Design

Helping to Build the Web: A Day in the Life of a Web Developer

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...

How to use AJAX: 5 Real World Examples

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,...

Livejournal's Awesome 404 Error

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 ...

Discussion on Persuasion Architecture at Cre8asite

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...

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Accessibility?

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...

Crafting Compelling Home Pages

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...

Poor IE users: Microsoft's Loss Means Active/Flash Elements are Now Less Accessible

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 ...

Where are all the Great Designers?

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...

CSS Inspiration

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 ...

Aggressive Use of Your Homepage

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 ...

WeeWorld Profiles & Visual Communities

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...

Wufoo - Woo Hoo!

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....