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The Year In Review: 2008

March 21st, 2009

The Year In Review: 2008

Fireworks over Enmore, Sydney
Photo by yewenyi.

2008 was a great year for CSS Newbie. And in the same nostalgic spirit of CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and (I’m sure) countless other web entities, I thought I’d take a minute or two to step back and reflect on what the year has brought for CSS Newbie.

Although I first purchased cssnewbie.com some time in the middle of 2007 and wrote my first “intro to CSS” article in November of last year, I didn’t officially launch the site until February 1, 2008. Thus, this article also serves as History of CSS Newbie – before 2008, there wasn’t such a website, and now there is. And thanks to you fantastic readers and commenters out there, it’s become a better and more rewarding website than I had imagined it could.

Growth

On January 1, 2008, CSS Newbie had exactly zero visitors – it seems even I was too busy recovering from my celebrating to stop by! Luckily, that trend hasn’t continued. I published my first “official” article on the site (talking about how to create book-style article introductions) on February 1st. That day I saw a huge jump in traffic… 11 visits!

By the end of the week, that one article had gained me a couple hundred visitors, and a milestone against which to work. Although the number was small, that first week’s worth of traffic meant a great deal to me. It proved, if nothing else, that maybe I wasn’t entirely crazy to think that I could put together a website talking about CSS. Maybe, just maybe, a few people would find what I had to say interesting.

That first successful article gave me the drive to write a second, and so forth until here we are at the end of 2008 and the CSS Newbie table of contents is chock full of interesting tidbits, so much so that I often find myself looking through the archive to remember how to do things I’ve forgotten! That’s one benefit of writing for CSS Newbie that I never expected.

Statistics

I’m a bit of a statistics nerd. As such, here are some interesting stats that help visualize the year’s progression.

I published 99 articles, or an average of a little more than eight per month.
You-all have left 670 comments(!). That’s an average of 56 per month, or roughly seven comments per article. And I appreciate it!
Alexa gives CSS Newbie a 3-month average traffic rank of 124,122… and a 1-week average of 58,318. Growth is in the cards!
152,907 unique visitors have stopped by this year, generating 293,329 page views.
50% of my traffic came from other sites. Thanks to all of you who linked here!
38% of visitors get here through search engines.

The five most responded-to articles of the year were:

And here are the five most popular articles of the year in terms of traffic:

Progression

And where will CSS Newbie go from here? Well, I certainly hope to increase both overall usefulness and visitor levels between the end of this year and the end of 2009. But how that happens could have a lot to do with you, the reader.

To that end, I’ve started a new survey to find out what you’d like to see happen with CSS Newbie over the course of the next year. I’ve made a few suggestions for ideas that I’ve thrown around, but if you can think of anything that I should be doing that I haven’t considered, please let me know about it in the comments.

The survey:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

The survey is also available in the footer of every page on the site. Please take a second to let me know what you’d like to see from the site over the next year – I’ll take your suggestions into very serious consideration.

Thanks

Thank you, the reader, for making CSS Newbie what it is today, and for helping me make it what it will become in 2009. Thanks to my guest authors for the year: Scott Philips, Chris Coyier, and Aaron Webb. Thanks to Jeremy Harrington for designing the new CSS Newbie that launched at the beginning of this month. Thanks to my coworkers and friends for helping me talk through my article ideas and suggesting fantastic articles of their own. And thanks to the Twitter crowd for expanding my online and inlife communities in ways I never imagined.

Here’s to a fantastic 2008, and an even better 2009!

Survey For People Who Make Websites 2008 Results Out

Back in 2007, the staff of A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey and presented 37 questions to 33,000 web professionals, providing “the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide” (ALA 2007 results). The results were compiled into a downloadable PDF file.

In 2008 they did it again, the results of the 2008 Survey For People Who Make Websites are now out for public consumption. The survey had less respondents compared to the one held in 2007 down to 30,055. Data analysis is provided by Alan Brickman and Larry Yu. The results speak can be overwhelming for some. Thankfully the findings are presented in a friendly, easy to read article with clear and beautiful CSS Charts.

ALA has generously shared the raw data with the community, which is available as tabbed text, CSV, and Excel spreadsheet. RAW data is a powerful thing, and I just have a couple of suggestions how it can be used:

AJAX application that allows visitors to enter their own responses, and generates a graph that shows where the respondent is in relation to others
Quick summary that shows the highest and lowest result per question
AJAX application that allows visitors to filter, sort, and sift through the data
Side-by-side comparison of 2008 and 2007 data

All in all, big props to the ALA team for the tremendous effort spent on this endeavor. It is a great contribution to the web community. Looking forward to the 2009 survey!

