Showing posts with label usability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label usability. Show all posts

3/31/2012

Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) Review

Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
What's in this book my manager, users, and I have been waiting for. This is a great start in branding and User design work for SharePoint 2010. I've been really busy setting up our corporate farm and working with some of our developers on cool new solutions. Now I can deliver them with a solid brand and a fresh look and feel that is unique and professional. This book will set you on a course with fresh ideas and confidence.
I've spent the last few days with this book and being new to SharePoint and specifically new to SharePoint 2010 I really appreciate the depth the authors have used in their topics. Everyone will get something from this book. From the new SharePointer to the old salt, there is something here for everyone.
I truly appreciated the sections on customizing the ribbon, wireframes, and the entire section on SharePoint Designer 2010. I also now have a new perspective on waffles!! If nothing else this book will keep you wanting a delicious breakfast treat!!
Black Friday is upon us, what a perfect gift for that SharePoint geek in your life!

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A must have guide for creating engaging and usable SharePoint 2010 branding
With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has provided a more robust environment for creating collaboration and content management sites that rival any of the popular websites on the internet. Creating a branded SharePoint site involves understanding both traditional web design techniques as well as topics that are typically reserved for developers. This book bridges that gap by not only providing expert guidance for creating beautiful public facing and internal intranet sites but it also addresses the needs of those readers that only want to understand the basics enough to apply some style to their sites.
Things like creative design, the experience visitors have navigating your user interface, ease of use?these are all important branding considerations and not always intuitive. This unique book from a team of SharePoint branding experts lays it all out. The book is divided into four sections:
Introduction to SharePoint Branding: In this part you will learn about what SharePoint branding is and how the topic has changed since SharePoint 2007.
Branding Basics: This section is geared towards both getting started as well as being a guide for people that don?t want to dive super deep into the advanced topics of SharePoint branding. You will learn about how to plan for branding projects, including creating wireframes and creative mockups as well as gathering requirements and estimation. You will learn how to work with SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint 2010 themes, and SharePoint navigation as well as gain an understanding of the low and medium effort approaches to branding can be used to make SharePoint look more like your own visual style.
Advanced Branding: This is where you will learn about the more intricate techniques for making large changes to the SharePoint UI, such as cascading style sheets (CSS), master pages, page layouts, web parts and XSLT. You will also get an introduction to deploying SharePoint branding to production servers using solution packages (WSP).
Other Topics: Everything else that is related to SharePoint branding is discussed here, including working with the SharePoint 2010 ribbon and client side technologies such as the client object model, jQuery, and Silverlight.

Whether you want to make SharePoint look completely different or just make minor design changes, this expert guide will provide tips, techniques, and insights to get the job done.

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1/26/2012

Designing Web Usability Review

Designing Web Usability
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
I agree with other reviewers, Jakob does present his ideas as Rules You Must Follow, rather than observations or suggestions. On a few things, he offers no data to back up his assertion, and on a couple things I know he's factually incorrect. I also agree that there are a lot of typos in this book, but only if you're observant.
However, what he does present is just great. I like the writing style. I like the example images. For example, when he says to design for "any" screen size, and then shows you 3 screenshots of Web sites that lock themselves into a certain size, that certainly illuminates how stupid some designers can be.
One other point. Jakob is writing for usability, about how people get information. He pays no attention to marketing issues, such as branding, creating product interest, giving the customer a memorable experience, entertainment, etc. It is fine that he concentrates on other areas, but know before you buy the book that you will have to make up you own mind in those areas (at least). For instance, site reports from the Web site I work on show that any time I throw a DHTML "whiz-bang" widget onto the site, the area it is promoting gets a doubling to a quadrupling of traffic. That flies in the face of his "don't use whiz-bang features" philosophy. But I've learned that his data and my data don't always agree. So take Jakob with a grain of salt.

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10/05/2011

Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices Review

Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices
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This book is an ideal text for providing intermediate-level web developers with a solid grounding in architectural principles and more advanced techniques. Before going into why I like this book I do want to offer one caveat - the authors' approach is towards the Model-View-Controller paradigm, and is based on Java Standard Tag Library, Jarkata struts and Apache. These are solid elements, but if you are working in a different environment you will not appreciate this book as much.
The historical material in this book is not fluff if you approach it with the intent to gain a fuller understanding of the major components of the Internet and web. This material is rich with details about why the core web technologies developed and evolved, including design choices the pioneers made in the face of constraints. In a subtle way this part of the book is a primer on design and architecture.
What makes this book so valuable is the non-trivial application that brings this book alive. This is a refreshing change from other books that use thinly contrived snippets of code or trivial applications. The code for this application can be downloaded from the book's supporting web site, which also contains errata (thus far there are only two entries), and articles that are valuable resources with or without this book.
Overall this is one of the better books on web application design and development, and one that dives into code and technical details.

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An in-depth examination of the core concepts and general principles of Web application development.This book uses examples from specific technologies (e.g., servlet API or XSL), without promoting or endorsing particular platforms or APIs. Such knowledge is critical when designing and debugging complex systems. This conceptual understanding makes it easier to learn new APIs that arise in the rapidly changing Internet environment.* Includes discussions of markup languages: HTML, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XHTML, eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)* Contains exercises geared to constructing an advanced XML application that makes use of XML and XSL parsers* Explores emerging technologies: Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), industry-specific XML standards, Resource Description Framework (RDF), and XML query languages

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