Archive: Posts about Web Design
September 29th, 2006, No Comments »
Steve recently wrote about these amazing laptop bags and Blackberry cases from Everquest Design (unrelated to the game of the same name). The bags are partially made out of materials from the relics of adventure history.
Your bag can feature a piece of the parachute of a Soyuz mission, or a piece of a sail from an America’s Cup boat.
This has instant appeal for me because it’s limited edition, has a great story, and the bags look pretty cool.
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June 28th, 2006, 2 Comments »
Based on this colo-rectal observation, I’m a little too amused by the unitentionally off-colour subtexts in web design. Still, I couldn’t ignore the peculiar stock photo they’re using on the Branham 300 site.
Maybe it’s just me, but the photo suggested a different sub-headline. You may have to click through to the larger version to read it:
2 Comments »
June 20th, 2006, 21 Comments »
I’ve been casually checking out some home exchange (or ‘house swap’, but that term is a little too reminiscent of key parties) sites. I’ve gotta say–as a whole, they’re a real disappointment. As far as I can figure, these are the top three for Canadians:
The sites commit a variety of sins, most of which reek of circa-2001 websites:
- They’re incredibly hokey looking.
- You can’t see complete listings until you pay.
- The usability and navigation is unilaterally awful.
- It’s painful to find the information you’re looking for. None of them have the basic search functionality you’d expect. They can’t, as far as I can tell, complete a query like ’show me all the properties in city X wanting to exchange with properties in city Y‘.
- Of course, there are no RSS feeds.
- The pricing is shockingly high. To be listed on HomeLink’s site and in their dead tree catalog (heh), it costs CAN $169! That would buy me 5 Flickr pro accounts, a year of a basic Base Camp account or a whole schwack of eBay transactions.
Clearly none of this stops them from running a successful home exchange business. Still, I’m pretty dismayed by my options. I guess their target demographics are seniors and families–hardly groups reknowned for demanding innovation in online services.
Craigslist has a home exchange service which is free (here are Vancouver’s listings), but it’s pretty labour intensive (the site doesn’t do much work for me).
Couldn’t some screen-scraping, RSS-enabled, garage-living, rounded-corner using Web 2.0 startup build a better home exchange site? I’ll be customer number one.
UPDATE: We recently paid US $60 and joined HomeExchange.com. The registration and profile-building steps were adequate, but the search functionality is truly awful. That’s the most important part!
You can execute an advanced search. So, despite the fact that I want ‘a home exchange for 2 people who want to come to Canada from France in spring, 2006′, and I can do is search by country! So, I get to wade through thousands of results trying to find the 1-in-20 entries which want to come to Canada. Then I have to manually assess the number of family members and where they want to go in Canada. It’s shameful, and a massive waste of my time.
This isn’t rocket science for HomeExchange.com. Millions of websites execute a usable advanced search. They’ve already got the database–it’s merely a question of writing (or borrowing) the PHP code.
21 Comments »
May 24th, 2006, 33 Comments »
UPDATE: Several of the comments on this page appear to have be duplicitously written by Constant Contact staff. See this page for more details.
Over at Capulet, we do email newsletters for several of our clients. I’m know, very old-school, but they’re still a useful tool for plenty of companies.
A couple of years ago, we completed an exhaustive assessment of the email newsletter options available and went with Constant Contact. They’re web-based, provide the functionality and reporting we require, and are very affordable. The app has an incredibly Web 1.0 interface (constant page reloads, pop-up windows and animated status bars), but it does the job. We recently had a recommendation for Campaign Monitor, so we may give that a try too.
I signed up for another Constant Contact account today, for a new client. I received the standard welcome and verify your address email. I also received a short email from Constant Contact support, reminding me to verify my address. They came simultaneously, which was puzzling.
I verified my email address. A few minutes later, I got a phone call from Constant Contact. A phone call! Just checking to make sure that everything was going smoothly. I blew off the ‘Campaign Consultant’, explaining that I was very familiar with their app. And then I got another email from the same guy.
That’s three emails and a phone call when I sign up for a bake-your-own newsletter service that starts at all of US $15/month. Maybe I’m just hermetic and the exception that proves the rule, but when I sign up for a self-serve service (heh), I want to serve myself. I don’t want to talk to anybody.
Leave me alone, Constant Contact. I’ll call if I want to chat.
Speaking of animated status bars, I copied a link for one off the Constant Contact site (link removed, as it was broken) in passing. Amusingly, the cheeky designer has named the file pacifier.gif.
UPDATE: They emailed me again today!
UPDATE #2: I also like Campaign Monitor’s pricing model, which is favourable for small businesses. For each email campaign, you pay US $5 plus one cent per recipient. So, if you’ve got 400 recipients, that’s $9 for the campaign.
Compare that with CC’s US $15/month (down to $12.75 if you subscribe for a year) for up to 500 recipients. Lots of businesses don’t send out a newsletter every month.
We’re lucky if we can send more than six newsletters a year. Based on 400 subscribers, that’s $153 for Constant Contact and $54 for Campaign Monitor.
