Archive: Posts about Web Design
July 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
A client recently asked me how they could get their site to show up like this in search results (that’s not my client, just an example I found):
The answer is disappointingly vague. From Google’s help system:
The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.
We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.
At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.
I also found this discussion about Sitelinks. It indicates that they have nothing to do with your site’s popularity or traffic.
If it were more important, I’d go do an exhaustive analysis of sites with Sitelinks in the search results, and figure out what makes them tick. I believe the Sitelinks only show up when you search for the domain itself (here’s an alternative example for the screenshot above, without Sitelinks), so those searchers are very, very likely to click the first result, Sitelinks or not.
5 Comments »
June 22nd, 2007, 6 Comments »
Via this Wired promotion, I visited LivingHomes.net. They make great looking pre-fab, eco-friendly homes. I was immediately impressed by how they’d built their site. It’s totally Flashy Flash and the Flash bunch, but it’s artfully done and reasonably easy to navigate.
When you first visit the home page, you’re presented with a wonderful time-lapse video of light passing through a living room. It’s a subtle and brilliant approach, and a really pure expression of what architecture and interior design are all about. I was immediately reminded of a lovely time-lapse film of the Waterfall Building that entranced me as part of the Arthur Erickson exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
The tour is narrated by Steve Glenn, the company owner. He takes you on a friendly tour of his own home, pointing out the home’s features, but also cracking little jokes and pointing out the Lego he still has from his childhood. There are also plenty of visual cues to click and navigate through the tour.
It helps that the product itself–the homes–are gorgeous, but I was really impressed by the elegant, functional site design.
Their pricing is pretty steep, but I guess that’s what it costs to build a reasonably guilt-free home. Like so many of these cool, modern, prefab home companies, they’re based in the States. The duty to ship a house across the border makes it financially impractical, but we already know a local architect who does a lot of this style of work with prefab elements.
6 Comments »
June 13th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Via Neil, here’s an instant messager interview between the mysterious CBC blogger Ouimet and Andrew Lundy, senior producer at the newly-revamped CBCSports.ca. There’s some interesting discussion about the re-emergence of portals (no, duh) and the direction of the CBC’s online sports coverage:
The goal was to bring the whole CBC Sports experience online. Since our new agreements with sports bodies like the NHL, FIFA and MLS include video, we want to offer people that. And we want to be more interactive, so we’re beefing up user-generated content and forums, as well as adding contests and pools and games to the mix. The end result should be a complete sports experience, beyond the stories and stats.
The interview is too long. Why is there such an aversion to editing amongst bloggers and podcasters? I think it’s taking the whole transparency and authenticity thing too seriously if the reader (or listener or viewer) has to troll through the piece for the good bits. I blame Robert.
9 Comments »
June 7th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Because I’m a bit slow on these things, I just learned (or possibly just remembered) that Stephen King’s Dark Tower books are being adapted to comic book form. Or, at least, a chunk of the first book is.
Can you order comics on Amazon? I’ve never done so.
I visited the Marvel Comics website associated with the project to learn more. They’ve got a little trailer for the series, but when I tried to access it I got this cheeky message:
Really? “A potentially unviewable experience”? Ignoring the fact that ‘unviewable’ is not a word, what exactly are they talking about? Will the trailer become a black hole, absorbing all light? Is it like an eclipse, and it’ll blind me if I look directly at it? Will it Goatse me (if you do not know what that is, do not try to find out–trust me on this)? Or, even worse, will it Gigli me? “Ah! It’s Unviewable!”
The hotel connection was a bit dodgy, but is this really my fault? And even if it is the user’s fault, surely that’s Marvel’s problem to solve. How about offering two different qualities of trailer? How about making it downloadable? In any case, they need a more helpful, friendlier error message.
I did eventually get a chance to watch that trailer, and it was pretty naff. Anybody who’d actually read the books wouldn’t opt for a narrator with that absurd accent.
7 Comments »
May 15th, 2007, 2 Comments »
The folks over at Vancouver’s Elastic Path (who employ Canuck uber-fan Dave) have compiled a big page of 111 shopping cart icons from ecommerce sites:
“Buy Now” may be a stronger call to action than “Add to Cart”, but may subtly suggest the user is finished shopping or is making a commitment to purchase without time to review the order. The beauty of “Add to Cart” is that it is non-committal and assumes the user is still looking around.
