Flying Fingers Gives Me Contest Idea

Apr 162010
 

So who is up for helping me run a contest? Who would like to be in a website building race? Racing to make my deadline yesterday, got me wondering how fast some of you are at coding. I would love to know how fast a page could be developed based on a Word Doc, something I was doing at the time I thought of the idea.

We could make certain rules, like no tables for layout, formatting must be done with a CSS file, and the code must pass W3C validation. You could use any software or service offered online to help you build the page, we just want to see results, and we want the fast. Continue reading »

The Intranet Enhancement List

Apr 132010
 

After just making one new portal go live very early yesterday morning, I added the finishing touches to my teams project plan for enhancing yet another portal. This one is a big deal. It’s the main portal for the company, and it averages over 150,000 page views a day.

What does a large company with such a busy intranet find important? Below are some of the key items we are going after. Continue reading »

More Important Stuff on the Left

Apr 112010
 

Last week I posted, Keep the Important Stuff on the Left. It was a quick post about how Jakob Nielson has new data that supports old, about how the important things like site navigation should really be on the left.
I know many would argue this, and I myself, could list a handful of blogs (some of my favorites) that contradict this. That’s why I thought we should take a look at what the kings and queens of the Internet are doing today. I give you the top 5, according to Alexa: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, and Live. Continue reading »

Keep the Important Stuff on the Left

Apr 062010
 

Jakob Nielsen released a new report to day: Horizontal Attention Leans Left. His findings indicate that web users spend 69% of their time on the left hand side of the page.

Watch that Image Size

Mar 302010
 

Doing some research for one of my clients today (a big one with 300,000+employees), I decided to check their web standards and guidelines. On the first page of their standards was the reminder to avoid templates that create horizontal scroll, and to design with 1024 pixel width in mind. Good advice. Too bad they can’t follow their advice themselves though. Continue reading »

Cut and Paste Character Count – Avoid Long Lines of Text

Mar 292010
 

How can a cut and paste character count tool improve the usability of a website? It’s simple. We need to know how many characters wide our main reading content is to ensure our site is at an optimal width for reading.

How Wide?

Several studies suggest that optimal width in the number of characters for a website is between 75-100. This site is about 95. Continue reading »

Incubate Your Great Idea

Mar 222010
 

Do you have a certain way of building sites or developing API’s, and think others should do the same as you? W3C now has a Incubator Group to get that methodology you have turned into a tool for everyone else. Continue reading »

Roger, Copy that Body Treatment, Over

Mar 162010
 

When building a new webpage for your site it’s good to keep in mind some basic necessities. Looking at just the content, and not considering things like navigation or design here is a list of the basic elements. Continue reading »

Testing Your Journal

Mar 112010
 

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. Continue reading »

Hiding User Functions in Plain Site

Mar 092010
 

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. Continue reading »

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