By Peter Bell

Handling International Address Inputs

Posted At : September 7, 2007 11:58 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Front End, Forms
How do you accept international address inputs? Lets say you have a site where most users are US, but some are international, where you want to maximize usability for US clients (do they REALLY need to type city and state in?!) but make it work for all users.

My first thoughts are as follows . . .

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Form Validation: On-blur or On Submit?

Posted At : September 7, 2007 10:42 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Front End, Forms
I've noticed recently a trend towards validating fields when you leave the field, so the form will immediately let you know whether your email address was valid or your username is unique. Obviously some dependent validations can't be done in this way, but in general terms it seems like a pretty good default approach to form validation.

What do you think? Should validations be performed ASAP or should they wait for a form submission? Obviously it depends - but on what? What would move you towards including or avoiding on blur field validations?

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Could Your Forms be Smarter?

Posted At : September 7, 2007 10:38 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Front End, Forms
Khoi Vinh just posted a really interesting article about form design. It raises some interesting questions about best practices for form design and how smart forms should be. For example, do you really need a credit card type drop down on checkout, and is it worth asking for city and state if you can infer them from the ZIP code? . . .

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What is a Website Made of?

Posted At : September 7, 2007 10:32 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Front End, CSS
As part of my recent foray into CSS, I spent some time looking at the last 40 sites I've developed. A few were for direct clients, most were from one of our three primary design partners we worked with while we were developing SystemsForge. I found that from a semantic perspective there tended to be a pretty small number of common "container" elements we could have used to build almost all of the sites . . .

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Why Bother With CSS (Help me out!)?

Posted At : September 6, 2007 10:38 AM | Posted By : Peter Bell
Related Categories: Front End, CSS
I try very hard to focus on the back end of the web applications we generate. Creating a system for quickly and efficiently generating the server side code for flexible, custom web apps is more than enough to keep me out of trouble. Unfortunately that isn't working out so well. Some of our clients create table based layouts which are inaccessible, bad for SEO and hard to maintain. Others ask us to outsource the production of CSS from jpeg mock-ups which has consistently resulted in CSS that is more tortured and hard to maintain (and no more semantic) that the table based layouts it is designed to improve upon . . .

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