Robert Denton

Staggering work of genius from Portland, Maine – Gardener, Photographer, Designer, Taco Maker, Birder, Biker, Wine Merchant

Archive for April, 2004

Page 23

Friday, April 30th, 2004

I regularly read stopdesign. Haven’t read in a while but found an entry like this one. 1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. And well I think that is kind of […]

Web site support vs. Self service

Friday, April 30th, 2004

How much human support does your website need?: April 26, 2004: New Thinking by Gerry McGovern Even vending machines require refilling and maintenance. McDonalds could not be run without its staff. The Web is often compared to a library. Well, where would a library be without its librarians? This is an interesting angle on a […]

More thoughts on Search

Tuesday, April 27th, 2004

Been thinking about the home page, and the site with regard to a search field on every page instead of a link to a search page. What comes first? Giving people the easy way to search or attempting to get them into your content? Some studies show that people look in the middle of the […]

Search Engine Optimisation and Accessibility

Monday, April 19th, 2004

Search Engine Optimisation and Accessibility

On the wiki & navigation

Saturday, April 17th, 2004

plasticbag.org | weblog | Using Wikis for content management… Now one of the problems with using Wikis generally is that they don’t lend themselves to the creation of clear sectionalised navigation. Nor do they do naturally find it easy to use graphic design, colour or layout differently on separate pages to communicate either your context […]

Navigation Study on Current University Websites

Saturday, April 17th, 2004

Navigation Study on Current University Websites Ken Kelleher prepared a useful overview of IA challenges on University web sites. Our main points he describes: – varied audiences – site architecture (taxonomy) vs. faceted view (audience gateways) He also lists a lot of the references I have in my bookmarks. This is a paper I have […]

cmsmatrix.org – The Content Management Comparison Tool

Friday, April 16th, 2004

The CMS Matrix – cmsmatrix.org – The Content Management Comparison Tool A big round about through a lot of systems. I really like the info pages for each package.

Brown's courses site

Friday, April 16th, 2004

Brown has an interesting entry point into their course web site pages. Essentially turns browsing course web pages into an application for viewing the data in different ways. You can filter based on department and semester. Very easy to do (given the right background architecture and likely increases the usability a lot.

Adaptive Path Navigation

Friday, April 16th, 2004

Just wanted to note this. We vetted the reasons why we can’t use a horizontal menu bar at the secondary, or departmental level navigation. Anyway, I was looking at this essay seven resolutions for 2004 and noticed how nice their navigation is… wishing we could somehow build and/or enforce a stricter sense of IA on […]

A Jakob Nielson Moment

Friday, April 16th, 2004

Is Navigation Useful? First bullet point: “users comment on the content first; if the content is not relevant, then they don’t care about any other aspect of the design” Link this to the discussion of the “page paradigm” and the recent mention of a survey (user testing?) done with location of search input fields vs. […]