A web agency weblog

Despite being published in 2000, Steve Krug’s Don’t make me think is a great book covering the most important aspects of usability.

Believe me or not, I have just finished reading it for the third time. Steve offers us excellent ideas which you need to remember in a daily basis if you really are into web design. He has good jokes too (the donuts drawings in the first pages reminded me of many distracted customers I’d had).

You can read the book in one afternoon, he really applies the omit needless words concept here, one concept borrowed from Elements of Style and also mentioned by Stephen King in his excellent On Writing. The whole chapter on this subject is just a couple of pages.

I really like the way used by Steve to explain most usability concepts from the user perspective, specially the part in how users see a web page all blurred versus the way a designer hopes.

You can tell that Steve has been there when he talks about the religious debates arising between programmers, marketing people and designers when choosing certain interface elements .

But not everything is focused in design, Steve also talks about internal politics, which, as we all know, most of the times tie web developers hands.

There are many great resources online about usability, but Steve has made a great job of putting the most important issues in one easy to read package.

You should grab a copy of Don’t make me think even if you are not into web design, these concepts apply to many other fields too.

Get it, read it and let us know what you think about!

Are you looking for a high profile job? A job that allows you to show your skills in a great environment?

Then I am sure you will be interested in this Google job offering.

I already applied. I wish you luck and don’t forget to tell us how it went!

If there is anything that I always wanted to do, was having my wife working with me. Yesenia and I have a great relationship and there is nothing we enjoy more that being together at home with our daugther.

After many years working in another firm, she decided to quit and join Ventanazul. Well, to be honest I played a big part in that decision: I was always telling her to do it.

Yesenia will be taking care of customer relationships and billing. She will also be participating in some new pet projects which will be made public soon.

If you wish, you can greet her writing to yesenia at ventanazul.com.

Welcome aboard Yesi, thanks a lot for trusting me, I love you.

Today I got a really weird problem with IE 6. I had some floating divs in my page and noticed some characters were being repeated.

If I looked into the code everything was right, the good boys —Opera, Firefox, Mozilla— showed everything ok. I also tried with IE 5.01 and IE 5.5 —yep, I’ve got the multiple IE installations— and everything was fine there too.

So, I did what I always do when in trouble with my an XHTML / CSS design: Going to css-discuss archives and then googling a little.

It took me less than a minute to know that the duplicated elements bug is a known issue, due to having HTML comments between floats. Explorer Exposed tells us more about this problem.

Gosh, I really hate IE.