Maintenance Web, Promoting Website, Web Design
While the world is off bandwagoning on blog posts about Twitter and how much of an influence/frustration it is, I wanted to get back to the root of some things. I’ve been troubled a lot lately by just how bad it seems that web (online) experiences for brands are failing the consumers. The amount of money wasted on ignorance, well, I just don’t know.
As every good marketer should know–from Marketing 101–it is very important that you maintain a brand, or an extension of it. This means that you want people to not only use your product or service, but that you want them to see a benefit from it, and ultimately continue to use it in the future.
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Once upon a time, within the past few months of my life, I gave a survey to about 60 or so people in regards to beverage websites that I asked them to view. It was a very simple survey (in exchange for answers, I offered consumers their pick from a grab bag of about $30 in CVS-purchased chocolates and candies–and yes, I had more than enough volunteers), with each person focusing on one of the 5 websites and then answering 10 questions. The first nine focused on rating things from 1-5 (for easy math), the last question asking whether or not the consumer would ever return to the website. Number ten was open-ended, and I asked for open comments, preferably focused upon what would prompt the consumer to return to the site.
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Full article: http://www.userglue.com/blog/2008/05/22/user-experience-design-for-brands-on-the-web-so-what/
License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States
Indexed in July 2008
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Elements of a Web, Text and Font, Web Design
HTML clipboardAccording to classic principles of web design, everything at the bottom of the page isn’t that important. Most users think like that. And most designers are convinced that this is true. Site elements at the bottom of the page aren’t really able to catch visitors’ attention which is why footers are often forgotten or ignored and not given the attention they deserve.
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What are footers good for?
Basically, footers need to provide users with the information they are looking for. This is why contact details and a brief information about site or / and site owners needs to be placed in the footer. Corporate designs may need to provide driving directions, telephone number, a web form or at least an e-mail.
However, you can also use the footer to express something artistic and very personal. For instance, if you are a Seinfeld fan, why don’t place a small Kramer somewhere next to the contact details in your footer? Thus, with one small detail you can make your site more distinctive and focus visitors’ attention to yourself.
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1. Imitate proximity to the ground
Well, that’s quite strange. But we’ve observed this trend too often to dismiss it. Many designers tend to imitate the proximity to the ground. This means that they attempt to complete layouts with illustrations of the ground — in such cases trees, birds, buildings and the horizontal perspective are usual. Funny characters, mascots, illustrations and hand-drawing are also typical for such footers.
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Full article: http://www.sinidaily.com
License: Creative Commons
Indexed in June 2008
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Themes or Templates, Web Design, Weblog (Blog), Wordpress Blog
If you have been using WordPress you probably know that there are thousands of very nice and freely available themes that you can use to skin your WordPress blog. What you might not realize, though, is that you should take a look under the hood of a theme before you put it into live duty on the blog that you have worked hard to build. Here are some things to take a look at:
1. Sidebars - Widgets or Hardcoded
The drag and drop nature of the WordPress Widgets are much easier for the casual blogger to manage but many power users prefer the old fashioned hard coded sidebar system. If the theme you are considering is not widget ready and you would like to use widgets you will need to add the necessary code to activate the widget system. Here are a couple of useful links for making a non-widget theme widget friendly.
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3. Page Navigation for sub-pages
If the theme generates the horizontal navigation links for your site automatically you may also want to know how sub pages will be handled. Depending on the way the navigation is coded and how the CSS stylesheet is constructed you may either find your subpages listed on the same level as your top level pages, listed as CSS dropdown menus when hovered over, or completely omitted from the horizontal navigation.
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Full article: http://daisyolsen.com
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States
Indexed in June 2008
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Text and Font, Web Design
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Typographers use layout techniques like single line boundaries, indents, outdents and versals (drop caps etc.) to punctuate paragraphs in a stream of discourse. Block paragraphs are common to the Web, indented paragraphs are common to print. Browser vendors gave us a default block style of flush left, ragged right with a single line boundary, but there are many variants we can pick from depending on the context.
In any project, the text itself will have its own tone, rhythm and meaning. It’s our job to provide it with a stage on which to sing. Typography serves the spirit of the text, bringing it before an audience, and then quietly fading into the background as the reader delves into the meaning..
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Technology & cost influencing style
Materials and technology have always influenced calligraphy and typography. Papyrus was used from the 4th century BC. It was brittle, so papyrus was rolled instead of folded. Parchment codices became more popular in the 5th century AD. The finest parchment was vellum, made from the white skin of a calf. Next came paper: Invented in China in the 1st century, the first latin text was written on paper around the 10th century. By the mid-15th century it was becoming dominant..
