Perhaps we’ve all heard that you’re suppose to avoid using tables and Flash when designing your website, but do you know why? For a good answer, you really need to look deeper than tactical benefits, and consider more fundamental questions of accessibility. A lot of times the end-consumers of our content are not consuming the [...] →
Improving the load time of your user interface can have a direct impact upon the user experience of your application as well as an indirect impact in competitive search engine rankings. We’ve all experienced websites that took multiple seconds to load and required numerous page loads to complete a sequence. The wait time in aggregate [...] →
Usability Heuristics are an artifact of usability engineering and commonly studied in related fields such as Human Factors and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The heuristics are a set of 10 fundamental principles that Jacob Neilson theorized every user interface should be subjected to in a usability inspection, prior to the usability design being handed off [...] →
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily [...] →
Imagine creating a Rich Internet Application (RIA) built entirely using JavaScript, from client to server. What would it look like? I’ve already discussed the benefits of HTML5 and the coming Web 3.0 movement in recent posts so I will not into those details now. Instead, I want to focus on what an application like that [...] →
If you’ve run a content website, there’s a good chance you’ve used AdSense. Google created the AdSense network as an extension of their popular AdWords advertising platform, enabling them to sell ad units on websites all over the Internet, not just their own search property. Getting started and generating revenue with AdSense is relatively easy, [...] →
Web 3.0 has begun and its not what you think. I don’t think many people realized what Web 2.0 was until we were at the height of it, and already seeing the capabilities that had been set out years before it. But imagine if we had all realized in 2001 what was possible and all [...] →
Have you looked at the new features that are part of HTML5? I must admit that it took me some time to actually look at it because I dismissed it as just some new markup to have to deal with. In that way, its really not correct for this to be labeled as HTML at [...] →
Optimizing a site can mean many things. If you’re an eCommerce site, probably means optimizing your landing page, hiding your navigation so as not to distract, and pushing visitors toward the goal of a transaction receipt page. For small business and service professionals, it may mean getting someone to fill out a form. Or if [...] →
Sometimes ugly design works. Like nails on the proverbial chalkboard for any graphic designer, but it is true! I have heard it repeated numerous times over the years but it wasn’t until I saw a couple first-hand examples, that I finally understand this quirky nuance of user experience. A number of years ago there was [...] →