#10574
Many web sites exist primarily to create or strengthen the brand for a product or service. We’re finding that a site’s usability can dramatically affect branding. And the graphical aspects of the site — such as logos or evocative pictures — have much less effect on branding than we expected.
User Interface Engineering (1999). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#25223
Branding Copy and Web Sites: A Bad Fit
The trouble with using text as a branding tool on web pages is that it gets in the way of what visitors are looking for. Visitors want and expect text to be useful and information. They are in 'active' and 'engaged' mode. They are searching. They want something. Text that isn't useful is disappointing.
Usborne, Nick. Excess Voice (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Marketing
#28695
Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful
Breadcrumbs use a single line of text to show a page's location in the site hierarchy. While secondary, this navigation technique is increasingly beneficial to users.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#18282
Breadcrumb Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Usage
Breadcrumbs serve two purposes: 1) they provide information to the user as to where they are located within the site, and 2) they offer shortcut links for users to “jump” to previous categories in the sequence without using the Back key, other navigation bars, or the search engine. Breadcrumb paths give location information and links in a backward linear manner. Navigation methods, such as search fields or horizontal/vertical navigation bars, serve to retrieve information for the user in a forward-seeking approach. As suggested by Marchionini, systems that support navigation by both browsing and analytical strategies are most beneficial to users since various patterns, strategies, tactics, and moves associated with both types of strategies are normally used.
Lida, Bonnie, Spring S. Hull and Katie Pilcher. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Usability
#23308
Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage
There has been speculation that a breadcrumb trail also aids the user's 'mental model' of the site's layout to reduce disorientation within the site (Bernard, 2003); however, we have not found research to validate this assumption. It would seem logical, however, that a constant visualization of the path to the user's current location would increase their awareness and knowledge of the site structure.
Rogers, Bonnie Lida and Barbara Chaparro. Usability News (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design
#25529
Breaking out of the Cubicle: How a Small, Swiss Company Got its Groove On
In the mid-1990s, Makiko Itoh and her partner left New York's cubicle land for a web shop of their own in the suburbs of Zurich. Learn from her tips on running your own web agency.
Itoh, Makiko. List Apart, A (2001). Careers>Management>Web Design
#20448
One of the lessons I learned at my mother’s knee was that you have to know the rules in order to break them properly. (Mother was a graphic designer.) The rules that are worth breaking are the ones you understand the purpose of – maybe you even agree with that purpose in general. There are plenty of stupid rules for the Web, rules that were put there by people who extrapolated too soon from too small a set of data. Those rules are no fun to break, kind of like removing a tag that says 'Do not remove under penalty of law' from a sofa cushion. We won’t bother with those rules today. Let’s go after the rules worth our time and effort. Given that, here’s my list of Web rules I’d most like to see broken, but only if they’re broken well.
Gunn, Eileen. Upper and lowercase Magazine (1998). Design>Typography>Web Design
#23986
It takes research, humility, and skill to truly understand your customers well enough to serve them better than your competitors.
Cooper, Alan. Cooper Interaction Design (2002). Design>Web Design>Consulting>User Centered Design
#26203
The Internet Archive is one of the largest archives of digital media in existence. It contains five times more information than is in the Library of Congress and several times more information than is currently available publicly on the web. David Womack interviewed its creator, Brewster Kahle, for Loop.
Womack, David. AIGA (2002). Articles>Web Design>History
#31914
Bridging the Designer–User Gap
Depending on how representative designers are of the target audience, a project might need more or less user testing. Still, usability concerns never go away completely.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2008). Articles>Web Design>Usability
#25493
Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs 
Weblogs (blogs)--frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence--are the latest genre of Internet communication to attain widespread popularity, yet their characteristics have not been systematically described. This paper presents the results of a content analysis of 203 randomly-selected weblogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of weblogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects. Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and under-estimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self-expression. Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, we consider the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situate it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the Internet today, and advance predictions about its long-term impacts.
Herring, Susan C., Lois Ann Scheidt, Sabrina Bonus and Elijah Wright. (We)blog Research on Genre Project, The (2004). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Blogging
#25919
The Brilliance of Smart Photoshop Objects
When it comes to editing an image, that typically means going back into the image app, recreating the image, then putting the newly created image into your site. A serious GoLive advantage is that communicates directly with your imaging apps to regenerate a new image right in place on your page.
