Many web design companies have a widely distributed development team and often a geographically diverse client-base, including international clients.
Read MoreWeb Design Site Rankings: July 2004
Back in January, just for fun I posted an unscientific traffic ranking table of web design sites (blogs, largely) to see how popular some of the sites were that I enjoyed on a regular basis. Well, I thought it was time to do an update.
Read MoreConveying Information Through Design
US News & World Report have just released their Best Hospitals: 2004 rankings. This is a pretty big thing for America’s hospitals, something akin to the health Oscars.
Read MoreThe Real World Benefits of Web Standards
When I look back at the code behind some of my earlier sites I am shocked by how bloated and downright ugly it is. I cringe at the nested tables, I wince at the liberal use of spacer gifs and am I embarrassed by my poor use of CSS. Read More
Big Name Sites Still Not Considering User Goals
Some of the redesigns of late have been rather good (step forward Stop Design and Justwatchthesky; not so fast Mezzoblue, although that comment highlighting script is kind of interesting). And then there’s that whole “Design Eye for the Usability Guy” thing, which just made the rest of us feel inadequate (but at least you gave us a good chuckle in doing so).
Read MoreHow to Write an Unreadable Web Article
I just tried to read the latest gotoreport and I gave up without even getting a quarter of the way through the first article. Why? Because it was unreadable! Read More
How Much Should I Charge?
This question gets debated a lot, and seems to have recently risen to prominence again in some well known blogs. And rightly so, of course, for even though the majority of us would do this stuff for free, it does help to be able to afford to keep that roof over your head.
This question is particularly tricky for people starting out in the web design business, so I thought I’d give my take, based on my own experience.
Microsoft Office Tips & Tricks
For those of us that seek to become even more powerful users of Office (knowing look, Keith), PC Magazine has kindly come up with 106 Office Tips and Tricks. Well worth a look.
On a side note, it’s interesting to see how unusable their site is. Try navigating around the tips and tricks article without having to go back to the main link via the breadcrumb in order to get to another main section.
You can’t dip into the Word section, read a few tips and then jump over to, say, the Excel section without going back to the main page. Which you can’t get to without using the breadcrumb trail. Like anyone would want to do that – silly me!
They also take the take the “page” metaphor to an extreme for their content (presumably to throw more ads at us) and break it up into small chunks on separate pages. Given that the site is not the fastest at loading, this soon (for “soon” read “as soon as you have to click the ‘next’ link for the first time”) becomes a real pain.
Fortunately, there’s a workaround to this usability snafu – click on the “print” icon and the whole article is nicely laid out on a single page, sans intrusive advertisements.
New Client Site Launched
Not that I’m one to blow my own trumpet (oh okay then, maybe occasionally), but I did want to mention that Smiley Cat Web Design has launched a redesigned version of Jet City Entertainment.
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