UX & IA Design Thinking

It’s been a rough road getting this certification but I have officially passed both the MCTS 70-630 and 70-631 Microsoft Certification!

I have been working with Visio 2010 for a while now and I have to say that I am really happy the new features. I do all of my wireframes in Visio. These can be from 10-40+ pages. I used to struggle with duplicating pages in the past but now there is this great feature similar to how PowerPoint works. If you copy an object and past it on another page it places it in the same horizontal and vertical location from where you copied if from. In the past I had to create a temporary box and place it in the upper left corner of the page > copy both objects > paste those objects on another page and then line the temp. box back up in the upper left corner… I feel like I am in one of those Windows 7 Commercials. “I had this vision one day of Copying and Pasting an object and having it paste into the same location on another page. The next thing I know Microsoft released Visio 2010. I’m a PC and Visio 2010 was my Idea…” This not only works going from page to page but from one Visio do...

I hope this post will help many of you feel comfortable with using the Content Query Web Part. In this post I will walk you through the process of creating a content query web part and configuring it to show custom field types. I will also give details on how to use XSLT to stylize and format the data being pulled. I will be using the following scenario as an example. Say that you had a site collection with a top level publishing site. This publishing site would display a the most recent blog posts from all blog sites within its own site collection. To solve this problem we will use a Content Query Web Part and a customized ItemStyle.xsl using XSLT. Please note that the “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” needs to be enabled at the site collection to display the content query web part. Step 1: Add a Content Query Web Part to Page Navigate to the site that you want the blog posts to show up and click on edit page. Under Editing Tools in the Ribbon, Click on ...

As you design your sites it is very critical that you test, test, test. Here is a common issue that has caused a lot of people headache in the past. If you have ever had the issue of your datasheet background color being the same color as the body of your site here is a fix to get it back to normal. Say you wanted a SharePoint design that was fixed width and center justified. This is pretty easy as long as you don’t change the body color to anything other than white. Example: Fixed Width site with dark body background. You might think to use the following CSS: body{ background-color:#000; text-align: center; } .ms-main{ margin:0 auto; width: 980px; background-color:#FFF; } #mainTable{ width: 100%; } Well that would be great if you never wanted to use the datasheet viewer… Here is how it looks with the CSS from above: Whoa… Look familiar? Well with just using the following classes you can keep the background color for your site but n...

There have been multiple request for the source code related to my original post for creating a two tier global navigation in SharePoint 2007. Click HERE to download the supporting files. Here is what it will look like with once implemented with just the OOTB styles: Steps to get it implemented: Download the .zip file: HERE Navigate on your server to the following location: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80 Rename original “web.config” to “web_original.config” Copy custom web.config file to this location Open up the “_app_bin” folder in that same directory and copy in the “mainMenu.sitemap” file Upload the custom master page “globalnav.master” into the site collection master page gallery. Choose the globalnav.master as your site master page Once you see that it is working simply update the mainMenu.sitemap file in with your custom nodes. Thanks

In SharePoint Designer 2007 you can simply open up any type of file you wanted even if it did not reside in SharePoint. Well now things have change for 2010… Now you are forced to open up a SharePoint site before attempting to open up a file that resides outside of SharePoint. If you try before opening up a site you get the following error message: “You must first open a Web site before editing external Web pages…” Not really sure why they changed this maybe they want to ensure that you are not downloading the free SharePoint designer and simply using it as a HTML editor for non-SharePoint sites… Anyways that is not the focus of this post. I also noticed that SharePoint designer tricks you to thinking that you cannot edit pages. Say you want to modify a file that does reside in SharePoint. By Default it will open up in a read only view (HTML) and will not allow you to change the file. It will have a orange like highlight to areas that are not editable. So the trick is to righ...

I am in the mood for sharing today so here is a great starter file to get your new design rolling. I created one for 2007 and now here is one for SharePoint 2010. I increased the resolution to 1280x800. Download it Here.