Allthingsdev.com

Why Redesigns are Necessary

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:19:16 +0000

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.

In my eyes, this is the perfect example of why this website needs to be redesigned. This website has had this layout since 2005. The users have grown accustomed to its layout and have learned the fast way to get to the exact content they want. This is fine, as designers we want our users to be able to get to their destination with as little hassle as possible, but in this situation, I can’t help but think that so much content is being ignored because users see no need in scrolling down or even visiting the left side of the page.

Here’s a few quick points when redesigning your own website(s):

Spread out the most popular links
Spreading out the most popular links will draw attention to other sections of a page and hopefully get your users more involved with other offerings you already provide.
Move the search box closer to an area you really want to emphasize.
The search box is easily the most sought after element on a page. Placing it close to specific section of your page is a simple and effective way to attract attention.
Move content up.
The closer your content is to the top of the page, the more important it appears to your users. If there is something you want to draw attention to, move it above the page fold.

I’d love to hear how you prepare for a redesign. Here’s a screen capture of the entire crazyegg heatmap test.

Domain Parking Update

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:42:32 +0000

A while ago, I wrote a quick blurb about my decision to park some of my domains I’ve been sitting on. I figured I’d do a quick recap and look at the money made over the past six weeks.

I’ve parked six domains:

In the month of October, all 6 domains combined for 479 views and resulted in 12 total ad clicks for a whopping (drum roll please) $1.42 in revenue. Yep, drinks are on me. November’s stats are even smaller, and therefore not worth mentioning.

I’m averaging a 2% click through rate, which is above average from my experience. Granted the entire page is an advertisement.

All in all, domain parking may be a shady business, but for those of us who have legitimate intentions to one day use these domains, it is a viable means to lower the cost of domain registration prices.

Read my previous post about domain parking.

CakePhp is Definitely….Cake

Jeff Purcell — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:43:49 +0000

I’ve been playing around with this PHP framework called CakePhp. CakePhp is designed for super fast php development, and I must say, fast is an undestatement.

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

I only recognize about 12 words in that blockquote. 5 of them have 4 letters or less. Nevertheless, I ran through a few tutorials tonight (out of boredom) and was amazed at how fast “rapid” really is. Check out the blog and the online bookmarks manager I created, both in less then 30 minutes.

I’m currently parting out ideas for my next web project and I definitely will be using CakePhp to speed up the development time.

php, development, cakephp, web development, framework,

Great Mobile Testing Website

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:53:01 +0000

So I’m reading through Cameron Mollâ€™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.

Ready.mobi allows you to test your mobile website against common problems and short comings that mobile web users have. Such as page size, display abnormalities and loading time and then gives your page a score from 0 - 5 (5 being the best). Also, while the software is crawling your mobile site, they display some very helpful mobile web design tips. What nice gentlemen.The scan runs several tests to make sure your mobile website is as optimized as possible for all mobile web users. Here’s a list of some of the tests it runs:

MIME types
Character encoding
Pop up windows
Alt texts
Image maps
Specify image sizes
Page title
Use of stylesheets
Stylesheets dependency
Redirection
Default input mode
Page size limit
Large graphics
Caching
External resources
Avoid free text
Structure
Form submit buttons

A visualization module is also provided. So you can see your site loaded in a handful of popular mobile phones.

Ready.mobi is a quick, simple and cheap way to test your mobile website against many different variables we face as web designers. mobi, mobile, mobile web design, web design, web standards

Book Review: Mobile Web Design

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:02:43 +0000

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

I purchased Cameron’s book on Wednesday and have been thumbing through it off and on. I find it extremely enlightening. Not only is the book well written, he provides links to some very informative pages about mobile standards and good mobile design practices. I’ve added quite a few new feeds to my reader after reading this book.

The book is 104 pages long, comes in pdf format and will set you back 19 dollars. This book is well worth the small fee. Cameron has posted a sample of the book(pdf). I suggest taking a gander, you won’t be disappointed.

FYI: If you purchase a copy of the book by September 14th, you’ll be entered into a drawing for an iPhone.

Domain Parking

Jeff Purcell — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:48:39 +0000

I own a ton of domains. I’m not sure how many, but I know it is a lot. I purchased the majority of them for projects that I never got around to doing. So many of my domains sit idly in my godaddy account collecing dust. Or collecting money for godaddy because their parking page is still on them. If you are unclear as to what domain parking is, there is a great Wikipedia article that will explain everything.

I was bored today and thought I’d look into this whole parking thing and see if I couldn’t at least recoup the yearly registration costs of these domains.

After a quick search, I settled on sedo.com. Don’t ask me why, they just looked trustworthy, and godaddy charged a monthly fee. Sedo offers the service for free, but takes 20% of your earnings. No big deal, I highly doubt I’ll make anything off this anyway. 20% of nothing is, well … nothing.

I’ll keep you posted, both of you. When the millions start rolling in, we’ll go to Vegas! My treat.

Here are the domains:

domains, sedo, godaddy, domain parking, squatting

Flash on Top of Flash

Jeff Purcell — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 04:02:52 +0000

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.

There is a little know attribute for the object and embed tags called ‘wmode’. If you set ‘wmode’ to ‘transparent’ in both the embed tag and the as a parameter inside the object tag. It allows for transparent flash animations and also fixed my little overlay problem.

Now, I’m not sure if this little guy is a valid attribute or not, but I do know that it saved my ass today and I’ll risk not validating for that.
flash, adobe, wmode, transparent, leaderboard, corner peel, advertisement

Digg for Designers

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 05:44:30 +0000

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

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:53:47 +0000

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.

Page Views or Ad Views

Jeff Purcell — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 02:42:40 +0000

What is more important, page views or ad views? You may be saying to yourself, “shouldn’t they be the same?”. Well, yes and no, Johnny. You see, you can have multipile ads on a page, therefore creating more ad views than page views. Here lies the conundrum…Is page views or ad views a better metric of your sites popularity and overall worth?

Page views, in my opinion, are a way to measure the usefulness of your site. Being that, the more page views, the more useful and sought after your site, and your site’s content is. Of course more page views means more ad views. But on the same note, more ad locations means more ad views per page view and therefore more chances for revenue.

I think it boils down to page views, although slightly smaller in size, are what makes your site meaningful not ad views. Ad views just help to support more page views? You lost yet? Me too.