New Poll: How Much CSS Do You Already Know?

Hey everyone, I’ve posted a new poll in the footer of the website, and I’d appreciate if you’d take a second or two (literally) and answer the question du jour: how much CSS do you already know?

This is a chance for me to get to know you, my audience, a little bit better. It will also help me do my darnedest to produce the sort of content that you would find most useful. So! Are you a true CSS newbie, already a big deal in the CSS world, or somewhere in between? Let me know in the poll below!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Also, here are the results from the last poll, which asked, “what do you want to see on CSS Newbie in 2009?”:

59% of the voters wanted more long, tutorial-style articles.
43.4% wanted more short, quick tip articles.
33.7% requested more entry-level, CSS-specific articles.
31.3% wanted more advanced and non-CSS articles.
24.1% wanted to see video tutorials and tips.
19.3% were looking for a forum to help find solutions.
12% wanted an email newsletter to stay in touch.

(note: these add up to more than 100% because people could choose more than one option)

So obviously, the overwhelming answer is: more articles! Long, short, entry-level, and advanced… it seems there’s an audience for all four. And since I try to offer a combination of all four currently, that is a very encouraging result to see. And the other three — video tutorials, forums, and an email newsletter — were all desired by more than 10% of the respondents. Obviously I have a lot of planning to do!

So thanks everyone for participating in the last poll, and please take a second to give me your responses on this one!

Fixing a Bad Feedburner Subscriber Count

feedburner errors

Google’s Feedburner is a fantastic service for managing RSS feeds and delivering useful statistics on those feeds, and they have a great API (application programming interface) for pulling those statistics and displaying them on your site. But lately, I’ve run into occasional problems getting at the information that Feedburner collects. Here’s the solution that I’ve developed for dealing with Feedburner’s flops.

I’m using Francesco Mapelli’s Feed Count Wordpress plugin to display the number of feed subscribers I’ve accrued. It’s a great little plugin that allows you to generate a custom message associated with your feed stats. For example, in the subscribe section of my sidebar, there’s a little message that, as I write this, reads, “Join 2449 other happy readers!” That’s the Feed Count plugin at work. I find it preferable to those little Feedburner “chicklets” that are scattered around the web these days.

But here’s the problem: when Feed Count makes a call to Feedburner to grab my latest subscriber stats, sometimes Feedburner drops the ball when it returns the number. Instead of returning the number of subscribers, it will sometimes return a “N/A” instead, suggesting Feedburner couldn’t find my stats, and resulting in a sentence that reads “Join N/A other happy readers!” Not quite the message I intended. And worse, sometimes Feedburner will return a big fat zero if it can’t find my stats — and “Join 0 happy readers!” is definitely not the impression I’m hoping to make on first-time visitors.

So what’s my solution? When in doubt, turn to JavaScript.

A JavaScript Solution

I first wrote this JavaScript solution in the last iteration of CSS Newbie when I finally got sick of being greeted every morning with my “not available” subscriber count:

$spans = document.getElementById('subbox').getElementsByTagName('span');
if($spans[4].innerHTML=="N/A" || $spans[4].innerHTML=="0") {
	$spans[4].innerHTML = "thousands of";
}

This solution relies heavily on the XHTML structure generated by the Feed Count plugin, but the concept could be edited to work with most any solution. Basically, I’m using JavaScript to find the 5th span (counting starts at 0) inside the #subbox id, which is the span generated by Feed Count that holds my subscriber count. The code checks the contents of that span, and if it finds one of the two dreaded values — N/A or 0 — it replaces that content with the phrase “thousands of” instead. It’s not as specific as I’d like, but it certainly gets the point across.

A jQuery Option

When I rebuilt CSS Newbie recently, I decided to upgrade this script to work with jQuery. I was already using jQuery for a few other effects on the page, so it made sense to cut down on the size of my code where available. Here’s the much smaller jQuery solution:

if($(".subscribers").html() == "N/A" || $(".subscribers").html() == "0") {
	$(".subscribers").html("thousands of");
}

This code does essentially the same as the JavaScript above but in fewer lines and, I personally think, with greater clarity. It looks for the contents of the element with the “.subscribers” class (which would have been an absolute bear to do with JavaScript due to the lack of a getElementsByClass function) and replaces it if it’s on our no-go list.

