Has anybody read any design posts lately that talk about web forms and best practices or cool uses? I'm working on putting together an alternate form to do an A/B test on a lead gen site, and want to mock up the "B" version of the form. I'm not in design, so I'm not actually worried about it looking super good, but just wanted to get input on how real designers handle forms. 

I don't do much with flash (i.e. none at all) but that's a very slick interface Zero. 

jason said:

Has anybody read any design posts lately that talk about web forms and best practices or cool uses? I'm working on putting together an alternate form to do an A/B test on a lead gen site, and want to mock up the "B" version of the form. I'm not in design, so I'm not actually worried about it looking super good, but just wanted to get input on how real designers handle forms.

here you go

A few other good posts exist on the same site that could help with benchmarking. 

You never know what you're going to get at Google. They have crazy change management and communication with their users.

The latest example: This space intentionally left blank. 

Nobody has any thoughts on that?

I am too weird. Apparently, things that are interesting to me aren't interesting to anybody else. 

I dono, we do a lot of unit testing and AB/ABC/ABCD testing. They have a much larger sample audience so they can probably move more quickly than we do. What's funny is that blog post really didn't mean anything except to the random sampling of people who were able to see that. 

UI and Experience testing is the standard these days. A/B, A/B/N, and MVT tests are huge. Google would be crazy not to, and like clives said, their volume is so high, they can reach confidence quickly. 

Read any good books lately?

Every year my mom gets me a book as a gift. Previous years she's gotten me "CSS Zen Garden" and "DOM Scripting". I'm going to be learning VB.net next year, and trying to polish up my UI design skills... anyone able to recommend a good book on UI or design principles in general for me? I'm a whiz with CSS and Photoshop, but I never formally studied design or computers at all... 

If you're looking for some UI design principles, I'd highly recommend Don't Make Me Think . It's a light read, 195 pages, but it's got some really great usability concepts and advice in there which will surely help with UI design. It's cheap too, so even if you don't like it, it's no big loss. 

Its not out yet but the Smashing Magazine Book looks like its going to be pretty good. 

By 'book' you mean a bunch of pages with links to other websites on them following the format of "Ten Awesome Fonts Every Web Designer Should Have", right? 

is there any other kind? 

I'm looking for a free online tutorial of Dream Weaver. I'm talking DreamWeaver 101 for dummies.

I'm taking this course on it, but the text book is $100. I figure I can get the same info for free online.

Anyone know a particularly good one? 

I'm pretty sure I understand how to lay the pages out, and link them to each other. It's, more or less, the same as word documents, or excel spread sheets, that link together.

I get confused with hierarchy saving structure, with the root and all that. 

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/
Other than that I don't know.
I do use Dreamweaver but everything I do with it could be replaced with notepad, a ftp program and a browser.

If you are just trying to learn HTML
Try w3schools http://www.w3schools.com/ 

Sackbar, I think you should go on Amazon or eBay and buy the book.

No offense, but from the posts you've made in other threads,
you seem to have a really difficult time with computer stuff that should be fairly simple,
so a book will give you a rigidly ordered, straight-forward guide to follow to learn the program.

I'd be surprised if you couldn't find it for 50% or more less than what your book store sells it. 

Are you sure he can work the Amazon checkout? 

All books should be purchased at http://abebooks.com 

CalvinHobbes said:

Sackbar, I think you should go on Amazon or eBay and buy the book.

No offense, but from the posts you've made in other threads,
you seem to have a really difficult time with computer stuff that should be fairly simple,
so a book will give you a rigidly ordered, straight-forward guide to follow to learn the program.

I'd be surprised if you couldn't find it for 50% or more less than what your book store sells it.

Thanks, Dad.

No offense, but from the posts you've made in other threads,
you seem to have a really difficult time with not being haughty and superior,
so answering my question without the arrogant life advice will give you the amicable temperament to be less patronizing.

I'd be surprised if you couldn't be 50% more helpful than you just were. 

Anyway, I guess I should be more specific.

If I, say, insert an image into a page layout, do I need to have that image saved in a specific place before hand, or will DreamWeaver automatically make a copy of the image, and save it to the the site's index folder?

Am I way off here? Am I psyching myself out, and this isn't actually as confusing as I think it is? 

Heya guys. I'm looking for a vectorized version of the Fazed logo such that I can resize it without being blurry. I'm eventually looking for something about 512x512, but I can do that part if I have a vector to start with.

It's for personal use. Could any of you folks hook me up? Thanks! 

Admiral Sackbar said:

Anyway, I guess I should be more specific.

If I, say, insert an image into a page layout, do I need to have that image saved in a specific place before hand, or will DreamWeaver automatically make a copy of the image, and save it to the the site's index folder?

Am I way off here? Am I psyching myself out, and this isn't actually as confusing as I think it is?

You wouldn't want it saved there.

What you need to do is set up a folder on your computer that acts like the topmost directory of your website. It will contain the index.htm file that users reach when they type in your domain.

From there, you would make a subdirectory called "images" that contains the image files you intend to use, and you'd pull images from this folder in dreamweaver. You don't want to have all your images mixed in with your page files all in one big messy directory, it's poor design.

Keep things in a sane directory structure; if your site is only a few pages, put those page files in your root directory for instance, images in a subfolder, CSS files in another subfolder, and any external scripts in another.

