I was fortunate enough to get to Baltimore for this year’s DrupalCon. Here’s a few takeaways regarding Drupal’s open-source community. The community is still strong. There has been some major turbulence recently with the dismissal of a community member from his position as DrupalCon track chair. It’s had repercussions about issues of both governance …
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Avoiding the boom/bust website cycle
How to ensure that satisfaction in your websites remains high, while also levelling out your spending A typical website is created in a burst of activity (and spending), then “launched” to the public. There is probably some really great thinking that went into it, but because no one can predict the future, you don’t really …
Read more »Accessibility As You Go: Part 3
Picking up where we left off in Part 2, in which we went over some of the tools and design considerations for accessibility, in Part 3 we’ll review some tips for minimizing accessibility issues by addressing them early in the development process. Plan Your DOM Order DOM is Document Object Model, which is the fancy …
Read more »Accessibility As You Go: Part 2
Picking up where we left off from the first in our Accessibility As You Go series: Testing Tools and Design Process Nip Color Contrast Issues in the Bud During the design phase, it’s important to verify that all text on the site has high enough contrast with its background color. Level AA contrast requires a …
Read more »Accessibility As You Go: Part 1
Introduction and Terminology Earlier this year, I went to a tech accessibility event here in Minneapolis (sponsored by Clockwork and WeCO) that was incredibly enlightening. Participants got a chance to watch and ask questions as several users with different impairments interacted with websites: A blind man was visibly frustrated using a screen reader that kept getting trapped …
Read more »Theming Drupal 8 pages based on URL
We’ve been all heads down over here, digging in to Drupal 8. We are trying to figure out best practices for the front end, now that we are no longer building new sites in Drupal 7, and documenting as we go. It has been fun picking things up, and I’d like to try to share more …
Read more »Election Day Coping Strategy: Tech-Themed Cocktails
Here in the US, November 8th, 2016 is a stressful day. Advomatic can help you with that. Our solution is not quite technical, but it is tech-flavored. As our development team was working trying to work weeping with despair and horror talking today, we were looking at one of our project management tools (Pivotal Tracker). Someone had added what …
Read more »DrupalCamp LA: A Recap (and the power of local community)
This past weekend was the weekend of my local DrupalCamp, DrupalCamp LA. This year was again at the University of California Irvine campus, though the camp had moved to a new building. The new digs were quite nice, especially the largest room which provided auditorium seating and held many more people than the space did …
Read more »Saving Time with Component-based Design
As someone who creates and implements designs for nonprofit organizations, I have learned a lot of ways to keep costs down. There are many little tips and tricks, like leveraging open source software, free fonts, and creative commons stock photos. But the most comprehensive way I’ve found to both meet client needs, keep project costs …
Read more »Fake it til you make it: A recipe for slanted text
In Jen Simmons’ recent presentation on modern layouts for the web, she takes down current web design conventions, and asks us to consider looking at the print world for inspiration. One such inspiration she points to is text wrapping around complex images. Why hasn’t there been more of that? Well, we haven’t been able to do it in …
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