Sunday, July 27, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Career Focus
Some of tips on Career Focus and Get the Best jobs in your field
Set goals
Be clear on where you would like to go with your career and formulate a 1, 3 and 5 year plan to get there. Set realistic milestones and targets, take inventory at frequent intervals and update these plans regularly.
Find a mentor
Identify someone in your field who can advise and counsel you in matters career-related and refer to this mentor in making the important career decisions as well as in negotiating the nuts-and-bolts issues that confront you on a day-to-day basis.
Mentor somebody
Become a mentor yourself to a younger professional to stay networked, build a reputation in a different peer group and stay abreast of developments in other divisions or companies.
Know yourself
Be honest about your strengths and weaknesses so you can work on them and try to see yourself as your peers see you bearing in mind that perception is everything.
Never stop learning
Invest in yourself by becoming a life-long learner. No matter how valuable our skills are, chances are they can be updated and upgraded through ongoing learning and training. Take responsibility for your own development and make sure you stay ahead of the learning curve by constantly updating your professional skills and credentials.
Hone your communications skills
Communication skills are essential to career success. Learn to give and receive constructive feedback, to persuade effectively and to solicit help and garner resources. Effective communications also entail learning to listen actively and attentively.
Keep the company's goals in mind
Treat your company as your most important client and don't lose sight of the company's vision, mission, values and objectives in anything you do. Also bear in mind the company's policies and procedures and seek to work within them or work with the leadership teams that amend or improve them.
Use your performance appraisals effectively
Performance appraisals are your opportunity to take on added responsibility and discuss where your career is headed and how you can propel it in the right direction by garnering the appropriate resources and support; use them appropriately.
Network
Whether it's through joining professional associations or being active in college or high school alumni clubs or other networking forums, it is important to remain networked in the community and to continue to broaden your circle of influence and network of contacts.
Volunteer
Represent your company in a community initiative or join a local community drive to make a difference and heighten your visibility outside of your immediate professional circle of influence.
Work on your interpersonal skills
Treat others as you would like to be treated - manners, respect and generally courteous behaviour travel a long way in the workplace.
Never bad-mouth bosses or peers
The surest way to lose the respect and trust of your boss or peers is to bad-mouth those you work with or previously worked with. Avoid office gossip and spreading negative opinions at all costs.
Upgrade your job
Bearing in mind that responsibility is taken, seldom given, always be on the look-out for new functions and responsibilities to add to your job description. Make yourself an indispensable part of the team by showing an eagerness to grow in your job and continuously being open to new methods, ideas and initiatives that positively impact the company's bottom line.
Develop a reputation as an expert in your field
Seek to become known as a true professional, a star player, someone who goes an extra mile in his/her job and who is a genuinely invaluable resource in a particular area. A reputation as an outstanding performer is your best asset in negotiating raises and promotions.
Promote yourself
Make sure others in the company, especially your superiors, know of your role and your accomplishments. Publicize your achievements and don't be afraid of blowing your own horn in order to get the recognition, praise and promotions you deserve.
Be passionate about what you do
The best way to excel is to be genuinely passionate about what you do. Enthusiasm is both visible and infectious and you will find others in the organisation as well as clients naturally gravitating towards you as your eagerness and passion for your job makes itself known.
Look the part
The most accomplished professionals are not necessarily the best dressed but good grooming and professional attire do convey the image you want to portray and leave an important lasting first impression.
Work smart
Focus on those aspects of your role that genuinely impact the effectiveness of the organisation and company's bottom line; its not just about how many hours you put in and how hard you work but also about the value of your output.
Leave your personal problems at home
No matter what is happening with the kids, the neighbours or the family dog, the workplace is only for dealing with workplace matters; leave all personal issues strictly at home.
Be a team player
Today's workplace necessitates being a teamplayer and working well with others. Be co-operative, eager and always willing and prepared to pitch in to make a project succeed.
Remember, if you follow these simple career tips you are not only optimizing your career, you are optimizing your life
Set goals
Be clear on where you would like to go with your career and formulate a 1, 3 and 5 year plan to get there. Set realistic milestones and targets, take inventory at frequent intervals and update these plans regularly.
Find a mentor
Identify someone in your field who can advise and counsel you in matters career-related and refer to this mentor in making the important career decisions as well as in negotiating the nuts-and-bolts issues that confront you on a day-to-day basis.
Mentor somebody
Become a mentor yourself to a younger professional to stay networked, build a reputation in a different peer group and stay abreast of developments in other divisions or companies.
Know yourself
Be honest about your strengths and weaknesses so you can work on them and try to see yourself as your peers see you bearing in mind that perception is everything.
Never stop learning
Invest in yourself by becoming a life-long learner. No matter how valuable our skills are, chances are they can be updated and upgraded through ongoing learning and training. Take responsibility for your own development and make sure you stay ahead of the learning curve by constantly updating your professional skills and credentials.
Hone your communications skills
Communication skills are essential to career success. Learn to give and receive constructive feedback, to persuade effectively and to solicit help and garner resources. Effective communications also entail learning to listen actively and attentively.