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Full article: http://jontangerine.com
License: Creative Commons
Indexed in June 2008
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Promoting Website, SEO, Web Articles for Dummies, Web Design
How can you build a web site from the ground up that pleases both crawler-based search engines and your visitors? Discover how “search engine friendly” design can tap into free traffic from search engines. This session is especially suited for beginners who need an overview of important design issues to keep in mind.
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So we will also talk about content and making it clear and organized so the engines understand it, as well as some of the friendlier design techniques.
The first things we want to do is get crawled and indexed. Think of each website as its own town. You want to make sure it’s all compliant and within code. So take a look at the Google webmaster guidelines which is a great place to start. Also if you are building a new site the best thing you can do is find a link to a site that has already been crawled and link it back to you. For the designers, I urge you to go out there and read about sitemaps and robot inclusion files and things related to that.
First I want to go back to the metaphor of a town. We want to make sure it’s easy for us to navigate and understand where things are, a good address system to follow, so we can find any geographical location within each town. So the big test is when you create a URL, is it unique, meaning there is no other page that has the same URL, and there is no page that shares two URLs. A lot of sites have this problem and make it difficult for the crawlers.
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Full article: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/016593.html
License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States
Indexed in June 2008
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Accessibility, Maintenance Web, Web Design
Many people think accessibility is an extra effort for little reward. Not true! Increasing discovery, access and usability of your Web site for all visitors are some of the major benefits that accrue from applying many of the WCAG 1.0. checkpoints. Back in Novemeber 1999 William E. Kennard, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said:
We cannot afford to let the issue of disabilities be simply an afterthought. Accessibility of services and products for all (people) has got to be a design feature, not an add-on.
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Increase Market Share and Audience Reach
Improve usability for non-disabled and disabled visitors:
The usability of Web sites is becoming a very important topic as organizations struggle to reach, and especially to retain, a wider audience.
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Full article: http://gr0w.com/articles/design/accessibility_design_benefits/
License: Creative Commons License
Indexed in May 2008
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Accessibility, Web Design, Web based Application
You rarely get the chance to develop a GUI from scratch, but it’s a very rewarding experience to deliver a useful and usable application that your customers actually enjoy working with.
I think every developer cares about usability, but there is a difference between caring about and actually creating a usable application. Since my time at Sun working with some great HCI engineers there, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation of the design and development process.
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Best analysis and design practices for a UI include:
- use multiple techniques for gathering requirements, especially:
- issuing standard document templates to elicit common information and to raise a few thought-provoking questions
- reading documents prepared by the customer or from the business domain
- structured interviews and both single- and multi-role brainstorming sessions with different types of user or customer
- visiting and observing the customer at their workplace or (better) workstation (see Gemba for some specific practices)
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Full article: http://colmsmyth.blogspot.com
License: Creative Commons
Indexed in May 2008
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Client-side Scripting, Custom Programming, Text and Font, Web Design
Webdesigners always have to make sure that they use a common font for their website, otherwise it’ll display incorrect on browser that don’t have the font installed. This can be really annoying if you want to use a nice custom font. You could load the font in Photoshop and save it as an image, but this isn’t dynamic and is not SEO. Here are two solutions on how to make dynamic custom fonts.
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PHP Image Replacement
Original story at dezinerfolio.comAs you could see above, the dynamic text are all images. It uses PHP and JavaScript that replaces all the content in specified tags with images. For example, the dynamic tekst above uses the following code:
<script type="text/JavaScript" src="ifr.js"></script>
<h2 class="title">This is a dynamic custom font</h2>…
Full article: http://www.marcofolio.net
License: Creative Commons License
Indexed in May 2008
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Ajax, SEO, Web 2.0, Web Design
CSS is an html addition allowing webmasters to control design, placement of elements, etc. You can use it to change the look of a site very quickly and easily. It also decreases the download time of the page. It is also easier to control the exact positioning of elements on a page. CSS formatted text links easily communicate visited/unvisited links.
CSS Disadvantages:
- End users must have font installed on their computers or the page will not display as designers intended
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Full article: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006889.html
License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License
Indexed in April 2008
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Web Design
After you have decided to buy a website template, now you are scrambled with all the websites offering these website templates. Some are free, some are packaged into tens or maybe hundreds but all of them share the various sales pitches that is marketing these professional website templates and pushing you to buy..
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When shopping for professional website templates, you should look to see if the website templates are really professional! In other words, you should look to see if the website template takes into consideration all other factors of a professional website design..
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Full article: http://www.articlesbase.com
License: Creative Commons License
Indexed in April 2008
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