The New York Times has a rare "can't-miss" article about the purchasing power and Internet adoption of the 50+ yr. olds in the US. Excerpted: Ms. Dougherty said a recent Nielsen survey found that 27.4 million people age 55 and older bought something onli...
Bonus points to whoever recognized the blog title as a bitchin' Bob Dylan song (modified a bit, of course). Anyway, via delicious, I came across an article that excerpted a book called Prioritizing Web Usability, written by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger. The book seems like it could be an interesting read (...
This post from CPU is exceptionally good - Don't give in to feature demands! A few excerpts: ...the more popular your product or service is, the more those requests start turning into demands and ultimatums, and finally very har...
I've been working on a site audit for the past week or so and have come to an exhaustively thorough section regarding usability and accessibility. While I'm not denying that this sort of information is extremely valuable when optimizing a website, my question to you guys is how much information is too much? How much information about making a site disabled user-friendly should a client receive? Ho...
Bare Naked App kindly pointed out that Skype's home page is one of the most compelling, well written homepages ever created. They properly target their audience, make the site fun, easy-to-learn and hard to resist. And, to top it off, the video walkthrough of Skype's service is pr...
I had to shout out loud on this one, though ZDNET also wrote a nice article about it. Believe it or not, IE's latest update (went through roughly 10 days ago) has created havoc on the web, for both web designers and end-users. As I type, anyone using Internet Explorer now has to "activate" any flash or active-x element related to their ...
Many, many folks who contact us are seeking re-development of their website. When Matt doesn't have the time to put together one of his gorgeous designs for them, it's been very tough for me to point people in the right direction to hire a talented designer who can use CSS effectively and create a standards-compliant site (I don't recommend it as much for t...
When building out the page-by-page wireframing of a new website, I've been prone to use Macromedia Flash to layout the elements and create the idea that customers and developers can see. A friend recently suggested Axure, software that's specifically designed for wireframing websites and has a lot of built-in functionality to support the task of prototyping....
If you're thinking about putting together a pure CSS driven site and need inspiration, I've compiled a short list of my favorite CSS showcases. I use these sites not only to inspire visual ideas, but also to learn more creative and practical ways to use CSS. I often find myself digging through source code of sites in the showcases discovering good (and bad) CSS ...
Lots of sites have a very simple homepage design. Google is a perfect example of this. However, I have found that loading up the homepage with information has increased sales, pageviews, visitor time-on-site, and linkbuild rate. (Rand and Matt's new design for seomoz.org - shown at right ...
Rarely have I been so inspired by a designer's website. In fact, maybe never... Dave Werner has put together one of the most impressive, detailed, extraordinary portfolios online today. He's only 25 years old, but his site is breathtaking. Don't miss it. I thought I'd share some images, for those who aren't compelled to click ...
I'm particularly fond of WeeWorld - I love the illustration style, the feel of the interface and the thinking behind it - that we can all have an online identity that follows us from place to place. The concept of an avatar has been around since the nascent beginnings of web forums, but to have a community of identities that allow for customization, represe...
I need recommendations for a site search engine that does the following: Spiders your site's content to X levels deep Build a database of page titles, urls, and content Provide a searchable front-end that is easily customizable to match an existing site I could write my own. It'd just be a simple spider program that spid...
For those of us who have to constantly reference HTML form help pages to create new forms for websites and surveys, there's nothing better than this cool new "AJAX" automated form builder. It's intuitive, easy-to-use, well designed and very flexible....