What makes a website successful? It might not be what you expect!
What makes some sites succeed and others fail? Put another way, when you are asked to redesign an existing website, what problems are you looking out for and where do you concentrate your efforts?
I would argue that as web designers we spend too much time looking at the wrong kind of problem.
I recently ran a free open door consultancy clinic to celebrate the launch of my new book (yes I know, two shameless plugs in one sentence). This involved various website owners volunteering their sites for review. Both myself and the audience then provided feedback.
What quickly became apparent is that the feedback being given by the audience was biased towards design and development.
Although their comments were excellent it focused almost exclusively on the quality of code, site aesthetics and usability. To address these issues in isolation is similar to treating symptoms and ignoring the underlying illness.
Cure the illness not the symptoms
Poor design, bad usability and terribly written code are symptoms of bigger problems. Often when we endeavour to address these symptoms, we meet resistance from our clients and become frustrated. This is because our clients are still struggling with fundamental concepts we take for granted.
Before we can address issues of aesthetics, usability and code, we need to tackle business objectives, calls to action and user tasks. Without dealing with these fundamental principles our clients’ website will fail.
Let me address each in turn:
Understand the business objectives
Do you ask your clients why they have a website? It feels like an obvious question. However, it is surprising how many clients do not have an answer.
Without having a clear idea of the siteʼs business objectives, the client has no way to know whether it is succeeding. This means they have no justification for further investment and that leads to quibbling over every penny.
However most importantly, without clearly defined business aims they have no standard against which to base their decisions. Everything becomes subjective and that will inevitably lead to problems.
Before we start discussing design, usability and development, we need to focus our clients on establishing concrete business objectives. This will provide a framework for decision making during the development phase.
This will not only help the client make decisions, it will also focus them on the business and away from micro managing the design.
Establish clear calls to action
Once business objectives have been set this opens up the possibility to establish clear calls to action.
I am amazed at how few website owners can name their calls to action. However, I am even more staggered at how few web designers ask about them.
Calls to action are not just limited to ecommerce sites. Whether you are asking people to sign up for a newsletter or complete a contact us form, every site should have a desired objective for users.
What is more, each page of a site should have micro calls to action that always draw users on and never leave them at a dead end.
Without clearly defined calls to action you cannot successfully design a site, structure the user experience or measure its success. They bring focus to the site and encourage the client to concentrate their efforts on helping people reach those goals.
Of course in order to know if a call to action is going to work, it is necessary to do some user testing.
Test against the right tasks
As web designers we all like to boast about being ʻuser centricʼ whatever that means! However, in reality I think many of us are paying lip service to the subject.
Sure, we ask our clients about who their users are and maybe even do some usability testing. However, usability testing is no good if we are not asking the right questions.
Again we find ourselves working on a superficial level rather than tackling the deeper issues.
Clients find it relatively easy to tell you who their target audience is. Admittedly the list they come back with is often overly long and contains a lot of edge cases. However, where they begin to struggle is articulating what these users will want to achieve on the website. They know who they want to reach. However, they cannot always tell you why those people would be interested in the site.
These user tasks are another fundamental building block for any successful website. Although it is important for a website owner to understand what their objectives are and what they want users to do, it is even more important that they understand the users objectives as well.
Again, this provides context for the decisions they are making about design, usability and functionality. Without it the site will become self serving, largely ignoring the needs of users.
User tasks help to focus the clientʼs mind on the needs of their user, rather than what they can get out of them.
So am I claiming that design, usability and code do not matter? Well the shocking truth is that to some extent I am!
The shocking truth
Whether we like it or not there is significant evidence that you can create a successful website with bad design, terrible code and without ever running a usability test session.
You only need to look at the design of Craigslist or the code of Amazon to see that this is true.
However, I do not believe it is possible to build a successful website without business objectives, calls to action and a clear idea of user tasks.
Do not misunderstand me. I do believe design, usability and code matters. I just believe that they only matter if the fundamentals are already in place. These things improve a solid foundation but are no use in their own right.
As web designers it is our responsibility to ensure fundamental questions are being asked, before we start exploring other issues. If we do not, our websites will look great, be well coded and have gone through endless usability tests, however it will not be truly successful.
FROM:http://24ways.org/2009/what-makes-a-website-successful
The Opposite of Fitts’ Law
If you've ever wrangled a user interface, you've probably heard of Fitts' Law. It's pretty simple -- the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Kevin Hale put together a great visual summary of Fitts' Law, so rather than over-explain it, I'll refer you there.
The short version of Fitts' law, to save you all that tedious reading, is this:
- Put commonly accessed UI elements on the edges of the screen. Because the cursor automatically stops at the edges, they will be easier to click on.
- Make clickable areas as large as you can. Larger targets are easier to click on.
I know, it's very simple, almost too simple, but humor me by following along with some thought exercises. Imagine yourself trying to click on ...
