And it dawned on me last week that maybe next time we, too, create a contest for our customers to create our website or what they see our website should reflect. Link >>

A while ago Emil Stenström wrote an article about one of those things that you have to keep educating clients about: writing good and informative link phrases. As you might guess from the title, Emil specifically talks about the use of 'click here' in Click here to read this article, but there are several other meaningless link phrases that seem almost as popular as forcing links to open in new windows.

A few examples:

• To learn more about this site, click here
• Learn more about this site here
• Learn more about this site
• Link to this site's about page.

When you see the examples like that it's quite obvious that neither is of much use to the visitor. Instead, I would use this:

• Learn more about this site

Another common link phrase that is meaningless on its own is 'read more', which is very common on news sites:

It can be argued that the context will make it clear to the reader what will happen when they follow the link. That may be true, but I prefer linking the hed in those situations:

Help reduce the number of meaningless links on the Web by repeating 'Think before you link' to yourself and to your clients.

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Posted in Accessibility, Usability.

• India web design
• site development India
• web solutions
• affordable web services
• web site hosting
• web promotion
• Custom Shopping. . .
  read more:

This post has been a long time coming. Originally it was going to be an entire series of posts (remember when I used to post more than 5 items a month? Good times), going into an inane amount of detail, and featuring case studies on every single aspect of the featured subject.

It is about doors.

You might be thinking that I couldn't possibly be dull enough to fill post upon post with doors. The idea was going to be to examine what is arguably the most common object in everyday human interaction and go into why it is, pardon my French, fucked up so often. I would start with looking at each component (primarily the handle, but any windows play an important part in interaction) and show how they are usually done so badly as to make the primary task of opening a door more difficult for people.

It was to be an opus on how, by paying attention to the task at hand and examining small details, to best design an object. But all you really need to know is this:

Excluding life threatening situations, door design is the single most common bit of bad design. Remember: handles mean pull, panels mean push. Never change this. For large values of never.

Ever have to design a door? Now you know how. Ever need to design a car, pen, website or anything, bear the above lesson in mind.

If you like keeping an eye on how your site is doing in various areas you probably already use tools like the W3C's validator services and Alexa's Traffic Rankings, just to mention a few. But there are many other tools and services that let you study interesting trends, statistics, and technical facts for your site. In fact there are so many that it's hard to keep track of all of them, which is where The Scrutinizer comes in handy.

The Scrutinizer was created by Rosano Coutinho and is a service that allows you to analyze, assess and validate any link using various tools and testers on the web.

I spent some time having fun by feeding the URL of this site to most of the services The Scrutinizer links to. The actual value of several services is questionable, and a couple unfortunately seem to be defunct. Of the services that were new to me, my favourite is UrlTrends, which displays ranking and link popularity trends for a page.

Do you know of any other useful online tools or testers?

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Posted in:

• Quicklinks
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Web Standards

Overview

When web site is published on the Internet, the web site need to be monitored, evaluated, reviewed and updated. Maintenance of a web site starts with the owners intention to publish a web site, then it focus on its users needs, habits and preference, which is why the web site is published in the first place, to give its visitors useful information. A web site also promotes image and reputation of its owner whether it is a company, a brand name, a product or service, an individual or a community. Having to stumble into an out-dated information on a web site will, more often than not, frustrate a visitor. An out-of-date web site, be it for its content or design speaks for itself about its owner.

Community Server can be a pretty powerful tool if you take your time to setup a decent site for your users.

Here are a few tweaks I've made to SCCAForums.com to make it a bit more user friendly.

On the home page there are sections for active, unanswer, and my posts(if logged in). These controls don't provide much information to the user though, by default only a link and portion of the subject of a forum post.

On SCCA Forums I've setup the controls to display the user who made the last post, link directly to the last post rather than the first post, and also display and link to the particular forum that the post was made in.

To do this you need to add the following script to your default.aspx page.

<script language='C#' runat='server'>

 int getPageNumber(int replies)
 {
  int page = 1;
  if (replies > 14)
  {
   page = 1 + replies /15;
  }
  return page;
 }
</script>

You also need to change the ItemTemplate section of the ThreadRepeater controls to look like the following

<ItemTemplate>
        <div class='CommonSidebarContentItem'>
    <strong><a href='<%# ForumUrls.Instance().PostPaged((int) DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, 'MostRecentPostID'), getPageNumber((int)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, 'replies')))%>'><%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, 'Subject').ToString() %></a></strong>
    - <%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, 'MostRecentPostAuthor') %>
    (<a href='<%# ForumUrls.Instance().Forum( ((Thread) Container.DataItem).SectionID ) %>'><%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, 'Forum.Name') %></a>)
        </div>
</ItemTemplate>    

More tweaks to come.

1. A profession
2. A problem-solving methodology
3. Communication

1. It’s Simple. Design Communicates.
2. Iterative Holistic Communication
3. Defining the Problem

1. Cameron Moll: Design is about communication but cannot exist without a medium of some sort.
2. Veerle Pieters: Design is away of communicating emotions. It expresses feelings so its design.
3. Jon Hicks: Debate how ugly design or no design wins it misses the point that design is about communication.

1. Desirability (human factors)
2. Viability (business factors)
3. Feasibility (technical factors)

1. Business
2. Technology
3. People

1. By addressing the question “What is this?” we communicate usefulness.
2. By addressing “How do I use it?” we communicate usability.
3. By addressing “Why should I care?” we communicate desirability.

