge was coming up with a short presentation. My original PPT file has notes, and it was intended to be presented live, but the key points should be on that online version and I'll outline them below. I'd love to elaborate and clarify, just ask.

Outline

Accessibility is making information available for all users. Section 508 should be your main accessibility guide and consideration (for practical purposes).
Usability is making information easier to use for your typical users. Ideally, users should quickly understand the layout, and the site should be efficient to use.
There are many sets of usability guidelines, but testing with actual users is by far the best way to improve usability.

February 13, 2008 3:53 PM

by David Nielsen

Doodle 4 Google contest

Google has announced a contest called Doodle 4 Google, inviting K-12 students to submit an alternate version of the company's logo. And, just like their special holiday logos, the best logo will be used on their site for 24 hours.

Seems like a good opportunity for talking about the connection between art class and careers in commercial art / graphic design, if you don't mind bringing in a little bit of corporate influence.