- a 1 x 1 target at a random location
- a 5 x 5 target at a random location
- a 50 x 50 target at a random location
- a 5 x 5 target in the corner of your screen
- a 1 x 100 target at the bottom of your screen
Fitts' Law is mostly common sense, and enjoys enough currency with UI designers that they're likely to know about it even if they don't follow it as religiously as they should. Unfortunately, I've found that designers are much less likely to consider the opposite of Fitts' Law, which is arguably just as important.
If we should make UI elements we want users to click on large, and ideally place them at corners or edges for maximum clickability -- what should we do with UI elements we don't want users to click on? Like, say, the "delete all my work" button?
Alan Cooper, in About Face 3, calls this the ejector seat lever.
In the cockpit of every jet fighter is a brightly painted lever that, when pulled, fires a small rocket engine underneath the pilot's seat, blowing the pilot, still in his seat,
out of the aircraft to parachute safely to earth. Ejector seat levers can only be used
once, and their consequences are significant and irreversible.Applications must have ejector seat levers so that users can—occasionally—move
persistent objects in the interface, or dramatically (sometimes irreversibly) alter the function or behavior of the application. The one thing that must never happen is accidental deployment of the ejector seat.
The interface design must assure that a user can never inadvertently fire the ejector seat when all he wants to do is make some minor adjustment to the program.
I can think of a half-dozen applications I regularly use where the ejector seat button is inexplicably placed right next to the cabin lights button. Let's take a look at our old friend GMail, for example:
I can tell what you're thinking. Did he click Send or Save Now? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement of composing that angry email, I kind of lost track myself. Good thing we can easily undo a sent mail! Oh wait, we totally can't. Consider my seat, or at least that particular rash email, ejected.
It's even worse when I'm archiving emails.
While there were at least 10 pixels between the buttons in the previous example, here there are all of ... three. Every few days I accidentally click Report Spam when I really meant to click Archive. Now, to Google's credit, they do offer a simple, obvious undo path for these accidental clicks. But I can't help wondering why it is, exactly, that these two buttons with such radically different functionality just have to be right next to each other.
Undo is powerful stuff, but wouldn't it be better still if I wasn't pulling the darn ejector seat lever all the time? Wouldn't it make more sense to put that risky ejector seat lever in a different location, and make it smaller? Consider the WordPress post editor.
Here, the common Update operation is large and obviously a button -- it's easy to see and easy to click on. The less common Move to Trash operation is smaller, presented as a vanilla hyperlink, and placed well away from Update.
The next time you're constructing a user interface, you should absolutely follow Fitts' law. It just makes sense. But don't forget to follow the opposite of Fitts' law, too -- uncommon or dangerous UI items should be difficult to click on!
FROM:http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fitts-law.html
11 useful SEO Tips
1. Semantic Data Extractor - Semantically Rich HTML
The Semantic Data Extractor Tool from the W3C will try to extract the following information from your document. We've provided on site links to extended information for each of these areas.
2. HTML 4 SEO Best Practices in HTML Authoring
Listing of all HTML 4 Elements that you as an SEO Consultant will be involved with at some point during your tenure. You should be familiar with the various HTML Elements and HTML Attributes that are available to you for on page SEO techniques.
3. The Ultimate SEO Guide
These documents are by far the most extensive resource for on page SEO. I guarantee you that nothing else compares and this SHOULD BE mandatory reading for all SEO Consultants.
4. The Basics - Building the Perfect Page - Part I
Building the Perfect Page is a series of topics discussing the basics of web page development.
* Title Element - Building the Perfect Page - Part II
This section discusses the importance of the Title Element.
o Title Element - Page Titles
Every html document must have a Title Element in the head section. Some refer to the element as a meta tag (title tag) when it is not. Here is a working example of the title element.
* META Description - Building the Perfect Page - Part III
This section discusses the importance of the META Description Tag.
5. Robots Text File - robots.txt
The robots.txt file is a set of instructions for visiting robots (spiders) that index the content of your web site pages. For those spiders that obey the file, it provides a map for what they can, and cannot index.
* robots.txt Validation
You should validate your robots.txt file. Enter the full URI to the robots.txt file on your server. The robots.txt file always resides at the root level of your web.
6. META Tags - Metadata Elements
The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.
* META Description Tag
Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the section of your web pages.
* META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page.
* META Language Tag
In HTML elements, the language attribute specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.
* META Link Relationship Tag
It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documents in addition to the page hit by the search. You may help search engines by using the link element with rel="start" along with the title attribute.
* rel="nofollow" - Link Relationship Attribute
By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines).
7. Robots META Tag
The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services.
* Googlebot Robots META Tag
The Robots META Tag for Googlebot is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of Google's indexes and services.
* MSNBot Robots META Tag
The Robots META Tag for MSNBot is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of MSN's indexes and services.
