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.

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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.

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If you work on an intranet site for a company, please read-me

Over the years I have built and worked on tons of intranet sites. When brought in to work on an existing intranet site, I commonly face a fairly big problem. There is no guideline to site management.

When I sit down it’s assumed that I will know where content goes, server capabilities, if the company has a style guide, backup procedures, and how much control I actually have. The list of unknowns is essentially infinitely long, and to make matters worse, the boss often has no clue as well.

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I had a pleasant surprise today to find the Firefox just updated. You can get the latest version, 3.6.2 here: Firefox 3.6.2.

What’s the big deal. None really, mostly just security fixes, and some stability issues. One worth mentioning in regards to stability was that some users were not getting notified that their extensions may need updating after upgrading to 3.6.

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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.

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Long ago sold on using valid HTML, I made the choice that I would rather not have a WordPress plugin on this site if it meant I could not have valid HTML. I have several reasons why: Reasons Why Validating HTML is Important.

Well, I have another reason. Making sure your site is still valid after installing a plugin, can prove you may not need the plugin at all!

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Here is a quick little post about a neat little feature that some of you may not know about. It’s the acronym title.

Suppose you like a mouseover text box explaining your acronym, say BWI for example. See the little underline underneath my BWI, and the mouseover text box?

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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.

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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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