Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

Where Am I? Breadcrumbs In Web Design

Friday, January 15th, 2010

A basic primer on breadcrumb navigation. Covers topics such as when and when not to use them, the three main types, design considerations, design mistakes, and using them together with drop down sub-menus.

Also includes a gallery of examples.

Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples And Best Practices – Smashing Magazine

Progress Indicators in Web Design

Friday, January 15th, 2010

A good primer to implementing ‘progress indicators’ in interface design. Includes discussion on different uses of progress indicators (not just for store checkouts), best practices, and when not to use them.

Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine

45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript Techniques

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

A list of tutorials to do some very clever things with CSS and JS. Some notables:

Advanced Event Timeline With PHP, CSS & jQuery
Sproing! – Make An Elastic Thumbnail Menu
Sticky SideNav Layout with CSS
Simply-Buttons v2
A Colorful Clock With CSS & jQuery

45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques – Smashing Magazine

SproutCore: HTML 5 Framework

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

I was looking to see if there were any frameworks for HTML 5 and came across SproutCore.  It’s an MVC framework and has some similarity to GWT in that it compiles all the code into HTML/JS/CSS that should work across browsers without plug-ins.  Also like GWT, it has a bunch of panels, buttons, and controls [...]

Keep Content Above the Fold? Breaking the Myth

Monday, December 14th, 2009

An article that questions the theory of making sure all content shows up above the fold.

Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want.

The myth of the page fold: [...]

Turbocharge Your Website

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

speedupIs website speed critical to your business?

Consider: A study has shown that increasing response times by 500ms for Google reduced traffic by 20%. Response time increases of 100ms on Amazon decreased sales by 1%1! These are some pretty amazing figures.

The reason is probably that [...]

Speed and User Experience

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Interesting article with some key learnings that can inform how Web sites and applications ought to be built. Here are some key callouts:

To create the illusion of direct manipulation, a user interface has to respond in less than 0.1 second. This is a guideline for AJAX-style interactions that you create on sites. It’s got to [...]

Making Better Use of Your “Contact Us” Page

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

The Contact Us page plays a critical role in most websites. For many organizations, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the entire website exists to support the Contact Us page. But how usable is your contact page? Despite its central role, Contact Us often fails to get the attention it deserves [...]

Is your browser secure?

Friday, September 11th, 2009

HTTPS. SSL. CA. CRL. OCSP. Cessation of Operation. Confused yet?

Firefox 3 seems to be very proactive in the area of web security. Sometime last night, a client’s SSL certificate got inexplicably revoked by GoDaddy. Firefox was kind enough to give a big fat warning message that the certificate had been revoked, blocking access [...]

A Website Redesign: 5 Months Later

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

It’s been just about 5 months since we re-launched the Dayspring website with a fresh design and a custom content management system. We’ve gotten quite a few positive comments on the site’s clean, precise look.

But how has the site performed? Sure it’s a laudable goal to make the Web more beautiful, but, [...]