8. META Tags Abuse and Misuse - Metadata Structuring and Standards
The SEO Consultants Directory Administrator and Directory Editors were involved in a discussion via email where our interpretation of the Metadata standards are being challenged.
9. Revisit-After META Tag
The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines, it never was supported and probably never will be. It was developed for, and supported by, Vancouver Webpages and their local search engine searchBC.
10. DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models.
11. HTML Comments Tag - HTML Markup
There has been a myth that has perpetuated over the years where keywords and keyword phrases listed inside HTML comments tags would add a boost to the overall relevancy of the page. This is not true based on numerous tests we've performed during the years 2002 and 2003.
from: http://www.seoconsultants.com/seo/tips/
X3D and HTML Integration
Fraunhofer IGD, recently announced its X3DOM project. A test-environment to evaluate and evolve a DOM-based HTML/X3D integration model.
X3DOM is an experimental open source runtime, implemented in JavaScript and WebGL, which allows to inline X3D content in (X)HTML pages. It performs the current HTML5 specification for declarative 3D content and allows including X3D elements as part of any HTML5 DOM tree. An official release will be announced soon.
This model is based on ideas and code developed by Philip Taylor from University of Cambridge and provides a minimal X3D-runtime in JavaScript. The system uses the recently released WebGL for rendering and therefore renders hardware accelerated without any plug-in. However, WebGL is only available in alpha-builds from FireFox and WebKit at: http://www.x3dom.org/?page_id=9
The objective here is to include a live X3D scene in your HTML DOM, which allows you to manipulate the 3D content by only adding/ removing or changing DOM elements. No specific plug-in or plug-in interface like SAI is needed. It also supports some of the HTML events like “onclick” on 3D objects. 3dsmax exporter which can save to html/xhtml, a converter tutorial and now has BMW configuration showcase.
The Web3d Consortium’s X3D HTML5 Working Group presented a working demonstration with event passing to/from the HTML DOM using the X3DOM examples at the W3C TPAC meeting in Santa Clara, California in Nov 2009. At this meeting the Web3D HTML5 working group presented their thoughts and ideas on how to integrate X3D and HTML. In addition to the hour-long presentation, many other conversations and working demonstrations were given to W3C members during the course of the TPAC. The Web3D Consortium’s work was well received by W3C and the W3C HTML5 WG. The W3C HTML5 working group can be found at: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/.
This integration model is still evolving and open for discussions.There is more work to be done to further this effort. Anyone interested in getting involved please contact John Stewart. More information about the Working Group can be found at X3D-HTML5 .
from:http://www.web3d.org/news/permalink/DOM-based-HTMLX3D-integration/
Alt + n commands list
Here is a list of various Alt+n special characters very useful!!!
☺ alt+1
☻ alt+2
♥ alt+3
♦ alt+4
♣ alt+5
♠ alt+6
• alt+7
◘ alt+8
○ alt+9
◙ alt+10
♂ alt+11
♀ alt+12
♪ alt+13
♫ alt+14
☼ alt+15
► alt+16
◄ alt+17
↕ alt+18
¶ alt+20
§ alt+21
▬ alt+22
↨ alt+23
↑ alt+24
↓ alt+25
→ alt+26
← alt+27
↔ alt+29
▲ alt+30
▼ alt+31
` alt+96
{ alt+123
} alt+125
~ alt+126
⌂ alt+127
Ç alt+128
ü alt+129
â alt+131
ä alt+132
å alt+134
ê alt+136
ë alt+137
ï alt+139
î alt+140
Ä alt+142
Å alt+143
É alt+144
æ alt+145
Æ alt+146
ö alt+147
ô alt+148
û alt+150
ÿ alt+152
Ö alt+153
Ü alt+154
ø alt+155
Ø alt+157
ñ alt+164
Ñ alt+165
ª alt+166
º alt+167
¿ alt+168
® alt+169
½ alt+171
¼ alt+172
¡ alt+173
« alt+174
» alt+175
░ alt+176
▒ alt+177
▓ alt+178
Á alt+181
 alt+182
À alt+183
© alt+184
¢ alt+189
¥ alt+190
─ alt+191
ã alt+198
à alt+199
¤ alt+207
ð alt+208
Ð alt+209
Ê alt+210
Ë alt+211
È alt+212
ı alt+213
Í alt+214
Î alt+215
Ï alt+216
█ alt+219
▄ alt+220
¦ alt+221
Ì alt+222
▀ alt+223
Ó alt+224
ß alt+225
Ô alt+226
Ò alt+227
õ alt+228
Õ alt+229
µ alt+230
þ alt+231
ä alt+232
Ú alt+233
Û alt+234
Ù alt+235
ý alt+236
Ý alt+237
¯ alt+238
´ alt+239
± alt+240
¾ alt+243
¶ alt+244
÷ alt+246
¸ alt+247
¨ alt+249
· alt+250
¹ alt+251
³ alt+252
² alt+253
■ alt+254