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.
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.
Amazon.com Redesigned for the better?
For many years I considered Amazon.com to be the epitome of great ecommerce design. About 2 years ago, I changed focus. Amazon started to do too much, in my opinion. Cluttering the interface with elements that, as far as I could tell, we rarely used.
A few weeks back Amazon redesigned their site and made a number of dramatic changes. Some were great, some are more perplexing.
Clearing Gracefully
Clearing in CSS has always been a bit of a pain. The guys over at QuirksMode have let out a little secret used by the CSS experts to clear:both without an extra div or hidden content.
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Latest Comments
- Robert → “ I have to agree with the design of the site being great. I am more interested in how the website got ranked so high and some keywords land first page in searches when the page it lands on has no page rank.…”
- Etienne Segonzac → “ Hello everyone ! I would love to have a chat with other Pomodoro users (and the mailing list is quite slow). The thing is for me the main takeaways of the technique are the rhythm + the motivation of visualizing my progress. BTW, the Navel Labs app is quite gorgeous (and the compliment is coming from a concurrent…”
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- sirber → “ Is there a limit to the URL size? What if I want to create a massive chart?…”
- Randy Martin → “ I have used the classic 12 column grid for all my design tasks for nearly 15 years. 12 column grids came out of print, allowing one to set type full page, half page, quarter page, third page, sixth page, etc., extremely easy. More than that, keeping things on the grid puts elements in balance and…”

