Latest Blog Posts

Flash Banners: Content and Design Considerations

July 7, 2009

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Flash banners can be a great addition to a website and can be a great way to convey important information in a visually attractive manner. In order to make them as effective as possible, there are some important content and design considerations that should be kept in mind when creating the banner.

Clear Instructions Will Improve Your Form’s Usability

June 2, 2009

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From a web designer’s perspective, creating a better and more usable form usually means coming up with a nice, clean design. That’s definitely true, but it’s not 100% accurate, because how usable your form is also depends on how well you’ve written the instructions contained within it.

Tips to Make Your Hosted Search Tool More Usable

May 28, 2009

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Hosted search engines allow you to easily incorporate a search function onto your website. Almost all of them give you some form code to put on your website, but you don’t have to use that code as they give it to you – you can customize it in order to improve its usability.

Why Your Content Needs Intro Text In It

April 30, 2009

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Introductory text is often one of the first things that users skip when looking at content on a website. Even if that’s the case, you shouldn’t ignore it altogether when writing your content. It can have some important usability benefits, and it might get read more than you think.

Ways to Create Breadcrumbs in WordPress

April 29, 2009

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WordPress doesn’t have a default way of creating breadcrumbs, so when you’re designing a website in it, you have to include them on your own, either by adding some code to your theme’s files or by using a plugin. Here are some ways to create breadcrumbs in WordPress for you to consider.

9 Ways to Make Your Links More Effective

April 16, 2009

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Links are one of the most fundamental building blocks of successful content on your website, yet many people create them – knowingly or unknowingly – in ways that decrease their effectiveness. Here are some tips that you can use when writing links within your content that can help improve their overall usability.

4 Reasons to Avoid Using ‘Click Here’ in Link Text

April 7, 2009

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Usability is always a concern of web designers, but when it comes to web content writers, that’s not always the case. There’s no better example of this than the continued use of “click here” in link text. Here are 4 reasons why you should avoid using “click here” when writing the links in your content.

Design Drop-Down Menus According to the “3 W’s”

April 2, 2009

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Drop-down menus are one of those “love ‘em or hate ‘em” elements in web design. Many designers or developers shy away from using them, and I used to be no exception to that. As I’m learning more about them though, I’m coming to embrace them – as long as they meet my “3 W’s” criteria.

Best and Worst Websites of NCAA Tournament Teams

March 20, 2009

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I promised in last week’s post about the NCAA conferences that I would take a look at the websites of all of the teams that received automatic bids by winning their conference tournaments. I’ve changed that slightly, so instead I want to show some of the best and worst websites of this year’s NCAA tournament [...]

Style Your Form Fields with Icons to Improve Usability

March 16, 2009

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From a usability standpoint, long forms with plain-text labels can be quite boring visually. One way to avoid this problem is to use icons within your input fields to visually indicate what the field is asking for. It’s a nice design touch that you as a designer can do to help make your forms a [...]