As I observed on the associated Digg page, it’s interesting that so many of the buttons refer to shopping carts, and so few refer to baskets. After all, I’d imagine most online transactions are for one to three items that would fit in a basket. Plus, of course, people who shop with baskets are cool urbanites, while shopping carts suggest suburban normality. I know why they went with ’shopping cart’–it’s a more common metaphor–but it’s still noteworthy.
Two other notes: I pity the poor bastard who laid that page out. And for the uninitiated, this post’s title refers to a venerable meme.
2 Comments »
April 8th, 2007, 4 Comments »
My step-mother is an avid painter, quilter and traveller, and she’s got lots of photos she wants to share with friends and family. “Friends and family”–remember those words.
For a Normal Human, she’s got decent aptitude with her PC. She worked with them in the latter part of her career, and she’s pretty skillful with the usual set of desktop apps. I got her set up with a Flickr account, and as you can see, she’s been uploading photos, adding descriptions, organizing them into groups and so forth. She mostly figured all that out on her own–she and Flickr can share the credit for that, I think.
Last week, my step-mother sent me an email saying that when she sent her photos to her friends, they could never see them. She wondered if she was maybe sending her friends the wrong URL or something.
After a little investigation, I figured out what the issue was. When she uploaded the photos, she was quite naturally selecting the ‘Private: Visible to Friends’ and ‘Visible to Family’ check boxes. This is total rational behaviour. After all, that’s her audience for the photographs.
Of course, in Flickr land, users need to have accounts and my step-mother needs to identify them as ‘friends’ or ‘family’ before they can view such photos. That’s pretty obvious to those of us who work with Web apps on a daily basis, but we’re only, like, 5% of the general population. Notably, in the pop-up help related to privacy, Flickr doesn’t indicate any of this.
I’m not trying to impugn Flickr or my step-mother here (she gave me her permission to blog about this little use case). I guess this is a little lesson in assumptions, and how web developers need to take care not to make too many.
More and more non-geeks are using these sophisticated sharing and collaboration online tools, which feature a whole schwack of new paradigms for people to understand. The web app needs to be many things to many people. It has to get out of the way of the expert user who’s ready to run, and it has to offer a hand to those taking their first tentative steps.
4 Comments »
March 27th, 2007, No Comments »
Here’s an amusing little parable about responsible web design, from the folks at Common Craft:
John McCain’s campaign recently created a MySpace page and made a few mistakes along the way. They used Mike Davidson’s (the co-founder of Newsvine) design template (without credit) and even images from Mike’s server. When Mike discovered this, he switched out an image as a prank. Hilarious.
That reminded me a little of a post I wrote on Capulet a while ago, called The Wrath of a Junior Designer.
No Comments »
March 14th, 2007, 2 Comments »
Today I stumbled upon (as opposed to StumbledUpon™) two blog designs that I quite liked.
Drivl is a humour blog that’s sometimes crassly funny (this Best of Drivl list looks promising), and sometimes just crass. Its design–subtle greens and reds with plenty of attention to detail–really doesn’t match its content. Regardless, it feels super contemporary and I dig it.
I don’t know if Blogged Out’s design is a WordPress template, but it’s simple and elegant. I know the main banner is a pretty basic PhotoShop filter, but I like the use of faint gradients and plenty of white space around the text. I’m not particularly interested in blogs about blogging, but there are plenty of other people who are (as Seth Godin recently suggested).
2 Comments »
January 23rd, 2007, 5 Comments »
Over the last couple of years, there’s been a trend to distribute what I’m calling ‘corner badges’. They’re little ribbon-type images that website owners can add to the corner of their site, to show their support for a specific cause.
They’re kind of the online equivalent of the ‘Live Strong’ (and zillion other) wristbands. I seem to recall that Make Poverty History was running such a campaign.
Does anybody know the official name of this little web widget? Also, can somebody point me to some examples? I can’t find any. Maybe they’ve fallen out of fashion?
I did find some sample code for implementing this corner badge thingy, but that’s as close as I got.
UPDATE: I think they might be called ‘corner banners’–here’s a Photoshop tutorial on how to make one. Thanks also to Mike for the javascript for the Make Poverty History campaign. And here’s another code sample for the corner banner on Joomla’s site.
5 Comments »
December 13th, 2006, 4 Comments »
Here’s a quick tip for all you designers and photo editors out there. We’re working on a design project at the moment, and we were looking to make a background look worn out. It’s a bit of a cliche, but a coffee stain or two was just the thing.
It turns out Jelena Jovović has created an idiot-proof set of coffee stain Photoshop brushes. Check out the sample I created in about seventeen seconds. They look brilliant, and that has nothing to do with my meagre Photoshop skills.
4 Comments »
