Silvanus' Blog

Archive for the ‘School’ Category

Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs

This article on A List Apart made some excellent points.  I often encounter issues where I would like to have my answers given easily by a FAQ, only to start reading a bunch of marketing goo.  If I’m digging around on your site for information, that you are not providing, no amount of ‘buy it cuz it’s awesome’ will convince me that is correct.  I want to know details about what I’m considering purchasing.  While reading this article, I recalled encountering the same issues the author refers to, being exasperated, and thinking much along the same lines.  Most FAQ’s out there are totally useless.  When I’m discussing site design, and page choices with a customer, I make sure that they have a truly viable reason to have each element they want to include.  Yes, there are common staples to most sites, but that doesn’t mean that every site needs to have them.  About Us pages are also one of the most worthless pages on most people’s sites, the same information included in them could simply be part of the Contact section of their site instead.  For me an About Us page should reflect the owners of the site/business, add a human element to the digital interface.  FAQ’s are essentially supposed to provide the same function, as if you are asking a business receptionist a question they can easily answer.  Most marketing related questions should be reflected in the product information, not in a FAQ.

So far this semester has been much of a refresher for me, a chance to put some of my skills to use.  However after receiving my excellent feedback regarding my xhtml+css pre-assessment, I was shown a couple of ways to do things differently.

I originally learned to build webpages back when tables were all that was available for controlling your layout.  After css came out, I sort of fell out of the loop for a while.  I struggled for some time to get css to behave the way I wanted.  I finally am getting a good handle on how to implement css pretty well.

The feedback from my pre-assess was very helpful, there were a few ‘ugly’ mistakes I had made.  After reviewing the pre-assess I turned around and implemented the suggested alternatives, and of course they worked quite well.  It took a little tweaking of my overall stylesheet to get everything to work out cleanly, but I was able to reproduce the same, if not better, look.  I had used comic sans as a font, because I was struggling to find a font that would duplicate the design appearance.  However, a quick replace with Verdana, leaving it with the font style of italic, produced the results I wanted.

I am really appreciating having involved online instructors.  Taking classes online is always a challenge in it’s own right, it’s great to have good instructor support.