I’m sure many of you have heard of testing a page or layout using two or more different styles. You can mix up the words, layout, anything. It’s commonly referred to as split testing. Many times though, the changes we make to our sites are not done is this fashion. We change the logo, or we change the wording to our tag line. There are all sorts of little things that we do that just don’t get the fair split test. Unless of course, you test your journal.

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Jakob Nielsen posted a new article yesterday that had me checking all my sites immediately afterwards. His article, Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design. The lesson? Stop hiding user functions in plain site.

In his article he uses an Apple product as the example on what not to do. Yes, Apple! There was a couple of other lessons I got out it as well.

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When the the king of search looks to optimize its own content for search results, you know it’s not by going out and buying back links. They get those free of charge by their millions of users who love their resources. So what can Google do to improve their own rankings? They optimize their code on-site.

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Here is an easy example on why you should use more than one type of web browser for testing your site. A special thank you goes to Premium Concert Tickets for allowing me to use one of their pages as an example: Michael Buble Tickets.

The IE Version

Still building websites in IE? There is nothing wrong with that. Still building website in IE, and not testing it with another type like Firefox? Crazy! I test intranet sites that I make for only IE6 users with other types of browsers. I have to, if I want high quality. Besides, there is something wrong with IE.

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working with WordPress for many, many years, and have greatly admired people who can create wonderful WordPress themes. The most I can do is log into the WordPress admin area and scroll through the different available themes, download one and click “activate”. Badda Bing. Job done. But the free themes always seemed to require customization which was just beyond my simplistic editing (hacking) know-how. I’ve always wondered how the heck people design wonderful-looking themes… are they graphic-design geniuses, or what?

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For those of you that need a minimum width set for whatever reason, most browsers understand the style of “min-width:1024px”. In this case, 1024 would be how wide you need it.

Typically, this min-width style is used to prevent inline DIV tags from wrapping. Min-width works great for most modern browsers, but the notorious IE6 refuses to play ball. It’s also still popularly used by large corporations.

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Here are the top posts and pages viewed on Best Web Image for the month of February, 2010. My personal favorite is: Reasons Why Validating HTML is Important to You. It’s a three part post that really drives the point on why you should validate your HTML.

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Quick! What is the hexadecimal color of my logo? Don’t know? Would you need to look in my CSS maybe? Would you try loading my logo into Photoshop and see? Too slow. Those of you with ColorZilla know.

The easiest way to do it, if you use Firefox, is to install the add-on ColorZilla.

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Are you suffering from Giant Image Syndrome? The common symptoms are: squished content, wrapped content, horizontal scrolling, super long lines of text, and basic site destruction.

Right now I am working for a Fortune 100 company that has a ton of intranet sites. The IT department was nice enough to create a default template so that anyone can build a site. They even allow them to use their own creativity, by not specifying a style guide. Oops.

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For those of using the TweetMeme plugin for WordPress, they just updated it. For those of you that have never used the plugin, it allows Twitter users to tweet your post by simply clicking the button. Mine is at the bottom of this post on the left.

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