Design

Throwing Out the Book on SEO!

OK... It's a new day in my office. I am changing my focus away from the standard SEO optimizing stuff and instead putting my focus where it really belongs - getting site visitors to embrace my site. Let's call this SEO for SITE VISITOR ACTIONS. I think that the search engine...

Design Principles

Return to the roots of design for a moment and remember that the art of our development is inherently tied to specific principles that have been forged over centuries of observation and creation. Digital Web Magazine has an ...

Oodles of Favicons

Although they don't get much attention, to the graphically and web adept, favicons are a source of great pride and study. These little 16-pixel graphics are an endless source of optimization and promotion for an entire community of designers, as illustrated by the Delta Tango Bravo blog entr...

Create Logos on the Fly

Although logo design is one of my banes, people still occassionally request that we do it. Lucky for us, helpful sites like LogoYes are great for providing a complete logo at a low, low price, or providing inspiration, if nothing ...

167 Days to Christmas & 37 Signals has Advice

37 Signals has a list of holiday "to-do's" on your e-commerce website to prepare it for the holiday shopping season. Since Christmas often accounts for up to 40% of a store's entire yearly profits, there's no doubt ...

Web Color Schemes

In the world of web design, one of the most frustrating topics I butt my head up against is color scheme. I search and search the color wheel in Photoshop and scour the web to help inspire me on themes that will work for a client or a site. Luckily, I now have some help, and ...

Don't Click It

Alex Frank, a German web designer has taken on the unique challenge of re-building the interface of the web, by removing the mouse click from his users' repertoire of interactive tasks. His example site for this surprisingly innovative project is don'tclic...

An Average Conversion Rate

While conducting some research, I came across a brilliant website on the specific subject of conversion rates. Conversion Chronicles details a remarkable amount and depth of information on the subject of e-commerce conversi...

Two Good Resources - Info Architecture & Web Design

Fellow UW graduate, Heidi Adkinson runs two very relevant websites on the subject of her Master's thesis - e-commerce research. The sites both offer some very good information on the subject of web design and...

Steve Krug's Advanced Common Sense

One of the first requirements for anyone considering building or operating a website should be Steve Krug's miraculous book - Don't Make Me Think. This short, 3-hour read has been next to my...

Sitemaps and Spidering

The great advantage of a sitemap (for SEO purposes) comes from its ability to reduce the number of links that must be followed in order to reach all pages on a site. Sitemaps have a unique ability to garner the attention of search engine spiders and crawlers - making for much faster i...