Keep the company's goals in mind
Treat your company as your most important client and don't lose sight of the company's vision, mission, values and objectives in anything you do. Also bear in mind the company's policies and procedures and seek to work within them or work with the leadership teams that amend or improve them.
Use your performance appraisals effectively
Performance appraisals are your opportunity to take on added responsibility and discuss where your career is headed and how you can propel it in the right direction by garnering the appropriate resources and support; use them appropriately.
Network
Whether it's through joining professional associations or being active in college or high school alumni clubs or other networking forums, it is important to remain networked in the community and to continue to broaden your circle of influence and network of contacts.
Volunteer
Represent your company in a community initiative or join a local community drive to make a difference and heighten your visibility outside of your immediate professional circle of influence.
Work on your interpersonal skills
Treat others as you would like to be treated - manners, respect and generally courteous behaviour travel a long way in the workplace.
Never bad-mouth bosses or peers
The surest way to lose the respect and trust of your boss or peers is to bad-mouth those you work with or previously worked with. Avoid office gossip and spreading negative opinions at all costs.
Upgrade your job
Bearing in mind that responsibility is taken, seldom given, always be on the look-out for new functions and responsibilities to add to your job description. Make yourself an indispensable part of the team by showing an eagerness to grow in your job and continuously being open to new methods, ideas and initiatives that positively impact the company's bottom line.
Develop a reputation as an expert in your field
Seek to become known as a true professional, a star player, someone who goes an extra mile in his/her job and who is a genuinely invaluable resource in a particular area. A reputation as an outstanding performer is your best asset in negotiating raises and promotions.
Promote yourself
Make sure others in the company, especially your superiors, know of your role and your accomplishments. Publicize your achievements and don't be afraid of blowing your own horn in order to get the recognition, praise and promotions you deserve.
Be passionate about what you do
The best way to excel is to be genuinely passionate about what you do. Enthusiasm is both visible and infectious and you will find others in the organisation as well as clients naturally gravitating towards you as your eagerness and passion for your job makes itself known.
Look the part
The most accomplished professionals are not necessarily the best dressed but good grooming and professional attire do convey the image you want to portray and leave an important lasting first impression.
Work smart
Focus on those aspects of your role that genuinely impact the effectiveness of the organisation and company's bottom line; its not just about how many hours you put in and how hard you work but also about the value of your output.
Leave your personal problems at home
No matter what is happening with the kids, the neighbours or the family dog, the workplace is only for dealing with workplace matters; leave all personal issues strictly at home.
Be a team player
Today's workplace necessitates being a teamplayer and working well with others. Be co-operative, eager and always willing and prepared to pitch in to make a project succeed.
Remember, if you follow these simple career tips you are not only optimizing your career, you are optimizing your life
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Liquid Design
Liquid Design
· Liquid design means that the web site adapts itself to the available space, the same way water takes the shape of the glass it is in.
Importance of 'liquid design' in creating accessible web design
The goal of liquid design is providing similar experience to people and eliminate possible irritating design flaws such as too much white space, disappearance of certain sectors of information due to lack of space etc. If you decide liquid design is suitable for your web site, here is a simple way to do it.
Ice sites, Jelly sites and Liquid sites
According to design style, websites fall into three categories:
· Ice web sites: are very rigid sites. The box that holds the content is fixed to the left. On higher resolutions appears a blank space stripe on the right causing a lack of equilibrium in the design.
· Jelly web sites: are the middle solution between rigid and flexible. The box holding the content is centered at any resolution thus preserving equilibrium, while still not using up all of the available space.
· Liquid web sites: are the utopia of flexibility, a site with no constraints whatsoever. Liquid sites expand or shrink to the available space on the screen monitor, no matter what browser window size or resolution the user might be using.
Is liquid design adequate for any web site?
In order to make a decision whether liquid design is suitable for a web site, factors such as type of content, structure, amount of information must be taken in consideration. Liquid design is ideal for sites with a lot of information. The elasticity of such sites increases readability.
Advantages of positioning with CSS
It allows disabled users to hear the content being read out first by their speech-based browser.
For all users the content will be the very first thing that loads (the loading time will be virtually instant) leaving the graphics and other bandwidth consuming elements to load in the background while the user is accessing the information. While this is a huge advantage for sites that use many graphics, it is not limited to them. Any site can reduce load time to a minimum by making use of CSS positioning.
Why Use External CSS?
It keeps your website design and content separate.
It's much easier to reuse your CSS code if you have it in a separate file. Instead of typing the same CSS code on every web page you have, simply have many pages refer to a single CSS file with the "link" tag.
You can make drastic changes to your web pages with just a few changes in a single CSS file.
