Five Questions to Ask Your Web Development Team

As a client or manager responsible for a web development project you don't need to know anything about how a standards based web site is created. However you do need to know that your project is addressing these five important issues.

Allsopp, John. Western Civilization (2005). Articles>Web Design>Project Management>Standards

Five Ways to Use Web Site Translation to Help the Bottom Line

In what aspects does the global web impact business? How can we use it to embark on new opportunities and save cost on running our existing business?

Iler, Huiping. WTB Language Group (2005). Articles>Web Design>Localization

Five-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages

On your site, the content page is the user's most frequent final destination. This page contains the information the user came to the site to find. Sites often have hundreds, if not thousands (and in some cases, millions) of these critical pages. How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they've designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively?

Perfetti, Christine. User Interface Engineering (2005). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Centered Design

The Flexible Intranet    

The key to efficient and effective user support is an intranet site that supports employees in performing their tasks. However, most intranet sites offer an overload of information that users often must interpret on their own. Van Mansom outlines a useful approach to creating corporate intranet sites.

van Mansom, Kees. Intercom (2008). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Florida Update One Year Later - The Year Google Grew Up

The Florida Update effected more than site rankings in the SEO industry. Jim Hedger looks at Google one year later after the disaster.

Hedger, Jim. Search-This (2004). Articles>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization

Fluctuations in Document Accessibility: A Case Study of Five Search Engines    

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the stability of five search engines, namely Altavista, Google, Hotbot, Scirus and Bioweb, carried out over two different time periods with different search queries selected from 'LC List of Subject Headings' with a closer examination of the URLs and their contents. The three different fluctuations identified, one of them being significant, show that Hotbot is prone to result fluctuations while Scirus is inclined to indexing fluctuations, and Bioweb is the most stable.

Shafi, S.M. and Rafiq Ahmad Rather. International Journal for Technical Communication (2006). Articles>Web Design>Search

Focus On WHAT You Are Going To Say

Focus all your energy on figuring out WHAT to say. Get that right and everything else will fall into place.

Usborne, Nick. ClickZ (2002). Articles>Web Design>Writing

For Conference Support, Consider a Wiki

For the last couple of months, I’ve been developing an online list of major trends that are transforming public relations, with links to sites, articles and quotes that in one way or another prove the point and that I know I’ll someday want to get back to. It’s something like my own personal tagging system, maintained in a wiki.

Forbush, Dan. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Web Design>Public Relations>Wikis

Formal Objection to WCAG Claiming to Address Cognitive Limitations

Lisa Seeman intends to make a formal objection about WCAG 2.0's claim that they address all requirements for learning difficulties and cognitive limitations, as they do not have the success criteria to back up their claim. Moreover, there are known techniques that WCAG have not included, and people who do intend to cater for people with learning difficulties and cognitive limitations would benefit from knowing of these techniques.

Seeman, Lisa. Juicy Studio (2006). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Cognitive Psychology

Forms vs. Applications

Once an online form goes beyond two screenfulls, it's often a sign that the underlying functionality is better supported by an application, which offers a more interactive user experience.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2005). Articles>Web Design>Forms>Usability

Four Things Every Web Site Headline Must Achieve

Here are four things you need to keep in mind, four elements that demand your attention, four separate ‘audiences’ you need to satisfy.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2003). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Four Tips For Raising Your Search Engine Rankings

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a web site that needs more traffic. If your web site doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then it will be hard to find.

Pires, Halstatt. Ezine Articles (2005). Articles>Web Design>Search

Four Tips on Writing a Web Site Home Page

Home pages can be tricky, simply because your page not only has its own job to do, but also has to support a group of second level pages. Here's how I approach writing home pages...whether a site has a total of ten pages or a thousand pages.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2006). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Fourth-Generation Hypermedia: Some Missing Links for the World-Wide Web

World Wide Web authors must cope in a hypermedia environment analogous to second-generation computing languages, building and managing most hypermedia links using simple anchors and single-step navigation. Following this analogy, sophisticated application environments on the World Wide Web will require third- and fourth-generation hypermedia features. Implementing third- and fourth-generation hypermedia involves designing both high- level hypermedia features and the high-level authoring environments system developers build for authors to specify them. We present a set of high-level hypermedia features including typed nodes and links, link attributes, structure-based query, transclusions, warm and hot links, private and public links, hypermedia access permissions, computed personalized links, external link databases, link update mechanisms, overviews, trails, guided tours, backtracking, and history-based navigation. We ground our discussion in the hypermedia research literature, and illustrate each feature both from existing implementations and a running scenario. We also give some direction for implementing these on the World Wide Web and in other information systems.

