The Web is great: I can publish content whenever I want, and it’s instantly available to my audience all around the world. The Web sucks: I can’t keep up with all the changes I have to make. New Web publishers, especially those that are used to traditional print cycles, are sometimes stymied by the...
Free Web Site Advice
One Bad Apple, Unfortunately, Really Does Spoil The Whole Bunch
Donny and his sibs were probably right about one bad apple not spoiling the whole bunch, girl. But on the Web, users make snap judgments — so one mistake, and can throw the whole site into question. (Kinda like a spelling error on a resume: probably doesn’t make you any worse at driving snow...
Stop the Home Page, I Want to Get Off!
Like everything else in our keep-up-with-the-Joneses culture, design follows a herd mentality. So, someone created the first Flash splash page back in about 1999 — and suddenly everybody had to have one. Some companies spent a bundle on them, only to find out that most users immediately looked for the “Skip Intro” button. (Remember...
Design Constraints
So, I’m a teensie bit jealous of designers/artists that get free reign to be as creative and original as they want to be. Me, I’m trapped in a very small box. I’m redesigning our alumni site, and at best it’s an exercise in limitation; the afore-mentioned Alumni community Web product is rigidly designed with...
Organizing Information
We’re reorganizing our Intranet right now — or, more accurately, keeping the department-centric organization but overlaying task-oriented navigation. Task-oriented is customer-focused, and it’s a better way to organize information into useful groupings so that your target audience can find it. But task-oriented comes with its own set of problems, especially over time as new...
Back to Basics: Color
Let’s talk about Web design and color. Thank goodness the heady days of “just because you can” are fading, but I still see sites with the “box ‘o Crayolas” color scheme. You know, where every element has a different color (or worse, every letter in a headline is a different color)? At a glance,...
Pithy Quotes on Usabilty and Design – STC Usability SIG
“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. ” – Robert Wilensky, author and professor, UC Berkeley “If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work.” – Susan Dray, Dray &...
Mixed Layers in Applications
I can tell already that this is going to be a multi-post rant, because I’m burning up. I’m working to configure an application for our Alumni Web Community (a “portal,” if you’ll excuse the buzzword). The fine folks at BSR Advance, who are now no longer on my Christmas card list, have made a...
Hit Counters Must Die
About once a week, I get a call from someone asking me to add a hit counter. You know, those “you are visitor #2,346 to this site” messages? The answer is no. Hit counters have many problems, as I often explain. First off, the average Web site visitor doesn’t have enough context to understand...
The (Unexpected) Power of Persistent Information
Something happened today that highlights how close to the surface every page on your site is, even if you’ve buried it in your navigation. Someone was doing a photo search on H. Claude Hudson, the first African-American graduate of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. They came upon the August 2001 issue of our campus...