Why Redesigns are Necessary

I’m currently in the early stages of redesigning a local newspaper’s website. I’ve been compiling statistical information such as the most trafficked pages and what time of day is the busiest and also where users are clicking on each page. Crazyegg.com allows me to log click activity and compile that information into something useful.
What I’ve noticed is that while the home page has links to almost all of the current edition’s articles, very few people users are venturing past the page fold. Also, over 60% of the clicks occurring on the home page are on four links. Continue reading »

Great Mobile Testing Website

So I’m reading through Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design, which I love by the way, and came across a few mentions of Ready.mobi. So I thought I would check it out. Continue reading »

Book Review: Mobile Web Design

You’ve probably seen many reviews on Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design around recently. I thought I’d add my own. Continue reading »

Flash on Top of Flash

At work we just implemented a ‘Corner Peel’ Flash Advertisement. You can view an example over at the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. I had a problem when putting this ‘Corner Peel’ flash ad onto the home page, you see we run a handful of advertisements of various sizes throughout our website. One of those being a leaderboard ad (728 x 90 px). When the corner peel is ‘peeled back’ it lays on top of the leaderboard.

When I saw this for the first time, the leaderboard advertisement was a flash ad and was laying on top of the corner peel ad and thus looked very funny. This little problem caused me quite the headache today. I thought I’d show you the little trick that saved me an even bigger headache. Continue reading »

Digg for Designers

Recently I’ve been coming across a lot of great articles that have been submitted to Design Float. Design Float is a digg-style social news site, but with a niche. I’ll let them tell you about it:

The ultimate goal of Design Float is to, hopefully, categorize the huge amount of design-related content available on the web into neat and easy to navigate pages of articles in order of importance/relevance as decided by the community.

Great WordPress Resource

I ran across an extremely large WordPress resource today. Over at Mashable.com they’ve compiled a list of 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog. This is a great resource of plugins and templates to extend WordPress way beyond its initial intention.

Great Website for Freelancers

I stumbled across this site for freelance designers and have been enjoying it ever since. I really love the layout as well. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Continue reading »

Design by Committee

Designing a website for a corporation can be troublesome. The term “design by committee” comes into play quite frequently. Don’t get me wrong, getting feedback on a design is very helpful, and I would argue, a necessity, but when there is a handful of directors, managers and editors telling you how it should look, that’s when the problems start. Continue reading »