A couple of recent posts showcasing icon use in navigation menus got me thinking again about icon design for the web.
Read MoreAuthor: Christian Watson
Break Down Your Website Traffic with a Stacked Area Graph
I recently enjoyed a post on SEOmoz about presenting web traffic stats in a more meaningful and useful way. I found this to be a great way to visualize how traffic to different sections of a site compares over time.
Read MoreMetacritic Redesign Brings Out the Hate
Movie review aggregator website Metacritic underwent a complete redesign last week, much to the dismay of its regular users.
Read MoreBreadcrumb Trail Navigation Design Showcase
Breadcrumb trails can be a useful secondary navigation tool for large sites such as online stores. Read More
Supercharge Your Website Maintenance with Xenu’s Link Sleuth
I’ve been using Xenu’s link sleuth to do some website cleanup recently and wanted to make sure I was getting the most out of it. A little research resulted in several useful articles about how much more you can do with this tool than just check for broken links:
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What’s the Best Search Box Size?
Search is an important component of any large website, especially an online retailer with thousands of products.
However, when visiting different sites I’ve seen little consensus on how many characters should be viewable in a search box, even though being able to read what you’ve typed is key to search usability.
I thought it would be interesting to review the search boxes of web retailers to see if there were any best practices that could be learned from them regarding search box size.
Rather than pick sites at random, I took my list of online stores from Internet Retailer’s top 500 list and picked out the top 30. After all, for these sites search should be an even more critical component as it would be used so frequently.
Ecommerce Copywriting: 11 Product Descriptions Compared
A recent article on Get Elastic — The 4 Pillars of Ecommerce Copywriting — got me thinking about the ‘2nd pillar’ mentioned in the article, writing to persuade.
Read MoreTo Click or Not to Click
It’s common these days for news-oriented sites to practice ‘link hoarding’ whereby when referencing a topic, rather than linking out to external websites they link mainly to their own internal archive of content about that topic.
Read MoreInteractive Media Awards Top 10 Websites of 2009
I’m not a huge fan of web awards programs, largely because you typically have to pay to be considered and so the pool of contenders is somewhat self-selected.
Read MoreAren’t Websites Supposed to Save Money?
A recent BBC news article writes that the British government spent £94M last year developing and running websites.
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