Veerle's blog

There’s a lot of talk these days about where the women of CSS are. Molly is asking, Douglas Bowman is asking,… Why are there far less women then men in this field? Maybe there are women out there but they are less vocal or haven’t reached the “celebrity” status as some men do. Of course I haven’t been around long enough so my time might still come where people will remember my name who knows. Also I’m still learning myself, so I’m far from an expert (yet). I can only yell “hello?! I’m here” but if you don’t get heard then I’m one of the many women in this CSS world.

Today I will bring you the next step of our tutorial about designing a CSS based template page. This part is about choosing the right color scheme and creating a nice background pattern for our webpage. Here is part 1 for those who missed it and want to catch up.

As you all know, my initial idea was to give you a small tutorial on how to create glassy buttons in an easy way. That’s why it might look a bit odd to you that we will think about color-schemes in the 2nd part of our tutorial. This should actually be our first step, then the creation of the buttons, the background etc.

I’m using and reading a lot about web standards for a while now, and it’s becoming clear to me that using these standards isn’t just something to be proud of to say “hey your site validates welcome to the club”, it’s so much more. But unfortunately you sometimes get the feeling that when you do you are part of an “elite” of web designers and that’s it. Just using it and telling others about it etc. is not enough. Thing is, if we only do this then I think next year and the year after that everything will still be the same, a small group of designers will use web standards but the majority will still create I.E. only websites etc. So my question is, where do we go from here?

If you’re seriously into web standards then this survey should be on your ToDo list. WaSP is a popular resource for people of many backgrounds. They are trying to get a clear picture of the people who are using web standards.

Maybe you don’t know who Jakob Nielsen is, he’s a usability expert with an ugly website called Alert Box. Some of you might have discovered this article, but for those who didn’t, I can only advice to take a look and read the story. Design and usability don’t always go hand in hand so prefectly. But now a team of web professionals has proven the oposite in a superb piece of kraftmanship on guidelines for visualizing links.