This is how I’ve gotten around the inconsistencies of the Feedburner API. If you have other solutions or ideas you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Latest Design News, Daily

I summarized over on 3.7CREA.TV that I find that staying educated and current is one of the more challenging and exciting parts of being a web designer or developer. One of the great aspects of this industry is the community and amount of knowledge that is being shared every day. It is this enthusiasm and quest to learn more that has allowed the web to advance at such a fast and exciting pace.

Due to the nature of the industry and vast range of contributors to it, it can often be hard to find and monitor the great content that is being published. I used to find myself hunting through countless different websites and RSS feeds, trying to ensure I didn’t miss any valuable information, articles or techniques. Even trying to sort through them in an RSS reader is more difficult than it should be.

So to try and make finding the best web design news easier, we have launched Today In Design. Today In Design aggregates the most popular design articles from sources such as delicious, digg, design bump, etc… additionally it pulls in hand selected news articles from sources such as CSS Globe and Design Newz.

Any feedback or suggestions would be more than welcome.

The Importance of Complementary Skills

If you’ve been a reader of CSS Newbie for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve noticed that not all of my articles are directly related to CSS. I also talk about HTML, JavaScript, content management systems, ecommerce solutions, and other related skill sets and areas of expertise.

This is for many reasons (for starters, I’d get bored otherwise!), but the main overarching rationale is that these areas of expertise are all complementary. Without HTML, CSS is useless. Without JavaScript, CSS can’t realize its full potential.

This means these skills are just as important as the CSS my site’s name suggests you’ll learn.

However, there’s only so much I can teach. I’m not an expert in everything related to web development, nor will I ever be. And while I consider myself pretty decent at writing these tutorials (which means my English degree wasn’t a total waste!), I consider myself to be a complete newbie when it comes to the art of “selling” my knowledge and authority. If there is such a thing as a natural marketer, I am not he.

Earlier this year, I came across Brian Clark’s (of Copyblogger fame) online course called Teaching Sells. I was immediately intrigued. Here was a guy with a complementary skill set who was willing to teach me what he knew. Brian’s expertise is not in building web sites, but in writing and teaching: the other half of what I do.

So I signed up for the Teaching Sells mailing list and downloaded their free report with the great title, “Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online… And Start Making Some.” And that report was pretty motivating for me. So when the class opened up in February, I signed up right away.

I started out very excited and motivated. The course is full of detailed information, and comes with a lot of worksheets and planning guides you can download and fill out to map what you’re learning to your own personal projects (I have a manila folder full of those worksheets). But then… well, I’ll admit it: I didn’t make it all the way through the course!

I got busy with work, with freelancing, with planning my wedding (only 17 days to go now!). But here’s one benefit of the program that I don’t think Brian and his crew tout loudly enough: Once you’re a member of Teaching Sells, you’re a member for life.

What does that mean? That means I can go back whenever I want, and I’ll still have access to the dozens of learning modules, the forums, the downloads, the interviews… and anything new they decide to add to the mix down the road. So my new and revised goal is to take up the class again this fall, start back up with a whole new group of motivated, excited students, and see if I can make it all the way through this time.

So if you’ve got a few minutes, take my advice: head over to Teaching Sells and watch the new video they have up that explains what it is they do better than I ever could (they’re the marketers, after all).

And if you think their pitch sounds plausible, sign up for their email list. You’ll get the free report, some case studies in your inbox to get you started, and once they open the doors to their class, you’ll be the first to know.

And if all goes well, I’ll see you in the forums.

(Note: Yes, the links above are affiliate links — past members of the program are given the option to be affiliates for future offerings. This means if you click one of those links and sign up, you’re helping CSS Newbie. However, even if there weren’t an affiliate program, I’d still recommend this course to anyone and everyone looking to learn the art of teaching online! So check it out.)

12 Creative and Cool Uses for the CSS Border Property

random art using the CSS border property

If CSS properties attended high school, you would never expect to see the border property sitting at the cool kids’ table. Sure, it’s a useful property and all — as long as you’re looking accentuate the boxiness of a design, right?

Actually, you’d be surprised at just how cool the border property can be. Please take the following dozen exhibits as proof that the CSS border property is a lot cooler than we give it credit for.

Jazzing Up Anchors

I’ve written here before about jazzing up anchor tags by changing the color, removing the underline, and adding background images. But border can be a great way to add a bit of visual style to your anchors without adding that great bit of accessibility that the underline provides. For example, CSS Newbie’s article links are currently styled with a dotted border, like so:

.entry a {
	color: #253c93;
	text-decoration: none;
	border-bottom: 1px dotted #253c93; }
.entry a:hover {
	border-bottom: 1px solid #253c93; }

That gives me a nice dotted border that turns solid when the user hovers over the link. All sorts of style and accessibility without that so-’90s underline.