UPDATE #3: One final beef about Constant Contact–they don’t let you cancel online. You have to call them or submit a support request. Why can I sign up online, agree to give them money online, but when I choose to cancel my service, I have to do so manually? It’s typical dumb company behaviour, but that’s no excuse.
UPDATE #4: Rebecca over at Xconomy discussed this post in a story about the Constant Contact IPO.
33 Comments »
February 22nd, 2006, 10 Comments »
I know this is the pot calling the kettle black, but check out the egregious spelling error on the cover of this book from O’Reilly (thanks, Colene). They’ve got it right over at Amazon, so they’ve already caught it on the actual cover.
On the subject of spelling and grammatical errors on this site, it’s pretty apparent that I don’t sweat the small stuff. I write entries as quickly as possible, and don’t necessarily spare the time to re-read them. I have a fixed amount of time to pay to this site, so I figure ‘more entries with a few errors’ is preferable to ‘fewer entries with no errors’. In my professional work, I’m much more careful, and happen to live with a superb proofreader.
10 Comments »
January 25th, 2006, 1 Comment »
I try not to obsess about my site stats, and I get less obsessed with each passing month. Still, I enjoy randomly checking them to see what bizarre searches people complete (the other day I spotted an off-beat sex tourist googling for ‘Iceland sexual habits’).
I’ve been using MyBlogLog, which costs the princely sum of US $25 a year. That’s about as much as I’m willing to pay for this kind of service (particularly when I get the slowly improving Google Analytics for free). It does a decent enough job of displaying where people came from, and where they left, but that’s about it. For example, there are no charts. As regular readers know, I really like charts.
Mark Evans recently wrote about BlogBeat, another web stats package targeting blogs. They’ve got a thirty-day free trial, so I figured I’d give it a try.
It actually has a very bloggy, Web 2.0 interface. On the summary page, recent visitors are listed (along with the referring location) in a chronological list. There are few (no?) images aside from some basic (and, thus far, misbehaving) charts. I liked the changing plain language questions (a sharp contrast from Google Analytic’s jargon-a-thon) such as “Who sent the most visitors my way?”. There’s also apparently Feedburner integration, though I don’t quite understand how that will play out in the interface.
On the downside, there aren’t any RSS feeds for results. Additionally, the layout seems targeted at low traffic blogs. There’s no use to me in seeing each individual visitor as they arrive. It’s still buggy–I selected the PST time zone, but the site displayed a new day at 9:00pm local time.
Is it better than MyBlogLog? Yes. Is it perfect? Far from it, but it’s a step in the right direction. Mark reports that they’re pricing it at US $5 a month or US $50 a year. That’s about twice what I’m willing to pay, but good luck to them.
Hey, Adaptive Path dudes, can I try Measure Map?
1 Comment »
January 17th, 2006, 1 Comment »
Research from Carleton University indicates that we make flash judgments of websites in about a twenieth of a second:
Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.
No pressure there, web designers.
1 Comment »
December 11th, 2005, 9 Comments »
In the previous entry, Tod and I discuss how the Conservatives have the best website of any of the Canadian parties. This is in part because the Conservatives have clearly copied the design and architecture of the US Republicans’ site. Matthew Good first pointed this out, and I borrow his screenshots to elucidate:
I don’t mean to suggest any impropriety here–I don’t know the whole story. If the CPC didn’t ask to borrow the site structure, then it’s a pretty bold ripoff. If they did, all power to them. As sites go, it’s pretty good. I imagine that the RNC spent some money building the right kind of site to raise funds and awareness, and the CPC is wise to stand on their shoulders.
9 Comments »
September 27th, 2005, 2 Comments »
It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but apparently the web design community has been getting all hot about Mint, a new stats package going for $30. My Irish friend John has tried it out, and seems very happy with it. I might give it a shot, as I’ve been using the fairly-lame Webalizer for years.
I’d like to see a live demo first, but Mint’s is down at the moment. Ironically, it’s because they’re getting too much traffic.
2 Comments »
August 9th, 2005, 5 Comments »
The folks at the University of Glamorgan has released a study that examines gender-bias in web design (via Rick Bruner):
Where visuals are concerned, males favour the use of straight lines (as opposed to rounded forms), few colours in the typeface and background, and formal typography. As for language, they favour the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations and are more likely to promote themselves and their abilities heavily.
No kidding. The sample group was absurdly small and narrow–”personal websites created by 60 university students, 30 male and 30 female”. Hopefully this impels further study on the subject. Michael Martine has some interesting comments on the study.
On the other hand, I’m sure the 20th century has a wealth of studies that evaluate the efficacy of print design between the genders. Interactivity aside, I’m pretty sure they’d say the same thing with regards to rounded corners and typefaces.
I obviously shouldn’t be knocking any body’s grammar, but there were two curious uses in this press release.
- “…men and women really are poles apart when it comes to…” - This is curious only because it’s a British phrase we almost never hear in North America. It is also the name of a Pink Floyd song.
- “…was then shown to a group of individuals of both sexes…” - Doesn’t this imply that they showed the websites to a group of hermaphrodites?
In case you, like me, were wondering where the heck the University of Glamorgan is, it’s here.
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