The Costco Challenge: An Alternative to Wal-Martization?

Hmmm, fancy that, by paying their workers a fair living wage Costco actually saves money by retaining more effecient workers, and not having to constantly recruit, interview, test and train new employees. Nice to see some positive numbers behind the benefits of actually conducting business with integrety and some sense of moral good. Or maybe there's no good intent, but they have figured out a more sustainable business model that benefits the employees as a side effect.

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags

Here we have another strength of links over categories:

When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them. - Zero Effect

That is, often when I am looking for something (a movie to watch, design inspiration) I don't actually know what I'm looking for. So if I'm drilling down deeper into categories, if I made a mistake early on I may just be getting further and further from what I'm looking for. But if I'm following links they may take me on a tangent that leads somewhere with little connection to where I started, but it might just be exactly where I didn't know I wanted to be.

Access Matters - Screen Readers and CSS Layout

"Today’s screen readers speak the content in the order it is written in the HTML."

It's great to have someone who actually has screen readers available verify this. This also means that fangs will be a reasonable approximation of most screenreaders. So the most important thing to consider with regards to standards based layouts and accessibility is source code order and appropriate use of "skip links". That doesn't sound so hard.

Type Directors Club : News : TDC2 2005 Results

While it's true that "Low-density scans cannot do complete justice to the high quality of the printed material." in a few cases they might have tried just a little harder in migrating the material to the web. That aside, what fun to see a fresh new collection of faces, and so varied.

csolyn.com redesign

http://www.csolyn.com/staging/

Having come up with three viable designs, Cybil and I are now stuck in the position of having to pick only one. Could you help by leaving your thoughts in the comments?

Here are the goals of the home page:

1. Give existing clients her schedule at all her locations.
2. Define the term "Skin Fitness Expert" which her PR campaign will be centered around.
3. Answer one of the most frequent questions she gets, "Where else do you work?"

As far as the look&feel are concerned the goal is to be, "more of a personal site than a spa site."