Beginning Web Design Workshops
We are proud to be sponsoring a free 8-week course aimed at beginning web development with Web Standards. The course is developed by the Cleveland Web Standards Association and lead by the great Joseph James Frantz (aka Flounder/aoirthoir).
Designing the User Experience
When we think about the development of websites, we think of the back-end development, graphic design and semantic markup that are coded and combined into the finished website.
The user experience design is often overlooked. It is intangible, naturally vague and difficult to understand. However, making this user experience comprehendible is crucial to the design process.
It is very tempting to skip over the experience design and straight to designing in Photoshop. Perhaps our ego gets in the way, or we are scared of spending hours that, in the end, don’t return a tangible product.
In the end our user experience notes and research are transformed into wireframes, design comps and ultimately the finished website.
Welcoming Constraints
As software developers we often find ourselves running low on time, money or patience. While these constraints often cause frustration, they are actually good things.
Constraints are simple solutions in disguise. When you find yourself working hard on a problem and seem to be progressing slowly, take the constraint as a sign to step back and examine the problem again.
The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.
Occam’s Razor
Ignoring Constraints
It’s natural to ignore constraints. After all, they cause us pain and we are taught to keep emotions out of our business. However, ignoring these constraints will lead to software which is counter-intuitive to use.
Resist the urge to throw more money/people/time at the problem to fix it. People under pressure do not work faster and additional funds just provides an excuse to deliver late.
Exceptions
There are times when constraints are caused by other situations. You may have a more serious problem to deal with if the constraints are caused by:
- Poor planning
- Lazy people
- Bad project management
- Counter productive working atmosphere
- Distractions caused by Twitter
10 Tips to Increased Ecommerce Profits
We spend many hours a week researching and observing customer shopping experiences and ecommerce websites. During our usability research for Simpli5, we discovered that most small ecommerce websites violate 3 or 4 of these fundamental principles.
Oscommerce and ZenCart users should hang on tight. They are likely to be repeat offenders, but also will see the greatest positive impact once these problems are fixed.
CWSA Looks Promising
Last night was my first opportunity to join the guys over at the Cleveland Web Standards Association, a relatively new meetup group with a goal of expanding awareness of web standards to local businesses and old-school designers – before taking over the rest of the world.
Functional Favicons
Traditionally favicons are used for branding. A tiny icon which represents who you are and is displayed in the browsers address bar, in your bookmarks and (in Firefox) in the tab of the page your are currently viewing.
For most, the favicon is purely aesthetic. However, in others it has become a useful piece of functionality.
Worldmapper – Trending the globe
I am fascinated by the different ways people represent data. We grow accustomed to displaying data in the same old ways. We start to glance over the mundane bar graphs we see everyday. We forget that the relationship between the data is more important than the specific numerical values. Graphs are for trends, reports are for numbers.
Worldmapper takes the same old data we hear every day in the news and dares to present it uniquely. I think it makes their point well.
Paving the Way for Simpli5
Simpli5 is our new web application which debuted this month. It revolutionizes retail business through a new innovative approach to managing orders, products, inventory and customers.
We believe retail management is all about decisions and Simpli5 makes these decisions simpler.
IE8 – Trying to become a real browser?
Microsoft posted an article on their Internet Explorer blog earlier this week where they claimed Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test. Internet Explorer has been the cause of many web design headaches due to blatent disregard for Web Standards. Microsoft may finally be feeling pressure from Opera and Mozilla to comply with Web Standards.
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