Agonizingly slow redesign in process…
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 cool. I grabbed the book [...]
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 web support [...]
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 page [...]
Search Engine Optimisation and Accessibility
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 or [...]
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 written but [...]
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 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.
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 dept [...]
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. links to [...]
Virtual Byron
Love the masthead—what a great way to give you context and sense of place.
There is a need across campus to present galleries of photos which draw upon databases of photos.
Several tools present photos and allow you to maintain a desktop catalog—iView is probably the strongest of the smaller applications. Others have template restrictions or don’t allow for the robust catalog management.
How do you implement something at the [...]
Summary: Recent studies have shown that while the use of breadcrumb trails to navigate a website can be helpful, few users choose to utilize this method of navigation. This study investigates the effects of “mere exposure” and training on breadcrumb usage. Findings indicate that brief training on the benefits of breadcrumb usage resulted in more [...]
Good Experience – The Page Paradigm
Like another thought about bread crumbs wherein it is posited that people who use them tend to be the regular users of the site and not the visitors who are there just looking for something.
Another thing I noticed and emphasized in a page design (currently re-worked by someone else) is [...]
AT&T Feed Room—Love the enormous grid and columns representing a topic area. This is sort of gutsy but maybe a feed room is meant to be just this straight forward.
It works.
But gosh RealPlayer is a stinky thing.
Rueturs has the same layout.
And their site works with Safari better.