Posts in: Usability
- Recommended reading: ‘Designing for Context’
- In case you missed it: Joshua Porter suggests using media-specific CSS to serve up different information based on the device used. Porter writes: The medium is the message: Imagine providing unique information exclusively for people who read your site via a web-enabled cell phone — then crafting a different message for those who are reading a [...] [23 Feb 2004]
- To open a new window or not? 5 reasons to re-consider this web technique
- At the newspaper site I work for (ajc.com), our style is to open external links in a new window. It’s a pretty standard web convention. Yahoo! mail and Hotmail.com do it. Most newspaper sites do it. Heck, I’ve even done it on my own site. But based on accessibility standards and my own experience as [...] [14 Feb 2004]
- Bad UI: Aetna’s DocFind®
- Aetna’s DocFind® allows members to search its database of doctors by zip code, city and county (in addition to name and specialty). If you want to search by "ZIP code", you are forced to choose a state as well. View a larger version At the next screen, you’re prompted for your zip code, a distance in miles, and [...] [4 Jan 2004]
- Creating clean URIs with PHP
- UPDATED to fix a broken link and correct some technical issues. I recently switched from dynamic URIs to faux-static ones. Here’s how to do the same on your site. I’m going to assume that you’ve already got your own PHP/MySQL-driven publishing system in place, and that you currently use dynamic URIs on your site. Step one: Change your URIs I use [...] [22 Dec 2003]
- Trim navigation on web pages
- 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 this [...] [14 Dec 2003]
- Another site improvement: Previous and Next links
- 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]
