Archive for the 'Design' Category

Design for modern & mobile browsers

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

There was–quite recently–a time when we seemed to have reached a pleasant stasis: everyone had finally thrown off the limitations of the 640×480 screen, even the 800×600, and we had tons of real estate to execute beautiful, elaborate designs. However, the explosive growth of mobile browsing, as well as the continued expansion of form factors, […]

Design & call-to-action

Monday, February 13th, 2012

We aren’t designers, but we sure like good design. Not just pretty design. We like design that helps our clients sell more stuff, join their organization, download materials, subscribe to newsletters…, to respond to their call-to-action. Whereas our focus with search marketing is to increase the size of the sales funnel’s opening, user experience design […]

More reasons to avoid Flash

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Over the years we’ve lamented the online popularity and over-reliance on Flash because of concerns relating to usability, navigability, indexability, measurability, portability, and so on. Now Steve Jobs has provided a litany of additional reasons that Flash is not supported by Apple products including the iPad, iPod, and iPhone. While some of our concerns make […]

Google browser size and visibility tool

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Google Labs just rolled out a browser size tool to help you see how your website is seen by people with different screen sizes (more literally, browser winder sizes). This tool can tell you if an important elements of you page is showing up “above the fold” or if it remains hidden unless users scroll. […]

Do you need a CMS?

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Clients often ask if they need a Content Management System (CMS) to help manage website changes. In theory, these allow organizations to effectively manage their own site changes. This post will delve into the pros and cons of using a CMS. As their name implies, Content Management Systems are software packages that make website maintenance […]

Improving web form conversion rates

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

You can drive all the traffic in the world to your website, but it’s a waste the visitors don’t convert. Form design is very often a significant contributor to poor conversion rates. While Key Principles and Specific Recommendations that follow are generally written for forms that solicit contact information from potential customers, they can also […]

Adobe + Omniture, why?

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Adobe is buying Omniture, a leading provider of web analytics and analysis provider.What does this mean for online marketers and our clients? This struck me as an odd combination until I started digging a little further into recent history of these companies and the direction of application development. Adobe makes software such as Acrobat, Dreamweaver, […]

Firebug can slow Firefox to a crawl

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Firebug is a great tool for analyzing and debugging HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more. I love it. But I also hate it. As of Version 1.3.2, it stores information about almost every resource downloaded as you browse the web, regardless of whether or not you have Firebug turned on. For someone like me that averages […]

800×600 is dead, almost

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

We were just revisiting an old client’s site, and we were struck by how narrow the design looks, having been designed to fit on 800 pixel screen widths. (My MacBook Pro’s “squat” 1440×900 screen definitely exaggerates this effect.) It used to be considered a best practice to design websites for 800×600 pixel displays. This width […]

The number 1 design rule

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

The golden rule for good web design is simply: Don’t annoy users. They will leave. A lot of big, beautiful, and expensive web sites commit cardinal sins that result in higher bounce rates and lower sales. Most annoying behaviors are easy to avoid. These sins include: Splash pages Sound or music when the page loads […]