Mac Design Magazine (2005). Design>Web Design>Graphic Design>Adobe GoLive
#27163
A form-based interface to generate 80x15-pixel buttons, like those often used to identify RSS feeds.
Luca Zappa (2005). Resources>Web Design>DHTML
#10238
I just can't escape those shrieking ads and articles: 'Everyone has broadband – or at least, they're getting it next week!' Because of this overwhelming hype, many Web developers and content pros currently seem preoccupied with learning how to produce broadband content....I must admit that I've been lulled into the broadband fantasy to some extent, too. I live in a very 'wired' town (Boulder, CO), and we currently have both DSL and cable modem connections at our home. So I've been sucking down a lot of broadband content lately. I've gotten very spoiled! However the vast majority of Internet users (even in the US) cannot get broadband.
Gahran, Amy. Contentious (2000). Design>Web Design>Usability>Bandwidth
#21219
One of the biggest pains about making Web pages is having to keep track of which browsers support what features. Wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to keep track of it all? Well, we've whipped up a few articles and charts to make things easier for you.
#20861
Statistics on browser popularity, as of December 1996.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1996). Design>Web Design>Statistics>Web Browsers
#24131
The Budget Webmaster's Guide to Increased Credibility - Part One
perceptions speak louder than words. Take another look at your site, or, better yet, get a fresh eye from another person in an online community you belong to. It may not be clear to your visitors that you are employing privacy protection techniques.
Abayomi-Paul, Tinu. SubmitYourArticle (2004). Design>Web Design
#28535
Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience
The most effective companies realize that they can't succeed on advertising alone; the customer matters.
Hurst, Mark. uiGarden (2007). Articles>Web Design>Usability>User Experience
#20236
Build a "Send to a Friend" Page
In this quick 'n easy tutorial, Short shows how to increase the popularity of your site by building a simple 'Send to Friend' form in HTML and ASP.
Short, Daniel. List Apart, A (2001). Design>Web Design>Forms>ASP
#20221
Build a Cross-Platform Web Design Testing Station in Mac OS
Everybody talks about cross–platform testing, but nobody’s shown how to do it on a nuts–and–bolts level. Until now. Sciortino’s comprehensive tutorial for Mac–based web designers will set you up with the testing platform of your dreams. (’Nix and Windows users, we hope to do the same for you in a future issue.)
Sciortino, Paul. List Apart, A (2002). Articles>Usability>Web Design
#20219
ALA's open source style sheet switchers are swell so long as your visitors use compliant browsers and have JavaScript turned on. But what if they don’t? New ALA author Chris Clark tells how to build a cross-browser, backward-compatible, forward-compatible, standards-compliant style sheet switcher in just five lines of code.
Clark, Chris. List Apart, A (2002). Design>Web Design>Server Side Includes>PHP
#25538
Everything you wanted to know about using PERL to build a simple search engine for your site (but were afraid to ask).
Ryan, Joseph. List Apart, A (2002). Articles>Web Design>Search
#28486
Build a Shopping Cart Application Using XForms
This tutorial focuses on key aspects of the W3C XForms 1.0 standard to produce a fully functional Web-based shopping cart. With this approach, the reader will get a good start at creating real-world applications with XForms, without having to learn the entire XForms specification.
Speicher, Steve K., Keith Wells, Jan J. Kratky and Kevin Kelly. IBM (2007). Design>Web Design>E Commerce>XForms
#22954
Ask anyone who has had to fix a Website that's littered with accessibility howlers, and top-most in their list of problems encountered will be forms, closely followed by tables. These two topics always seem to present the most difficulties, but they needn't be a problem. For the most part, forms are a problem because the extra accessibility tags are simply not known to the Web designer -- after all, it looks right, it seems to work... what's the problem? Only by switching off the monitor and using a screen-reader can our oblivious Web developer understand the issues.
Lloyd, Ian. SitePoint (2003). Design>Web Design>Accessibility>Forms
#28481
Build Ajax into your Web Apps with Rails
Ruby on Rails provides an excellent platform for building Web applications. Discover how to use the built-in Asynchronous JavaScript(TM) + XML (Ajax) features of the platform to give your application the Web 2.0 rich user interface experience.
Herrington, Jack D. IBM (2006). Design>Web Design>Ajax>Ruby on Rails
