Building Web Sites With Depth

Is the Web really the ultimate customer-empowering environment? The Web as a whole is empowering, because users have the option to click over to the competition at the slightest whim. So why do sites so often leave users feeling powerless? The Web increases accessibility and defies geographical barriers. But e-commerce sites often decrease accessibility and erect more barriers than you'd walk past in a store.

Nielsen, Jakob and Marie Tahir. WebTechniques (2001). Design>Web Design>Usability

How to Design a Web Table of Contents

There's something in our human nature that makes us want to dive into things, to browse, to dabble. We first try to program our VCRs without looking at the manual. We drive for awhile; if we get lost, we look at a map or ask directions (or not, depending on our gender).

Toub, Steve. WebTechniques (1999). Design>User Interface>Web Design

Legal Code: When Intra Becomes Extra

And somehow, on March 8, months of chat logs--what a CEO and his management team talked about in their almost daily online chats were the ordinary, boring aspects of running a company. But a few posts involved company strategies. The posts revealed negotiating tactics the team planned to use with business partners, and some of those tactics revealed a fundamental lack of good faith. If the public message logs didn't increase the company's liability exposure, they certainly poisoned its hard-earned business relationships.

Fausett, Bret A. WebTechniques (2001). Articles>Communication>Legal>Online

A Solid Intranet in Eight Steps

Corporate intranets are old news—everyone has one. But have you ever stepped back and wondered whether your intranet is cost-effective? Or, whether it increases your company's productivity? Have you ever asked your corporate users if they like it? For that matter, do they even use it? Because intranets have become commonplace, it's easy to assume they're well designed and usable. Unfortunately, most intranets have grown undirected and unchecked, like weeds in a garden. To dispel the myth that good intranet design just happens, let's look at the rules that my colleagues and I follow when we design corporate intranets.

Mandel, Theo. WebTechniques (2001). Design>Web Design>Intranets

Taming the Data Tangle

Intranets are complex because they have complex objectives, whereas Internet sites cast a wide net and filter audiences into a few focused paths that eventually lead to a single call to action (such as a purchase transaction). Intranets provide all of the information available on a topic and let readers cull the data they need to complete the task at hand. Intranets cast a wide net, but the filtering is much more difficult. This is a major problem when more and more content gets jammed into an intranet by various corporate divisions. The result is often a resource that's too cumbersome to use.

Rosenheim, Mimi. WebTechniques (2001). Articles>Web Design>Intranets