Helpful Documents and Websites for UX Conscious Web UI Designers and Front-End Developers

As you may know, I’ve been working on an official UX Style Guide document for DNN. It’s almost ready and should be made available to the community around the same time that DNN 5.5.0 is released in August.

Working on this document required quite a lot of research.  I’d never pulled together a complete style guide from scratch before and I wanted to be sure that every guideline I included was backed up by information and evidence that was available from the greater user experience design community. As a result of this research I discovered several useful online documents and web sites that all informed my decisions around the specific guidelines that I have included in the document.

Collected, these these online documents and web sites are very useful resources for any front-end developer or web UI designer who wishes to improve their users’ experience. I am including this list in the DNN UX Style Guide document but I also thought it would be beneficial to the DNN Community if I posted it here as well.

:-j(enni)

Accessibility in Visual Studio and ASP.NET

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228004(v=VS.100).aspx
This page on the Microsoft web site provides an overview of the relevant standards and of some techniques for how to configure ASP.NET Web server controls to make sure that they generate accessible HTML.
 

ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms227996.aspx
This page lists ASP.NET server controls and provides information about accessibility considerations that pertain to each control. If a control is not listed on the page, it generates markup that conforms to current accessibility guidelines without any configuration requirements.
 

Global Market Share Statistics

http://www.netmarketshare.com/
This site provides detailed statistics on the current and past market share for different browsers, search engines, operating systems, mobile usage, and monitor resolutions. Some of the information is only available to subscribers, but information on browsers, search engines, operating systems and screen resolutions are available free of charge.
This site no longer makes more than the top five results in any statistical category available free of charge, making it less than useful as a general resource. I have replaced it with the similar Stat Owl site, listed below.
 

Section 508 Website

http://www.section508.gov/
This site contains the complete text of and other information about Section 508 of the United States’ Rehabilitation Act. Any Web site that is developed by a US federal agency is required by this document to be accessible to persons with disabilities. This law applies to federal agencies and to companies that contract with them and many states and municipalities have also adopted these guidelines.
 

Stat Owl

http://www.statowl.com/
This site provides detailed statistics on the current and past market share for different browsers, search engines, operating systems, mobile usage, and monitor resolutions. All global information is available free of charge, but corporations may sign up to gain access to detailed reports for their own web sites.
I have added this site to replace "Global Market Share Statistics" which, due to changes in what is available free of charge, is no longer useful as a general resource. (As it turns out, Stat Owl has a much more useful display interface too.)
 

Telerik AJAX Enabled ASP.NET UI Components

http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-ajax.aspx
This is the main information site for Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, a component package that is included in all DotNetNuke distributions and available to developers working on core DotNetNuke components. The DotNetNuke core also includes wrappers for some of these components making those particular controls available for use by 3^rd party developers.
 

Treasury Board of Canada Common Look and Feel Standards

http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/clf2-nsi2/index-eng.asp
This site provides access to the UX standards that must be followed by all web sites developed by Canadian government agencies.
 

W3C CSS Validation Service

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
This service allows you to check the validity of your cascading styles, providing a log of any errors encountered. You may validate an individual CSS file or an [X]HTML document with a style sheet and the file may be specified by URI, file upload or direct input.
 

W3C Internationalization Activity

http://www.w3.org/International/
This site includes resources to help with the internationalization (support for different languages, scripts and cultures) of web technology.
 

W3C Markup Validation Service

http://validator.w3.org/
This service allows you to check the validity of your [X]HTML markup, providing a log of any errors encountered. You may specify the markup to be validated by URI, file upload or direct input.
 

W3C Mobile Web Initiative

http://www.w3.org/Mobile/
This site includes recommended best practices for creating and testing mobile-friendly content and web applications.
 

W3C mobileOK Checker 

http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
This service performs various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. A web page is considered “mobileOK” if it passes all the tests.
 

W3C Unicorn Unified Validator 

http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/
This is a new tool by the W3C which allows you check the validity of your [X]HTML, CSS, and Atom/RSS Feeds as well as the mobileOK status of the page, all at the same time.
 

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative 

http://www.w3.org/WAI/
This site includes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) document, tips and techniques on how to apply WCAG 2.0 and information on how to manage and evaluate web accessibility.
 

W3C XHTML Media Types – Second Edition 

http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-xhtml-media-types-20090116/
This W3C Working Group Note contains suggestions about how to format XHTML to ensure it is maximally portable, and how to deliver XHTML to various user agents – even those that do not yet support XHTML natively. Of particular note is Appendix A, “Compatibility Guidelines” which summarizes design guidelines for authors who wish their XHTML documents to render on both XHTML-aware and modern HTML user agents.
 

XHTML Standards in Visual Studio and ASP.NET 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exc57y7e(v=VS.100).aspx
This page on the Microsoft web site provides an overview of the ASP.NET features for XHTML conformance and how to control the XHTML standard to which ASP.NET pages and controls are rendered. It also provides a list of ASP.NET controls that can or will generate non-compliant markup.