This is cool for scope attribute:
Linking headers to data: the scope, id and headers attributes
Many tables are more complex than the example table I’ve been using so far. I’ll make it a little more complex by removing the “Company” header and changing the data cells in the first column into header cells: Company data
Employees
Founded
ACME Inc
1000
1947
XYZ Corp
2000
1973
In this table, each data cell has two headers. The simplest method, markup-wise, of making sure that a non-visual browser can make sense of this table is to add a scope attribute to all header cells:
The scope attribute defines whether a header cell provides header information for a column or a row:
col: header information for the column it is in
row: header information for the row it is in
Adding a scope attribute with the value col to the headers in the first row declares that they are headers for the data cells below them. Likewise, giving the headers that begin each row a scope with the value row makes them headers for the data cells to their right.
The scope attribute can take two more values:
colgroup: header information for the rest of the column group that contains it
rowgroup: header information for the rest of the row group that contains it
A column group is defined by the element. Row groups are defined by the , and elements. I’ll get back to those in a bit.
The benefits
It may look like a lot of work to create accessible data tables in HTML. For complex tables, it is. Sometimes to the point where it gets almost impossible to do by hand. For simple tables though, using header cells with a scope attribute is quick and easy.
It’s obvious that people using screen readers or other assistive technology benefit from tables that use the available accessibility features. Trying to make sense of a large and complex table by listening to it can still be very difficult, so if at all possible, simplify the table.
Less obvious is that designers and users of graphical browsers also benefit: an accessible table has plenty of structural hooks to apply CSS to, and good styling can make the table more usable for everybody.
…
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
· Liquid design means that the web site adapts itself to the available space, the same way water takes the shape of the glass it is in.
Importance of 'liquid design' in creating accessible web design
The goal of liquid design is providing similar experience to people and eliminate possible irritating design flaws such as too much white space, disappearance of certain sectors of information due to lack of space etc. If you decide liquid design is suitable for your web site, here is a simple way to do it.
Ice sites, Jelly sites and Liquid sites
According to design style, websites fall into three categories:
· Ice web sites: are very rigid sites. The box that holds the content is fixed to the left. On higher resolutions appears a blank space stripe on the right causing a lack of equilibrium in the design.
· Jelly web sites: are the middle solution between rigid and flexible. The box holding the content is centered at any resolution thus preserving equilibrium, while still not using up all of the available space.
· Liquid web sites: are the utopia of flexibility, a site with no constraints whatsoever. Liquid sites expand or shrink to the available space on the screen monitor, no matter what browser window size or resolution the user might be using.
Is liquid design adequate for any web site?
In order to make a decision whether liquid design is suitable for a web site, factors such as type of content, structure, amount of information must be taken in consideration. Liquid design is ideal for sites with a lot of information. The elasticity of such sites increases readability.
Advantages of positioning with CSS
It allows disabled users to hear the content being read out first by their speech-based browser.
For all users the content will be the very first thing that loads (the loading time will be virtually instant) leaving the graphics and other bandwidth consuming elements to load in the background while the user is accessing the information. While this is a huge advantage for sites that use many graphics, it is not limited to them. Any site can reduce load time to a minimum by making use of CSS positioning.
Why Use External CSS?
It keeps your website design and content separate.
It's much easier to reuse your CSS code if you have it in a separate file. Instead of typing the same CSS code on every web page you have, simply have many pages refer to a single CSS file with the "link" tag.
You can make drastic changes to your web pages with just a few changes in a single CSS file.
This is cool for scope attribute:
Linking headers to data: the scope, id and headers attributes
Many tables are more complex than the example table I’ve been using so far. I’ll make it a little more complex by removing the “Company” header and changing the data cells in the first column into header cells: Company data
Employees
Founded
ACME Inc
1000
1947
XYZ Corp
2000
1973
In this table, each data cell has two headers. The simplest method, markup-wise, of making sure that a non-visual browser can make sense of this table is to add a scope attribute to all header cells:
The scope attribute defines whether a header cell provides header information for a column or a row:
col: header information for the column it is in
row: header information for the row it is in
Adding a scope attribute with the value col to the headers in the first row declares that they are headers for the data cells below them. Likewise, giving the headers that begin each row a scope with the value row makes them headers for the data cells to their right.
The scope attribute can take two more values:
colgroup: header information for the rest of the column group that contains it
rowgroup: header information for the rest of the row group that contains it
A column group is defined by the element. Row groups are defined by the , and elements. I’ll get back to those in a bit.
The benefits
It may look like a lot of work to create accessible data tables in HTML. For complex tables, it is. Sometimes to the point where it gets almost impossible to do by hand. For simple tables though, using header cells with a scope attribute is quick and easy.
It’s obvious that people using screen readers or other assistive technology benefit from tables that use the available accessibility features. Trying to make sense of a large and complex table by listening to it can still be very difficult, so if at all possible, simplify the table.
Less obvious is that designers and users of graphical browsers also benefit: an accessible table has plenty of structural hooks to apply CSS to, and good styling can make the table more usable for everybody.
| Date | Topic | What to read | What’s due |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 5 | Course overview | Chapter 1 | |
| September 7 | Accessibility standards | Introduction to WCAG 2.0 | Written questions about Introduction |
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