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Handpicked News For Internet Developers - Since 1999 |
Archives For Web Design
Why MySpace is Better Than a Regular Band Website
Web developers need to really think about how they can simplify the time to launch websites, and how to offer simple tools for an artist to communicate with fans and dispense information in a timely and efficient manner. Several bands I follow now have a simple splash page which says "Coming Soon - Meanwhile check our MySpace account for updated tour information and news via our blog."
The problem? They have had a "Coming Soon" page for almost a year! The reason is simple. Why duplicate what they already have at MySpace?
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Design Choices Can Cripple a Website
By testing, I don’t mean asking a few folks around the office; I mean doing a live test that demonstrates—with hard figures—what site visitors actually do. Testing like that is a beautiful thing. There is no space for fancy arguments. An expert’s credentials and opinions mean squat. When you serve alternative versions, one after the other, and measure reader actions, you get the real deal. You get what is.
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The cranky user: Oh, the pixel pickle
I sometimes wonder whether graphics wouldn't be better off if graphics designers and developers had stayed with vector-based graphics. For all that pixels are wonderful (I have nearly two million of them in front of me right now), they sometimes make Web designers do really stupid things.
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Book Review: Charles Wyke-Smith's Stylin With CSS: A Designer's Guide
I have put off CSS just about as long as I can. I hate having to post questions to forums on one of the zillions of hacks out there, and it is simply not cost-effective for me to learn the technology to the point that it is second-nature to me yet. Once the site has been mocked up and the user goals have been defined (or vice-versa), I NEED to get to work on it and turn the site around and get paid.
Don't get me wrong - I do use CSS quite a bit. But I haven't gone to the lengths some of my heroes have gone too, like Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and others. But this may change with the new book from New Riders - "Stylin' With CSS: A Designers Guide". (Although "Pimp My Stylesheets: A Designers Guide" would have been a cooler name.)
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5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages
As the name suggests, the 5-Second Test involves showing users a single content page for a quick 5 seconds to gather their initial impressions. Five seconds may not seem like a lot of time, but users make important judgments in the first moments they visit a page. This technique unveils how those judgments turn out, giving the team insight into some essential information about the page. Using this technique, we've found the information we've gathered essential for making huge improvements to our clients' sites.
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Yahoo! News Gets Facelift for Users, Advertisers
As part of the redesign, Yahoo! implemented a tabbed navigation interface, giving each section its own page that's reachable from the news home page. Putting the navigation across the top of the page also makes more room for content, and the page's ad, above the fold.
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The Web: A Work in Progress
On Monday, the always-bouncy Boing-Boing published a post about text greeking-you know, the "lorem ipsum" placeholder text that designers often use to flesh out a layout while waiting for final copy. That post got me to thinking: how many Web pages have gone live with placeholder text of one kind or another? Sounds like a job for Google-and a great way to procrastinate while looking busy.
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Lessig preaches openness to Flash faithful
But the technology itself remains under Macromedia's proprietary control. And unlike HTML, which lets anyone inspect a Web page's underlying source code, Flash movies keep that information under wraps. On that note, Lessig said Macromedia should study the explosive growth of HTML, which created a vast community of Web developers by allowing them to "steal" from one another and expand on each other's work, as compared with the less spectacular growth of Apple Computer's AppleScript scripting language, which hides its code.
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How to design an accessible site
For most webmasters, the problem is being unaware of the tools to use and where to find them. Zanet was in the same position. On a budget of zero, the tools were collected and a site was put together meeting "Priority 3" or "Triple A" accessibility. This report points out the steps they took. You can learn from the mistakes made and the resources used ...
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Userism
(Zeldman.com) Designers with cutting-edge skills are suddenly more interested in creating great user experiences than in pushing the technology for its own sake. Nobody on the panel and nobody in the audience thought twice about this user orientation. That is a profound change, and I hope it continues to spread ...
How to Make a Good Design Brilliant
(via Webword) Usability is important to web site design because if it's missing, the site can alientate or confuse the user, as well as detract from whatever your main message, product or service is.
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LESS IS MORE - How to keep your website clutter-free
The past was about "bells and whistles". Websites were designed to showcase the technology behind the web rather than to be an effective communications medium. Flash was used to "excite" and "engage" - its effect however was often the opposite. And web navigation was sometimes an experiment in obscurity making it almost impossible for the visitor to find their way around. Entertainment was the mantra rather than communication effectiveness.
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