This week, we’ve examined domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand. In today’s third installation of our Internet branding series, we’re going to take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.
Like email addresses, it’s really [...]
Back in the days of the FAQ and the image map (remember when you would hover your mouse over a picture and different parts of the graphic would link to different pages?), web designers used a website element known as a sitemap or site index. Modern sitemaps are valuable tools that are submitted to search [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Social networking is one of many buzzwords that has recently risen to fad proportions. It seems that any time the subject of marketing arises, the topic quickly turns to importance of social networking.
The power of social networking lies in the creation of personal relationships. We’ve mentioned before that you should use social networking to increase [...]
Recent website design work has caused us to do some research into the current design techniques and trends among website authors regarding web stanards. We looked into the definitive guide on the subject, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, and were excited to find that a third edition is coming this year. While imagining how [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Following last month’s announcement of an upcoming embedded bidding solution, Proxibid today announces that auctioneers can begin reserving this solution in mid-September. Also announced today is the preview of the new layout of the Proxibid website which looks like it sports a much cleaner appearance. Gone are the borders and tables, the auction calendar has [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Image via CrunchBase
Our post on Wednesday described an announcement by Proxibid of their forthcoming embedding bidding service. This service will allow auctioneers to seamlessly embed Proxibid’s systems into the auctioneers’ web pages. In Wednesday’s post, we posed five questions we felt were important to ask of Proxibid and other providers who are looking to offer [...]
Read the rest of this entry »We’ve all seen websites that list frequently asked questions, or FAQ. Continuing in our series All Things Must End, we’re going to show that FAQ are training wheels from when the web was new and have no place on modern websites that are properly designed.
Image via Wikipedia
While there isn’t really anything inherently evil about a [...]
Read the rest of this entry »One of the most important and valuable marketing opportunities for any company is management of proper email campaigns. We’ve covered bulk email management and discussed how and when to capture email addresses from current and prospective customers. Following last month’s article on the importance of setting your email client to read messages using plain text, [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Image via Wikipedia
We try to cover basic security best-practices as much as possible. We talked about the value of NoScript, a Firefox plugin that prevents JavaScript from loading on web pages unless specifically allowed by the user. Today, we’re going to examine why reading email as HTML is a bad practice from a privacy, security [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Veronica Belmont, geek goddess and co-host of the technology video podcast Tekzilla, started a new website called the Vintage Web. Listed on the site are examples of websites from days gone by, when designers were so excited to use the newest features offered by technologies like DHTML and JavaScript that they weren’t concerned with the [...]
Read the rest of this entry »One of the users we follow on Twitter recently posted this amazing article about company website design.
Some of the highlights:
Social networking is about people engaging with people. Individuals do not want to build relationships with brands and corporations. They want to talk to other people. Too many organizations throw millions into Facebook apps and viral [...]
I’ve seen many auction websites. I’ve seen good sites and bad sites. I’ve seen pretty sites and ugly sites. The good and the pretty aren’t usually the same sites. Some of the most attractive websites I’ve seen are some of the worst functioning websites. Some of the best auction websites look hideous. While it’s important [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The example RFP for website construction posted last week mentioned a little about web standards and user agents, but after further reflection it seems we need to examine further the importance of an accessible and usable website and add a few more requirements to the proposal.
An accessible website is one that can be viewed on [...]
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe in 1993. As of July 1, 2008, it’s an ISO standard, which means that the format is open and published so that anyone can create it or use it.
There are many misconceptions about the proper use of PDFs, and today I’m going to try [...]
Apple today released new versions of their iTunes software as well as updated versions of iPods. This release was hardly surprising and, as predicted, there wasn’t anything unexpected or widely diverging from the rumors that had been floating around the Internet.
The take-aways are really fewer than I had expected.
iTunes 8 is out and it’s cool. [...]
Google today, seemingly confident enough about their new browser, posted a link on their homepage for the download.
While a significant percentage of the news I read over the course of the last week involved Chrome and the browser wars, I’m guessing that the news escaped the average Fox News viewer.
Now everyone knows. Everyone who uses [...]
Flash is a very bad way to build websites. It’s not only about SEO. It’s about usability. For the same reasons that mature developers don’t use “fly-out” or “drop-down” menus, you shouldn’t use Flash because it requires you to do one of two things. You can either alienate the growing minority of users using alternative [...]
Read the rest of this entry »