There are of course many schools of thought on how to structure your site files, and dreamweaver may have a default setup; just make sure you're not throwing everything in one directory. 

do I need to have that image saved in a specific place before hand

Yes, in basic web setups usually there is an images folder where you save all of your images. The name images is not set in stone, just common practice.
Heck, you don't even have to save all of your images in one folder, again it's common practice.

You'll have to tell Dreamweaver to upload the images to your server after you save them locally. 

What happens if you just have all your files mixed into one folder? Does it make the site load slowly and run inefficiently? 

Just makes it harder to manage. 

Dedpoet said:

Heya guys. I'm looking for a vectorized version of the Fazed logo such that I can resize it without being blurry. I'm eventually looking for something about 512x512, but I can do that part if I have a vector to start with.

It's for personal use. Could any of you folks hook me up? Thanks!

Nevermind, I got it. I just zoomed the small version a few thousand percent and screen grabbed it. Ghetto but came out fine. 

Yeah, the logo is pixel perfect, so zooming in shouldn't affect quality at all. 

I am graphic arts challenged, sooo is a vector image what I would be looking for if I wanted to take a big ass photo and take it down to banner size with out making it look like a turd? 

No, photos are raster images. Resizing it to work on a web banner would best be done with photoshop, gimp, or if you dont' want to install a program, aviary is pretty cool 

Yeah I tried in ps but everything gets squished and flattened. No big deal I normally fail at ps stuff. 

Vector images are mathematically produced, which means when you blow them up, all the proportions can be scaled up, rather than just increasing the size of pixels. 

Gotcha, I just read up on them. 

You need to ensure that you constrain the proportions and select the proper resampling algorithm (both within the "Image size" options) If the image is not the same aspect ratio of your banner you can use the "canvas size" option to crop it to the right size after resizing it to make it the right size. 

I think I tried all of that before. It has been a few months since I gave up getting it to work. Thankis for the info though. 

Well, PS isn't going to squish and flatten it unless you tell it to. 

When I get back to work on tuesday I will post an example. 

noneater said:

If you're looking for some UI design principles, I'd highly recommend Don't Make Me Think . It's a light read, 195 pages, but it's got some really great usability concepts and advice in there which will surely help with UI design. It's cheap too, so even if you don't like it, it's no big loss.

I actually read that already and found it somewhat "meh". It was just a lot of common-sense theories... I found myself thinking "well duh... of course" for most of it and not really learning anything that wasn't totally obvious. I'm looking for something with more practical, applicable advice and techniques I guess. 

Well then, it's a good thing it was cheap :-) 

Yeah, my boss bought it for me and the developers here - I (the one who doesn't actually write our software) was the only one who read it. :P 

I got the first edition of Designing with Web Standards a couple of years ago. Looks like it's on the 3rd revision now. I assume that the content is still very much relevant these days. This is an alarmingly brilliant book. 

Would any of you know how to get the copyright image to appear in Photoshop CS3? My wife is trying to get it into an image and she's tried the CTRL + 0169 but it still isn't displaying the copyright logo in the text. She's on a laptop that doesn't have a numerical pad, though she's entering in the numbers on the top keyboard (I had heard you need to use the numerical pad). Any ideas what could be wrong? 

Would any of you be open to doing a site similar to this?

http://www.achachliebling.com/

My wife needs a shopping cart site for her Steampunk jewelry. This is the site she has currently, though it doesn't have a shopping cart, it only links into her Etsy shop: http://www.oncelostjewelry.com/. She was about to do a deal with a designer for $400, though I wanted to check with you guys and see if you might be open to do something and compare cost to what she's been offered. She's also open to doing a cash / trade model on her stuff if you saw any of her pieces you'd like.

She has a new business card and banner that she designed below that is the new design style she's looking to use for her site:

http://i37.tinypic.com/15mmomp.jpg

http://i34.tinypic.com/8wdqj8.jpg

http://i37.tinypic.com/dh47yu.jpg

If any of you would be interested, shoot me a PM with some examples of other sites you've done. 

That picture on the ach ach site is really unflattering.

As for the copyright image, just copy/paste this: ©
I'm on a Mac, I don't know how to do it in Windows.

Has your wife looked into like http://Etsy.com or something?
Seems like getting in on a community like that could be more of a benefit
than just having a site with a shopping cart. 

I'm also a giant idiot who can't read posts. 

$400 sounds like a pretty good deal if the designer can deliver. 

Yeah that sounds pretty cheap. I'm migrating a site to a new eCommerce system and the old one which was completely freeware and shitty cost them $700. I'm doing hourly on this since I just have to design, mod and transfer product, but its already over $1,000. 

Gotcha.. I kind of figured it was a steal. Though it's hard to say how it'll end up looking once it's done. 

Are there any good web design magazines in the US? It seems like all the ones I'm finding online are from the UK... 

RandallFlagg said:

Would any of you know how to get the copyright image to appear in Photoshop CS3? My wife is trying to get it into an image and she's tried the CTRL + 0169 but it still isn't displaying the copyright logo in the text. She's on a laptop that doesn't have a numerical pad, though she's entering in the numbers on the top keyboard (I had heard you need to use the numerical pad). Any ideas what could be wrong?

You want ALT + 0169, not CTRL. You may also need to enable a different keyboard mode (num lock for example) to make the top numbers work like the number pad - depends on the laptop. 

Has she tried using the Windows Character Map?
Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Character Map