Category: Usability and design
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Useful web considerations: Bing vs Google, YouTube and accessibility, Top 100 internet sites
This is a very brief post about a few web related things that are worthy of note recently. Bing is coming! Batten down the hatches, Google I have to say I’ve been very impressed with Bing’s advertising campaign which effectively brands itself as a ‘decision engine’ rather than a search engine, but more noteworthy for…
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There is a different Google out there – trust me
Whilst most UK Googlers don’t yet see much of a difference, in the US Google has made a few minor alterations to it’s interface. Most of the time when you go to http://www.google.com whilst in the UK, you will be automatically redirected to http://www.google.co.uk – however you can get to the .com version using browser…
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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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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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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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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…