Jacob Nielsen has posted his annual round up of what’s being done wrong on the web.
Actually, many of the problems he highlights are fairly minor, so if this is his list of consistent worst offenders, then the web is becoming a much more useable and accessible place.
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I was looking to find a nice color scheme for a site the other day and a quick search of the web brought back a number of useful online tools. I thought I’d make a list of them (in no particular order), more for my own benefit really.
Read MoreMy wife recently took back a cordless phone because it didn’t work. She had left it in its charger over night like she was supposed to but the thing just wouldn’t produce a dial tone. I looked at it briefly, pushed a few of the buttons and agreed that the thing was dead out of the box.
Read MoreThere’s an interesting article over at Sitepoint about using Javascript to enable jump links to scroll you smoothly down the page to another location. According to the author, the reasoning behind this is that:
When they’re navigating through a long document, users often are confused or disoriented when they click a link that jumps to another location in that same document.
Are they? Based on what evidence? In all the usability testing I have done, never once has a user complained to me that having a link take them to another location on a page is confusing.
Read MoreOptimizationweek.com has a great speed comparison of three leading travel sites and comes up with some interesting findings.
Plus it has a catchy title — Overweight Travel Sites Delay Holiday Travelers — although, from an SEO standpoint, it would benefit from being a little less cute and a bit more obvious as to what it’s about.
Anyway, the fact that the sites’ home pages average about 150kb is pretty scary; don’t they care about dial-up users? I’d never heard of the term “HTTP Compression” before reading this article either; there’s a useful technology that more sites should be using.
Maybe they are and I’m just late to the table?
Keith has done a nice redesign of Asterisk, making it more readable while still maintaining a nice design aesthetic. Read More