The New York Times and Washington Post both make use of streamlined, “breadcrumb” navigation on the inside pages of their sites. Rather than have links to every other section of the site on every page, both sites use a trim navigation bar at the top of the page. There are a two major advantages to [...]
[14 Dec 2003]
If you view an individual Quick Byte, you’ll notice that there are now links to the previous entry and the next entry at the bottom of every post. Thanks to Rudy over at the SitePoint forums for helping me figure this out.
[11 Dec 2003]
I used to use dynamic URLs for the “Quick bytes” and articles on this site (for instance, seeqb.php?entry=xxx). They worked just fine. However, some search engines won’t index those entries, ignoring everything after the ? (Google is capable of indexing ‘dynamic’ URLs.) Now, I’ve got faux-static URLs. Instead of ‘seeqb.php?entry=xxx’, the permanent link for each [...]
[8 Dec 2003]
It seems news home pages everywhere are wedded to tiny type. Miami.com (Miami Herald) and the CJOnline.com (Topeka Capital-Journal), for example, use 10 pixel or smaller font throughout their home pages. LATimes.com and NYTimes.com both use tiny type in their navigation. This is a bad thing. Tiny type is hard enough to read in print. [...]
[25 Nov 2003]
M&M’s (the candy) has a campaign where you can vote online for your favorite M&M’s TV ad. Visit the M&M’s web site and you’ll get a Flash-based image map where you can choose your country (and language). Considering society’s “geographic illiteracy” it doesn’t make much sense to put such a hurdle on the home page. [...]
[14 Nov 2003]
Want to find out what users want? Try to get in their head. One way to do that: create a persona. Alison Heard explains what a persona is (‘…[A] hypothetical-user archetype, developed for interface design projects and used for guiding decisions about visual design, functionality, navigation, and content’), and why creating one is a good [...]
[23 Oct 2003]
Carl Zetie slams drop-down (or pop-up) menus on forms in his Information Week article “Usability, Accessibility, and Profitability.” Zetie writes: The most annoying error is the misuse of pop lists. Many Web sites ask users with a U. S. address to enter their state abbreviation…by picking from a pop list. Because the HTML pop list [...]
[14 Oct 2003]
Chiara Fox explains the difference between site maps and site indexes. Blogger is now FREE! The first good thing to come out of Google’s acquisition of Bloger: it’s all free. No more premium Blogger. We all get to use the good stuff. *GASP* What?! PNGs in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows? Found on Glish.com: How [...]
[11 Sep 2003]
(Also known as “Ode to Don Norman“) I read Don Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” a couple of months ago. This morning, I experienced good design up close. I mistakenly bought a bottle of Neutrogena T/Gel conditioner thinking it was shampoo. I’ve done it before: buying a bottle of shampoo when I meant [...]
[9 Sep 2003]
Sitepoint.com featured an article a while back on opening new windows using standards-compliant code. Accessify offers two alternate approaches. But there are a few reasons why you should think twice about opening new windows.
[5 Sep 2003]