I had to post this article below. It was simply so spot-on with regards to the cold, hard realities of design work that I would have been in the wrong for now sharing it….

Direct and Related Links for 'The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School'

A loyal Psi user asked for a button he could use on his site to link to the Psi download page. I had a copy of the new Psi icon that Jason Kim whipped up, so I put something together. If you want to put something like this on your site, the HTML [...]

While I was catching up on my seemingly endless rss feeds this morning, I can across this post by Matt Berther.  Intreaged I read the link in his post.   All I can say is thanks to Matt and to Tom,  wow.  What a great post. 

read more:

Easy way to get accurate backlink counts from Google and Yahoo.

If you are a regular Google user and website owner, you know that the link: modifier doesn't give accurate results for the number of backlinks pointing at a site. In the good old days we'd go to alltheweb.com and do a search with link:www.ahfx.net to get an approximation of the number of backlinks because they didn't dummy down the number of backlinks like Google does. However, now we've got better tools. To get a more accurate backlink count you have a couple of options.

1. Sign up for a Google account and go the the webmaster tools. You will first need to verify you own the account. Then you can access a number of important items like web crawl errors, statistics, and links. Just use the link tab to see a much more detailed view of backlinks.
2. You can use Yahoo's Site Explorer. Yahoo's site explorer is a great little tool to figure out just who is linking to someone without going through the hoops of signing up with Google and verifying you own a domain.

At the CSS showcase site CSS Mania, a contest is being held to select the best sites submitted during the last year (May 2005 to May 2006). Awards will be given in ten different categories.:

1. Site of the Year
2. Associations
3. Blogging
4. Business
5. Entertainment
6. Institutions
7. Media
8. Portal
9. Web Design (Companies and Portfolios)
10. Web Tools

As opposed to many other similar contests, the winners will not be decided by public voting. Instead five judges will vote for their favourites among the nominated sites.

As it happens, I am one of those judges. The others are Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Molly E. Holzschlag, and Sergio Villareal. And no, sites created by any of the judges will not be included in the contest.

I will place a lot of emphasis on code quality and accessibility when I pick my favourites in each category. Appearance is obviously also important, but I'm not going to vote for a site that only looks good on the surface.

If you're not a judge you can't vote, but you can browse the CSS World Awards categories to find out which sites are nominated. Anyone here involved in the creation of a nominated site?

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Posted in:

• CSS
• Quicklinks

Credibility is difficult to build and extremely easy to lose. These 10 steps will help you maintain your credibility.

Stanford released the following 10 points for increasing credibility after a 3-year, 4,500 person study .

1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. - The web makes it extremely easy to link to other sites that back up your material. No need to create a 3 page bibliography. Simply link to the material inline. Those that want additional information will be able to review your information and see that you have done your homework on the subject.
2. Show that there's a real organization behind your site. - Web sites make it easy for smaller companies to look just as big (or bigger) than larger organizations. While this can be both good and bad for either group, showing that your company has more of a presence than a P.O box will help increase your credibility.
3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide. - Besides stating your "qualifications", it is always better to show off your expertise by writing articles that clearly shows your understanding and your authority on the subject.
4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site. If you provide a simple bio of the people in the organization, you can highlight your expertise and show that your people can be trusted. Testimonials are a great way to help build credibility.
5. Make it easy to contact you. - This is one of the three essential purposes of a website . Show your contact info on every single page.
6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose). - Your website should look like your business. Templates will never do that for your business. Make sure that your design is built around your customers and can communicate directly with their needs.
   
7. Make your site easy to use -- and useful. - Make sure you use good navigation and make it simple for people to "progress" through your website to the information they are searching for.
   
8. Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently). - Whether you are using a CMS or have a company blog, make sure that you are providing up-to-date, pertinent, information that will answer your customers current questions. Your industry isn't stagnant. Your website shouldn't be either.
9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers). - Your customers didn't come to your site to see advertisements. They came looking for specific information. Make sure people can clearly tell what are ads and what aren't.
   
10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem. - No one loses credibility faster than those that have broken links, bad grammar, or pages that don't display correctly. Take a second to review your site.
    

These are simple concepts. However, making them a part of your everyday operations is more difficult, but the benefit will be well worth the effort.

• Upgraded to ExpressionEngine 1.4.2
• Deleted the ability to phone stories in - no one had used it and it was costing me $5/mo.
• Reimplemented the navigation tabs to be bigger and centered
• Pulled the first 100 words or so of the latest story to the home page.
• Pulled recent comments to the home page and other 'non-story pages'
• Changed most of the list icons, and added other icons from the Silk Icons set
• Added a 'social bookmark this story' link that allows people to submit the story to different social bookmarking sites.

• FAQ/Help Section with guidance on what to write, how to write, etc
• Author 'badge' - a graphic for story authors to post on their own site (since most seem to be bloggers as well).
• Print style sheet

Overview

Web development incorporates all areas of creating a Web site for the World Wide Web. This includes Web design (graphic design, XHTML, CSS, usability and semantics), programming, content management, marketing, testing and deployment. The term can also specifically be used to refer to the "back end", that is, programming and server administration.

ref: Wikipedia: Web Development