user experience

Put Your Website Visitors In Control

April 30, 2012

In most of the website usability studies that I’ve read, poor legibility is by far the most frequent complaint encountered. It’s generally a sin of comission on the part of web designers, because web-safe typography by default is designed to be both legible and flexible. A website gets into trouble when its design diverges from [...]

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Boing! Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

February 16, 2012

Search for the term “bounce rate” on the Internet, and you can find any number of very technical explanations. Some of them even include a nifty mathematical formula or two. But as a business owner, here’s all you should really care about: Bounce rate is basically a measure of the percentage of visitors to your [...]

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Icons – Amazing Little Pictures

April 14, 2011

I will freely admit my bias towards icons upfront, I believe that just about every design can benefit from their use. What exactly is an icon you might ask? For design purposes, icons are simplistic representations of a concept. Take something big and grand, like the Earth, and reduce it down to a it’s most [...]

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Improve Your Website in 5 steps: Typography

July 27, 2010

Every website communicates information to users through text. Headlines grab our attention while cluing us into what the following paragraph is about. Supporting text tells us a story about a good or service being offered, and why we can’t live without it. Given the weighty job that text performs on a website, it makes sense [...]

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5 Things That Annoy Website Visitors

April 6, 2010

One of the most important parts of creating a website is designing it to be user-friendly and easy to navigate. With the billions of websites on the internet, users have plenty of choices when it comes to online shopping, entertainment, or anything else they are looking for. If they don’t like something about your website, [...]

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Web Safe Fonts

March 30, 2010

Not every font that is installed on your computer can be used on your website, because not everyone that views your website has the same fonts installed on their computer as you. In an effort to keep websites looking similar between different browsers and operating systems, web designers can choose from certain fonts that are [...]

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What are browsers, and how do they affect my website?

February 16, 2010

If you’re new to the web and you’re undertaking the development of your first website, you’ve probably been hearing the term “browser” a lot lately. And most likely you’re confused. Browsers are one of the most important parts of a user’s web experience; which browser you are using can have a very large effect on [...]

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No One Likes to be Framed

January 19, 2010

Back in the infancy of the world wide web, frames were a pretty useful tool.  They allowed a designer to have multiple panels on a page with one or more displaying consistent content (like a menu).  With the advent of the modern web programming languages such as Active Server Pages (ASP), PHP & ASP.Net, frames [...]

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What makes a credible website?

October 5, 2009

Empty plastic bags roll through a cracked and patched pavement parking lot. Shopping carts are scattered about… some maneuvering themselves unmanned through the rows of unpopulated parking spaces of the Electronics-O-Rama. The store signage is in disarray, and the glass of the storefront is fogged and dirty. The color scheme of the decrepit building is [...]

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