As a proponent of design patterns, it was interesting to read Design Patterns: When Breaking The Rules Is OK in Smashing Magazine recently, in which the author highlighted the potential inadequacies of design patterns.
Read MoreAuthor: Christian Watson
Old Navy Email Design Showcase
Old Navy is known for its retro, kitschy designs and bold use of color in both its stores and its advertising. Their emails follow a similar philosophy, livening up your inbox with a kaleidoscope of colors, patterns and typographic styles. Read More
Come Visit! How the Websites of the Top 10 Most Popular Countries for Tourists Compare
Summer is approaching, and along with it thoughts of vacations and where to go this year. With this in mind, I thought I would take a look at the official tourism websites of the most popular countries for tourists, as ranked by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, and see how well they help those looking to make this important travel decision.
Read MoreInfographic Design Needs Your Feedback
We’ve been dabbling with infographic design at work as a way to generate backlinks. We recently published a new one about the rising issue of copper theft (hey, I work in the security industry).
Read MoreSocial Media Coffeebreak: How to go Viral on Pinterest & Use Memes to Build Backlinks
I particularly enjoyed a couple of recent posts on the SEOMoz blog — the first about how to go viral on Pinterest and drive a bunch of traffic to your site, and the second on how to use internet memes to build backlinks and traffic.
Free Google Analytics Dashboards and Custom Reports
As part of their announcement about improved custom report and dashboard sharing, Google have released several custom reports and dashboards for Google Analytics users to install.
Web Tooltip Design Showcase
Tooltips are a useful way to present additional, context-sensitive information about an element on a web page, such as a hyperlink.
As tooltips continue to become more common as a means for users to interact with web page elements, the need for good tooltip design has become more important. Read More
Anatomy of a Horrible Web Design Client [Infographic]
This is pretty good — we’ve all dealt with them. I particularly like the quote:
Read More50% of web design clients only know what they don’t want, and they don’t know what that is until you design it for them.
How to Set Up a Search Engine-Friendly Site Maintenance Page
I found this SEOmoz post on setting up a search engine-friendly website maintenance page to be very useful, especially as I have a significant website redesign launch coming up.