I just finished a quick project where the client wanted a HTML form that he could host locally on his PC. The form was to be filled out often, and upon submitting, the contents are  emailed to the desired representative in the field. Sound easy? Leaving a blank mailto won’t work.

To create a form like this start out by building your regular web page, and whatever form fields that you desire. To get the mailto action to work for various emails there is only one trick, and all it requires is some javascript.

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Here is a little PDF file I put together for some writers/content providers that I work with.

Though their writing skills are excellent, their knowledge of how to create anchor tags fell very short. Don’t Click Here!

Download: How-to-link

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In the last post, Rob talked about how a “big time fancy design firm” came up with a “blue text on a black background” layout, which can only be difficult to read because of the low contrast between black and blue.

It’s generally agreed that the higher the contrast and resolution, the easier text is to read, with black text on a white background at high dpi (dots per inch) being the easiest. In fact, newspapers and books can achieve higher contrast ratios than a computer monitor, so they seem easier to read. Text displayed at 150 dpi is twice as sharp as a typical video monitor, but HALF the resolution a basic laser printer achieves.

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Working on a large scale intranet, I am forced to look at blue text on a black background. A big time fancy design firm came up with the idea, the VP’s bought into the layout, and it’s not going to change. There is nothing I can do.

Doing user testing, studying focus group answers from surveys, and reading user feedback emails, I can only guess the design firm does not specialize in developing websites.

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Something I often say, “If you don’t have a business plan for your website, you don’t have a website.” Something I have been saying all of 2010, “Make your site do something.”

Yesterday one of my coworkers sent me a link to a comic titled “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell“. I’m sure many of you have seen it, but if not, it’s about how a site owner hires a webmaster to redesign their site. The webmaster does a great job, the client loves it, but then pecks away at it, slowly turning it into a Frankenstein of a website, just the way it looked when it started.

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Whether you just finished your first site, or you have made a million of them…Post in a comment below, what is your favorite webmaster tool. Mine is WinSCP.

What’s yours?

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Doing some research on what is hot and what is not, I was inspired to add a new section to the home page for this site: Usability in the News.

The section will have links to two leading stories or articles that are about web usability or design. Content will be semi-periodic, at least once a week.

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Creating a couple of mockups for a site has some real benefits, and it doesn’t just effect the appearance. It can also enhance the code and navigation of a site. Creating two versions for a site may sound like an extra expense, a simple pain in the butt, seem pointless, but it helps a site out a lot.

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Here are the top posts and pages viewed on Best Web Image for the month of April, 2010.

My personal favorite is, More Important Stuff on the Left. It’s a follow up of Jakob Nielson’s report on his findings.

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First, may I say, getting subscribers is not easy. It takes work, regardless if you are managing a blog or not. If you are running a blog, a subscriber count could be the easiest thing to improve though.

When it comes to numbers for this site, I have three major goals that I try to accomplish. I try to get more unique visitors, I look for ways to keep them engaged longer (more pageviews per session), and I try to get more subscribers. I have the goals broken down in easy steps that I believe I can accomplish, and try to keep the three in sync.

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