If you have ever run a web design company or built a website for someone that knows very little (or nothing) about best practices in web design or SEO, then you undoubtedly have come across the client who wants something glitzy, with lots of flash (with or without actually using Flash), and *gasp* lots of animations. When I hear something like "I like those sites that have a flashy i...
It wasn't long ago when I noticed that the new beta for Google analytics had one major, bold-ed statistic on the dashboard. The bounce rate smacked me in the face a couple times until I realized that this must be a major factor that Google uses to decide whether or not you website will stay at the top of search results. I had my theory and it was time to test it.Although I know that ...
E-commerce has, for the most part, evolved far beyond the late 1990's cliches of hair-wrenching, sanity-shattering slogs through yet another "clever" designer's take on how shopping on the web should be. Standards prevailed, usability won out, and we're now free to spend our collective $107 million (Census.gov e-commerce sta...
Yesterday, one of the most popular web design portals, AListApart, unveiled their latest project - a survey for web designers and developers. Here's their pitch: People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are ou...
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Divergent opinion: web design must take on a new life in order to be potentially creative, enveloped in a veil of mystery, vitality, strength, necessary illusion, blindness, bias. “I suspect, however, that (Funes) was not exactly versed in thinking. Thinking means forgetting differences, generalizing, abstracting." (Funes, o Memorioso, Fic&cced...
Many of the large content and e-commerce sites we've worked with experience a disease I like to call "page bloat." Symptoms include pagination of content pages, creation of new pages that simply provide alternate navigation methods and site architecture design that follows the little-known usability rule from well-known guru, Wrongy McLovestoClick - "more pages are always better...
Over the past quarter as my own web development skills have taken a significant ramp-up - I know how to use CSS float styles! - I've begun taking an eye to the regard of QA and it's importance within rapid-development commercial environments. Across the board as an industry we are breaking out the latest tools (eg. UGC, social communities, ala Web 2.0!) , harnessing emerging tech...
1. Separate code from html I mix. I do. When the project or web page is minimal it makes a lot of sense to have a small amount of code in the same file as the .html. But when the project starts to grow or requires lots of code it is time to separate my code from the .html. I feel strongly about this probably due to my type ‘A’ personality that ha...
You have great content ideas and the motivation to create, but if your site isn't link-friendly, you might still be up the proverbial creek. Let me give a perfect example from one of my favorite bloggers - Andrew Goodman (from a blog entry called monetizing your site): ...
Footers are important. Usually, they are a repetition of the primary navigation and contain anything that is considered "the fine print," such as copyright information and privacy policies. With the rising popularity of standards based design, they also have become the home for buttons that show off standards compliance. While doing a ...
You have anywhere from 4-10 seconds to engage my attention before I’m gone... Before I click away, close the window and head over to your competitor’s site for a dose of instant gratification. I shouldn’t have to piece together the objective of your page—this isn’t a TV crime drama, and even if it were, the plot would be more obvious than ...
A friend of mine and a skilled developer, Marc-Antoine Ross from DevTaxi, did a great review of Web 2.0 forms and I think it's worth reading! So here it goes: I decided to review the registration forms from most of the sites that made it to the invaluable Web 2.0 Awards. Most of...
As a follow up to Matt's How to Hire a Good Web Developer article, I thought I would expand on the subject a little more and discuss common traits good web developers have. These are things I've noticed in working with or talking to web developers at all skill levels -- from someone who still uses Front Page all the way to Google emp...
I've been doing work on a website for one of our clients, and I noticed they followed a trend with their email address that I've seen a lot. They were getting lots of spam at their contact email address, i.e. [email protected], so they replaced it with [email protected] as a last ditch method to stop the avalanche of spam.While this works, it doesn't get to the root of the p...