Kathy Sierra at CPU wrote a piece last week called How to get Users to RTFM. From the source: Make Reading the Manual UnnecessaryIn theory, "If your product is good enough, they shouldn't need a manual." In pr...
A friend of mine runs a content-based website monetized largely through page views. He recently shared a tactic with me that's been immensely successful in improving the number of page views per visit. His terminology - "link density." Link density refers specifically to the placement and number of links on a content page. For example, this page on ...
You've developed what you consider to be a killer new site. Yet, for reasons unknown to you, nobody is visiting. Your design is amazing and your code is solid. But the search engines seem to think you're invisible, and you don't know why. You might be committing one of the 5 developer snafus that kill your traffic. 1. Bad robots.txt file When the sear...
This post from Shoemoney - A Sale is Made on Every Website Visit - got me thinking about the dichotomy between monetizing a visit and building a website's brand. Here's the gist of what Jeremy's saying: This same way of salesmanship IMO directly ...
When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I am a "Web Developer". It's more accurate than "Web Designer" and much less narcissistic than "Webmaster." Even still, people have a hard time grasping what I do every day at my job. I'm sure if you asked 3 very important people in my life -- my girlfriend, mother, and best friend -- what I did at work every day...
I've always subscribed to the "content, content, content" philosophy of developing successful web sites. In my former life as a freelance web developer, I've far too often seen clients get neck deep in logo and font choices -- subsequently ignoring the main reason they got on the web in the first place: content. Unless you have useful, reliable and frequently updated content,...
When dealing with client recommendations for design, usability, and accessibility, we always stress the importance of a custom 404 page. Why? Because I think everyone gets a little sick of seeing standard pages that do little to direct users toward a useful solution. These boring, default 404s are not friendly, they're hostile. And without the proper presentation they risk scaring away less savvy ...
As a professional web designer I've noticed a consistent trend in the majority of the projects I've worked on: The more time that is spent dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing a design by the wrong kinds of people the worse that design gets. The same trend applies to the number of people involved in the design process.Group intelligence is multiplicative when id...
I came across this incredibly well-done presentation on CSS vs. Tables and although I know it's a tired old debate, the presentation style itself actually sparked my interest. I think something like this for the SEO basics is long overdue - the beginner's guide is great, but it's a bit much for man...
Reading through the the thread - Persuasion Architecture and the Art of Agreement for Website Success - is inspiring. Although the discussion starts with a short review (by Kim) of the Eisenberg brothers' new book, it evolves into a stirring debate and exploration of how websites can influence user actions. From the t...
Just a short post to note that OneStat has released figures about worldwide and country specific screen resolutions of Internet users. Here's the global averages: 1. 1024 x 768...
...Fortune Magazine's "All Web Sites Are Alike", written by David Kirkpatrick! This article posits that: All Web sites are alike. Regardless of their owners, they can all do the same set of things. In that fact lies the profound crisis f...
Okay, so that title was a bit of a stretch since ugly sites don't hurt so good so much as they hurt so bad, but I'm keen on song-lyrics-as-titles lately (and c'mon, who doesn't like Mellencamp?).Once again, via delicious I found another ...
Last.fm's signup page is one of the best I've ever seen. It's elegant, user-friendly, and does a fantastic job of keeping the user aware of what's going on. Rather than splitting the signup process into several steps across multiple pages or combining them all into one massive form, it splits it into three steps but keeps everything on one...