Web Design
Web Usability at Convertup.com
Came across this very nicely done site: Convertup.com. The founder of this site (make sure to subscribe to his ConvertUp web usability blog — the articles are great) has numerous tips about web usability testing. ConvertUp publishes articles and offers services to help people increase their site’s conversion rate by offering a usability testing [...]
What To Test?
Any site designer knows that testing your web site across multiple browsers is key. But not only has the market become very fragmented regarding the number of browser, but there are also several popular VERSIONS of browsers running around as well — each with their own quirks. Here are some current browser stats:
According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp [...]
Creative (and Effective) Form Design
UK based Carphone Warehouse has created an innovative phone ordering application on their web site, The Phone Spot. There are two things I like about it.
First, they make creative use of animation on their cell phone ordering form. This ‘Step by Step Phone Finder’ has an animated character on the left which makes the search [...]
Artist’s Cafe
It is often hard to find an affordable website designer, especially if you are a small to medium sized business. Artist’s Cafe specializes in web sites for small businesses, designers, and entrepreneurs. They tout affordable rates in the $2-3k range, and advertise themselves as having very creative, passionate and artistic designers.
Four seconds till abandonment
The research by Akamai reveals online users are less patient than ever. If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, users are likely to abandon it. 75% of those users would not return to websites that took more than four seconds to load. Read more
Is your page too ‘heavy’ and need help [...]
Color Palette Generator
Designing a web site and need a color scheme? Try the Color Palette Generator.
Simply provide a link to where your photograph is hosted, and press a button. This tool extracts the “dull” and “vibrant” colors from your photo with corresponding color palatte colors, ready to use for web page design.
Use it at: Color Palette Generator
Make an .ICO from a .PNG
Here is a handy little web application (no software download required) lets you convert between PNG and ICO formats without losing any quality.
Use it at ConvertIcon
Wordpress for Magazine Sites
In ages past, I’ve always recommended pMachine’s Expression Engine for article-driven web site. WordPress has evolved its feature set considerably, and can now handle magazine oriented sites due to its expanded API:
The ease by which sites can be created and run through blogging software like WordPress allow writers previously without publishers to print their works [...]
GIMP for Photoshop Users
GIMP is a full featured Photoshop competitors. Even better, it is cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) and FREE! Explore books and tutorials on GIMP. There is even a portable version that runs on a USB stick.
Already an experienced Photoshop user, and you don’t want to re-learn another tool? No worries, enter GIMPshop:
If you’ve never used Photoshop [...]
Landing Page Design Tradeoffs
This great article on user interface design highlights many of the design considerations one must consider when building an optimized web site. These principles are particularly applicable to landing page design, where the page layout is critical to driving conversion rates. Here is a table summary Digital Web Magazine’s writeup of design tradeoffs one must [...]
