If I have one gripe about SharePoint 2010, it’s scrolling. It’s something I’ve bumped into in every 2010 project I’ve worked on thus far (which has been a lot). First, I’ll explain the problem, and we’ll subsequently look at some potential solutions (which have their drawbacks) for this highly visible and hotly debated element of the SharePoint interface.
I have a bumpy relationship with Flash technology. I love to hate it, and hate to love it. It’s an essential element of the online experience, allowing some amazing functionality (when it’s used correctly) like video, interactive graphs and charts, and the interactive extension of capabilities that you simply can’t do with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
I’m very excited to be a part of the upcoming SharePoint .ORG Conference that will be held in Baltimore this year. If you have even a small amount of interest in SharePoint or SharePoint design, you’ll love the line-up. I’ve attended and have spoken at numerous conferences and events around the country, but this is the first SharePoint conference I’ve seen with a dedicated “design” track. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to speak at a few of the design sessions, and I look forward to seeing any readers at the conference.
I am starting to see a pattern. It is approaching the end of the year, and as with many, hindsight is on the mind. Over the course of my blog, I think I’ve set a course and direction for what I write. The web has definitely changed since my first post in September of 2008; so too have we, as designers, developers, and avid fans of the internet. We have altered our methods, our tools, and our expectations for what a website should be. In all of this change, I have clung to one idea that holds me steady on this shaky ground: constraint.
SharePoint 2010 makes it incredibly easy to add dialog content to your website. Built-in functionality allows you to retrieve content from anywhere within your site and display it in a modal dialog that appears over the page. This is pretty standard stuff when it comes to modern web technology, but the ease of use is what makes SharePoint dialogs so amazing. In this article, we’ll explore the dialog functionality that comes with the SharePoint 2010 platform, and we’ll discover new ways to customize that content to create a uniquely fresh appearance for your SharePoint portal.
I do quite a bit of design and implementation on the SharePoint platform. Today, I created a very handy little script that I think might be something worth sharing. I don’t often post anything so specific on my blog, but I found this to be extremely useful, and I hope you do too.
Bigger, better, and bolder. That’s the direction of things. The art of the interface is a little more complex than it was yesterday. We have new techniques, new technology (languages and libraries and acronyms, oh my), and even more bandwidth to back it all up. What to do with all this power? The possibilities are nearly limitless. I say, take it down a notch.
Header text gets all the love, doesn’t it? From Photoshop to the browser window, the focus seems to be on design elements like logos, navigation, and of course, header type. It’s great fun to use tools like Typekit to make your header text something a little less than ordinary. It defines your site, gives you a unique look and feel, and gives readers that oh-so-scannable sensation they know and love. When you really think about it, however, readers aren’t there for the header text. The headers serve as an essential tool to quickly find what you’re looking for, but the real prize here is the body text, isn’t it? This is where your information is, this is where you write and communicate to readers, and this is an area of design that cannot be neglected. Sadly, it often is.
It’s a very cool feature to have a form field that has prompt text such as Enter search keywords… right inside the input box, itself. It looks good, it makes sense to users, and it can save a lot of real estate in your design by negating the need for field labels. The problem, however, is that there are about one hundred ways to implement prompt text, and ninety-nine of them are wrong. Let’s look at this thing from all angles and come up with a fantastically simple and reliable way to make this work.
If you’re into client-scripting, then jQuery AJAX is probably your thing (if it’s not, perhaps it should be!). jQuery has some fantastic support for AJAX, and implementing it into your web application is so easy it’s stupid. The AJAX functionality in the AJAX library is so flexible, sometimes it’s easy to get lost when you’re trying to do something very simple. I’ve come up with a very basic jQuery AJAX template that I use for just about everything I do, and I thought it might be useful to share.