Open University, The (1997). Articles>Information Design>Hypertext>Web Design

The (Free) Script That Saved My Website

I recently purchased a music streaming website, powered by MySQL database full of links to the musical content. In order to transfer the website to my hosting I was going to need to import the database. Unfortunately, I host with GoDaddy.com. GoDaddy offers phpMyAdmin to control your databases which is a great program but it limits imports to 2MBs. My database was over 70MB. I tried it anyways with my fingers crossed but as expected, it wasn’t going to work.

Haig, Anders. ReEncoded (2008). Articles>Web Design>Databases

The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site

The designers of Netflix.com have a smashing success on their hands, but we didn't find them resting on their laurels. They want to get even better, and for them that means iterate, iterate, iterate. Netflix isn't the only company using a fast iterative design approach. Google has also gained attention for their unorthodox design methods, with many people complaining that they have a huge stable of products, but only a few they've designed well.

Porter, Joshua. User Interface Engineering (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Workflow

Friend or Foe? Web 2.0 in Technical Communication  

The rise of Web 2.0 technology provides a platform for user-generated content. Publishing is no longer restricted to a few technical writers—any user can now contribute information. But the information coming from users tends to be highly specific, whereas technical documentation is comprehensive but less specific. The two types of information can coexist and improve the overall user experience. User-generated content also offers an opportunity for technical writers to participate as “curators”—by evaluating and organizing the information provided by end users.

O'Keefe, Sarah S. Scriptorium (2008). Articles>Web Design>Technical Writing>Social Networking

From Web 2.0 to Web 2.007

When Tim O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 in 2004, the Internet was still 'a place for people to go.' Now, it's what he imagined: a place where people are. It has become integrated into our daily lives, where we collaborate with others. It has also become a place where our electronics and appliances collaborate on our behalf.

Janisch, Troy. Icon Interactive (2007). Articles>Web Design

From Writer to Content Provider

As a regular user of the web or even as a writer for online magazines, you may not have picked up on a trend I've noticed from my contacts with web entrepreneurs. Increasingly, those who aim at selling big on the Net understand that attractive prices, huge inventories and responsive online ordering aren't enough to spark fantastic traffic. They call the missing ingredient 'content' and crave its power to inspire repeat visits.

Yudkin, Marcia. Yudkin.com (2001). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Fruit Flies Like a Banana: Writing Unambiguously

Ambiguity has a way of creeping into your writing without your noticing it. Here are five of the biggest culprits.

Henning, Kathy. ClickZ (2001). Articles>Writing>Web Design

Fuzzy Matching as a Retrieval-Enabling Technique for Digital Libraries

This paper advocates an often-neglected search-support technique, approximate or 'fuzzy' matching of user search terms. When properly deployed, fuzzy matching can significantly enhance the benefits of other, more common approaches to end-user answer retrieval from online reference collections. We compare crude with more sophisticated approximation techniques to explain how astute fuzzy-match software can convert many different near-miss situations (such as those involving faulty prefixes or suffixes, character misplacement, nonstandard word stems, or unanticipated redescription of concepts) into more adequate results. We also suggest practical ways to overcome fuzzy matching's own major drawbacks (namely, problems with search speed, search imprecision, and misinterpretation of search results). The resulting analysis clarifies how to deploy fuzzy matching for maximum effectiveness. We conclude that appropriate fuzzy matching enables more frequent, more flexible search success than do ordinary retrieval-improvement techniques used without it.

Girill, T.R. and Clement H. Luk. CSU Chico (1996). Articles>Content Management>Web Design>Search

Gantt to Glory: Evolving from Project Management to Successful Web Operations

Is the sheer possession of a PMP intended to be the Holy Grail of successful web projects, known to fail at a startling rate, or simply a way to divorce oneself from whatever outcome may result from the web project?

Podnar, Kristina. Content Wrangler, The (2008). Articles>Web Design>Project Management>Planning

Get That "One Thing" Into Your Web Page Headline

If you are presenting a risk-free trial of something...get that message into your headline. This may sound obvious, but while we were testing various offer pages, it became clear that the winning pages all had headlines which were focused on the offer, and were very much reader and benefit centered.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2006). Articles>Web Design>Writing

Getting Started with Ruby on Rails

The “how” of Ruby on Rails: Hivelogic’s Dan Benjamin prepares non-Rails developers, designers, and other creative professionals for their first foray into Rails. Learn what Ruby on Rails is (and isn’t), and where it fits into the spectrum of web development and design. See through the myths surrounding this powerful young platform, and learn how to approach working with it.

Benjamin, Dan. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>Web Design>Server Side Includes>Ruby on Rails

Give Your Testimonials More Credibility

I think that the people who give the testimonials do so for the additional exposure they receive for their own names, sites and businesses. I also think they do some mutual back-scratching, and hype each other's products and services. In other words, the testimonials are just additional sales text. They have no credibility as outside, third-party endorsements.

Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2006). Articles>Writing>Web Design>Marketing