Design

The Page Bloat Disease & Why You Should Eliminate Extraneous Pages

Many of the large content and e-commerce sites we've worked with experience a disease I like to call "page bloat." Symptoms include pagination of content pages, creation of new pages that simply provide alternate navigation methods and site architecture design that follows the little-known usability rule from well-known guru, Wrongy McLovestoClick - "more pages are always better...

QA within the Web development sector

Over the past quarter as my own web development skills have taken a significant ramp-up - I know how to use CSS float styles! - I've begun taking an eye to the regard of QA and it's importance within rapid-development commercial environments. Across the board as an industry we are breaking out the latest tools (eg. UGC, social communities, ala Web 2.0!) , harnessing emerging tech...

Put Your Best Foot Forward: 19 Gorgeous Website Footers

Footers are important. Usually, they are a repetition of the primary navigation and contain anything that is considered "the fine print," such as copyright information and privacy policies. With the rising popularity of standards based design, they also have become the home for buttons that show off standards compliance. While doing a ...

This Message Will Self-Destruct in 10 Seconds

You have anywhere from 4-10 seconds to engage my attention before I’m gone... Before I click away, close the window and head over to your competitor’s site for a dose of instant gratification. I shouldn’t have to piece together the objective of your page—this isn’t a TV crime drama, and even if it were, the plot would be more obvious than ...

Traits (Most) Good Web Developers Have

As a follow up to Matt's How to Hire a Good Web Developer article, I thought I would expand on the subject a little more and discuss common traits good web developers have. These are things I've noticed in working with or talking to web developers at all skill levels -- from someone who still uses Front Page all the way to Google emp...

5 Tips for Hiding Your Email Address from Spammers

I've been doing work on a website for one of our clients, and I noticed they followed a trend with their email address that I've seen a lot. They were getting lots of spam at their contact email address, i.e. contact@company.com, so they replaced it with contact2@company.com as a last ditch method to stop the avalanche of spam.While this works, it doesn't get to the root of the p...

The Multiheader - A Huge Trend in Homepage Design

One of the biggest changes to homepages across the web, particularly with big brands, is the seemingly mandatory inclusion of the multiheader. Multiheaders allows multiple stories or features access to the primary visibility section of a homepage, and let visitors choose (through a click or hover) which featured piece they want to see. Let's take a walk through a few: ...

Why Good Content is Like a Pixar Film

SEO blogs have been preaching the same old spiel again and again: have good content on your site. It's no secret, yet for many businesses, it seems hard to implement. I thought I'd change the argument up a bit and put it in perspective the only way I know how: by using movies as an analogy. Good content is like a Pixar film. Pixar films fall into the "You Have to be a Jerk to Not ...

How to Convince a Client They Don't Need a Splash Page

Following up yesterday's article, How to Convince a Client their Site Doesn't Need Music, I decided to write a similar one about splash pages. Splash pages are the pages that the user sees before they actually get to a website; typically, they're flash and offer some kind of introductory animation. The user clicks "Skip Intro&qu...

Rebuilding Avatar Financial in CakePHP

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you may have heard about Ruby on Rails. It's the latest greatest web development platform that has become immensely popula...

What Does Your Trained Eye See?

Recently I've started working with Rand on doing site analyses for our clients. He's taken me under his wing by walking me through a typical site analysis and telling me what to look for. Obviously, since Rand is the resident expert, it is easy for him to know what to look for and what to recommend to the client.Unfortunately, up until I started working for SEOmoz, I was accustomed to ...

Link Density - A Method for Increasing Page Views

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 ...