Build a Postage Stamp

A while back, I ran across a cool little technique for faking a postage stamp using the CSS border property. The original link seems to have been lost from the web, but here’s the basic technique, in XHTML:

<div class="stamp">
	<p>99&cent;</p>
</div>

And CSS:

.stamp {
	width: 500px;
	height: 414px;
	background: #fff url(george.jpg) no-repeat;
	border: 12px dashed #1b1a19; }
.stamp p {
	color: #fff;
	margin: 10px 10px 0 0;
	font: bold 60px Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
	text-align: right; }

Now, you could obviously take this even further with a bit of skill and a degree in something other than Rhetoric, but I think you get the idea. You can see the example live here.

Prettier Images

Borders are a great way to make your excellent images stand out even more. I wrote an article on the subject a while back, but here’s the basic idea:

img.photo {
	border: 1px solid #999;
	background-color: #fcfcfc;
	padding: 4px;}

You can see a similar technique used on CSS Newbie’s current design around all of the images in the articles, as well as the ads in the sidebar. As you can see, the technique can be subtle but visually pleasing if used properly.

Homemade Coupons

If you’re ever required to design an online coupon, you needn’t turn straight to Photoshop or the like. You can craft a coupon easily with just a bit of CSS:

.coupon {
	width: 250px;
	padding: 10px;
	text-align: center;
	border: 3px dashed #ccc; }

Just that speck of code gives me a nice coupon that looks something like this:

You’ll have your readers printing and clipping in no time.

Better Blockquotes

CSS blockquote

Blockquotes are often useful, seldom used. But if you have a website that often refers to the words of others, a well-styled blockquote will go a long way towards impressing your readers with your borrowed prose:

blockquote {
	margin: 1em 3em;
	color: #999;
	border-left: 2px solid #999;
	padding-left: 1em; }

Just a touch of code, and voila… instant credibility!

Hunt Archaic Code

If you ever take over a website (or perhaps built a website) that is still using the Code of Yesteryear, consider turning to CSS and the border property for help hunting down bits of HTML soup that could use a bit less seasoning:

font, center, s, u, b, i {
	color: #000;
	font-weight: bold;
	background-color: #f99;
	border: 3px solid #c00; }

For more information on this useful technique, see my article on finding deprecated elements with diagnostic CSS highlighting. It just might save your life someday. But I doubt it.

Round the Bend

So far, all of our techniques have had one thing in common: boxy edges. But if you’re using a browser developed within the last five or so years (read: not IE6), you’re not limited to those same old dull right angles. This article from last August shows us that CSS3 offers us a way of breaking out of — or at least bending the corners of — the CSS box:

div.rounded {
	background-color: #666;
	color: #fff;
	font-weight: bold;
	padding: 10px;
	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 5px; }

The border-radius properties allow us to round the corners of elements without having to resort to images. Cool indeed!

Angle it In

Of course, not all angles are bad angles… if used properly. Way back in the day, CSS guru Eric Meyer pointed out a way to use borders to create some pretty wicked angles. If you’d like to learn more about this technique, his site is a great place to start.

CSS Drawings

And now for a bit of fun! The following excellent (and cool) examples are all drawn using the CSS border property.

This functional LCD-style digital clock was built using CSS borders to create the lines of the LCD. Check out tanfa.co.uk to see it in action!

There’s something very pop-art about this CSS skyline. It leans heavily on the border property to create the buildings and windows.

Here’s a random art generator that combines HTML, JavaScript, and the CSS border property to create random examples of modern art. If you hit the “update” button long enough, you’re bound to find something worthy of hanging on your (cubicle?) wall.

Christopher Hester is a man with fantastic CSS skill, incalculable patience, and presumably no girlfriend — at least until he started impressing the ladies with this house he built with the CSS border property. And be sure to check out his second CSS house, which he built using background colors and approximately 50 gazillion non-semantic divs.

If you know of any other fantastic uses for the CSS border property, be sure to mention them in the comments!

It’s 2006, and we’re still talking about site navigation? Yes, we are; and apparently we need all the reminders we can get, since so few sites seem to get it right. (Including, I’m well aware, CSS Insider. Don’t hate; I didn’t design it.)

In his new A List Apart article (“Where Am I?”), Derek Powazek slaps us upside the head, again, with the cardinal rules of web site navigation. From any page on a site, a user should be able to easily answer these three questions:

Where am I?
Where can I go?
Where have I been?

