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Murdoch charging for online news – seems a bit backward to me
The recent suggestion by Rupert Murdoch that he will be charging for online news provision starting sometime in 2010 goes against all intuition. Here’s my analysis and predictions. I mentioned the story to two people already and they both said ‘Well we’ll use BBC News instead…’ – who will pay for online news or celeb…
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Quick web design tips: Image size and optimisation
Optimising (or optimizing) images is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get the size of your web pages down. Not optimising images remains to be one of the most significant problems on the internet. Reducing image file size benefits all users, as well as for the increased popularity in mobile devices, making your…
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Top 10: 1990s bad web design (and early 2000s)
Web design has come a long way since the original 256 colour dithering of late-1990s web design and the myriad of weird and wonderful things it brought with it. In the late-1990s and early 2000s personal homepage were on the rage with companies like Tripod (Lycos) and Geocities (Yahoo) offering 5 free webpages with free site building tools. Here’s a…
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Password masking – the debate begins (Reflections on Jakob Nielsen)
Jakob Nielsen is a highly regarded usability expert. His recent Alertbox article (I’m sure he wouldn’t want to call it a blog post) entitled Stop Password Masking, is certainly going to cause a stir in the web community. He proposes that masked passwords (when you type in a password field on the web it only shows…
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Web redesign: Why bother?
Starting a website redesign project before establishing clear goals and objectives, is a bit like driving a 1987 Ford Fiesta through a mountain range with iffy brakes and no steering wheel. The road will be bumpy and before long you’ll have a sore head and be rusting in the forecourt of a Little Chef. If you can’t…
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Compare the meerkat
Compare The Market’s recent (and still current) ‘Compare The Meerkat’ campaign has undoubtedly become engrained in the minds of the UK public. On a recent trip to London Zoo, guess what everyone was saying near the meerkat enclosure? Three months ago, would we have been able to buy meerkat garden ornaments? The reason why it’s a…
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Ceefax predicts mobile web: Jakob Neilsen declares BBC world’s best headline writers
The latest article by Jakob Nielsen, the living legend of usability who publishes regularly on a web developers’ treasure trove and graphic designers’ nightmare of a website, declares the BBC News website as the epitome of great web writing. This is true, and a well established fact, that the headline writers at the BBC succinctly…
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Curve of clarity: Picking the right keywords
Choosing the right words to fill your webpage, or keywords for your ad campaigns can sometimes be hit or miss. Using the ‘curve of clarity’ as an idea, you should be able to choose appropriate keywords to maximise seo efficiency and also the readability and relevance of your site.Key principlesWords in common usage have high…
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Their news, us news, me news: newspapers are old news
The speed at which news is classed as ‘new’ has changed. Newspapers simply can’t keep up with the pace of life that the current Internet age provides. The scope of news has changed dramatically too, especially with the concepts of Twitter and (as one example) BBC News ‘Have Your Say’ feature on web stories.
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SEO long tail: use it to your advantage
One of the keys to a successful web presence has nothing to do with search engine optimisation. Though SEO techniques can certainly benefit the exposure of your site, what really counts is making sure the site has direction. Indeed for most websites, paying good money for a SEO consultant would be about as productive as…
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Usability and SEO of hyperlinks and link text (Reflections on Jakob Nielsen)
Jakob Nielsen is proclaimed as the guru of web usability, analysing and writing about usability and SEO methods any web designer, developer or author can apply to their site. He is both adored and panned by the web community for his insightful and informative, but hideously designed website*. Ranked very highly in the community, his…
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Quick steps to improving readability (Reflections on GCD post)
As well as a couple of simple steps to take to improve readability of sites (below), this is just a short post to flag up an article I found recently by Gail Diggs at GCD Marketing: When “Bad Writing” is Good. Essentially, the old rules of copy writing are “thrown out the window” because of…
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Beware the fold – Designing for netbooks
Web designers need to be more aware of the popularity of netbooks as cheap, low-tech, laptop notebooks. This popularity has suggested that a significant proportion of web users are quite happy with low-power processing (hence longer battery life) in order they can check their email and favourite websites on the move. This has spelt an end, or…
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Plain English to help SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
The highlight of the week just gone was the issuing of 200 banned words by the GLA: BBC News Story, List of Banned Words. This reminded me of the importance of plain english, the sort that the Plain English Campaign hark on about. These people write some very useful guides which help those writing for…
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Fixed width or full width websites?
I recently read an article on A List Apart called Fluid Grids. This got me thinking on how many websites use fixed width columns and how many used full window width to display content. Certainly when the web was young, the design of many websites (quite often personal web pages) were full width, expecially with…
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Why I’ve removed all but my name from Facebook
I might not be one of those activists that has completely deactivate their Facebook profile or those lucky enough to actually have their profile deleted by the powers that be, but I’m getting a little annoyed about the whole terms and conditions saga. It’s been well documented in the news and on networks that Facebook’s…