So simple, and yet somehow, so elusive to many designers.

Derek provides visual examples of great site navigation. Put your site to the test! Do you know where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going?

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Horizontal CSS Dropdown Menus

CSSnewbie reader Andrea Pluhar wrote in with an interesting problem: she wanted to use a CSS dropdown menu on a website that she was building, but the design called …

Source

Engaging Readers, Design Your Way to More Blog Comments

You have probably read the studies that claim on average, 1% of online users actually contribute and create content on a given website. The rest are perfectly happy reading your posts, forming their own opinions, and moving on to the next blog with out ever actually leaving any sort of feedback. This makes sense of course, we don’t always have time to leave our thoughts on blogs, or many times it doesn’t even seem worth the effort. After all you have to formalize your thoughts, actually write them out, review, edit, post, and then monitor for responses.

It actually is a lot more involved than we probably realize.

It is also a lot more important to get this type of reader interaction than we probably realize. The amount of interaction generated through a blog is an easy indicator of it’s success. Not only for the blog owner, but also to other readers. Consider looking at two blogs with similar content, one with an average of 10 - 20 responses where the other only has 1 - 3.

I hate to say it, but most people would subscribe to the blog that is generating more interest and response, even if the content was of similar quality.

How Design Can Encourage More Blog Commenting

When people blog about “design” in regards to websites many times they are primarily referring to the asthetic quality of a site. While the aesthetic quality of a site can have a large impact on how many people put in the effort to comment on a blog, I want to approach the situation at a higher level.

Consider that the definition of design is “to assign in thought or intention; purpose.”

Design is not just making pretty visuals, but to craft your site with specific thought, intention and purpose. So the question then becomes, how can we build the site with the intention of encouraging users to leave comments.

Create an Incentive or Reward

The primary reason anyone is going to leave a comment on a blog is they believe that their will be some pay off that is worth their time to formulate their response, edit it, etc… In most cases it is because they have a feeling about the content to the point where they feel the need to get their thoughts off of their chest, or maybe the author is well known enough where the idea of talking with them would be the reward.

However not all blog posts will have content compelling enough, or an author well known enough to create the incentive and reward with those elements alone.

Highlight Your Commenters

Smart marketers have found that the higher that you can appeal on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the better success you will have reaching your audience. By highlighting those who really participate you are appealing to the need of “esteem.”

You could do this by:

Making a post about them every once in a while
Having a top commenters widget
Use gravitars

Give Your Commenters a Bonus

I have seen great response to giving the top commenters some sort of bonus. Widgets that keep track of who has commented the most make this an easy endeavor to track and monitor.

Some of the more common methods could be:

Giving the top commenters a dofollow link
Giving top commenters profile/link on the home page
Giving top commenters a special design when they do comment, do occasional giveaways, etc…
Use the dofollow plugin, so high quality commenters can get some SEO value from contributing.

Use Design and Visuals to Engage Users

While I have talked about “design” in terms of designing an experience or functionality, I haven’t addressed the actual visuals of a design and how it can improve the amount of user interaction.

If you pay enough attention to the design and visuals of your comments, you can catch the attention of users and encourage them to leave a comment.

Make Your Comment Area Eye Catching and Interesting

As a users gets closer to the bottom of an article or post, you can bet that they have either scrolled past or lost focus of most of the visual elements on the page. This presents an excellent opportunity to draw their eye to the comment area by just adding a little bit of flair, tension, or contrast to develop some visual interest.

Want to really get some attention? Consider using custom designed form fields (not too custom as to hinder user experience).

Be Suggestive

Suggest that a user leave a comment where ever you can! At the start of the comments create a link to add a comment. You could even go so far as adding a “reply” button/link at every comment in the list.

Additionally this will make it easy to comment, as users won’t have to hunt for the add comment link.

Highlight the Commenters

People leave comments because they want people to read their opinion (even if it is just the author). Make sure that the users name/link has enough visual emphasis. This will help establish that the commenter will get the recognition that they are seaking.

Again, use Gravitars. Users who have gone so far as creating a gravitar will appreciate being able to show their branding on another blog and are more likely to comment because of it.

Any Experiences or Tips?

These are some of the best methods I have come across, if you have any experiences, tips, or other ideas on how to encourage more users to participate through the design of your blog/website feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.

Five commonly neglected parts of a website that deserve detail

There are some great websites out there. They are well planned, well executed, well designed and simply effective. For every great website there are three that are could be great, but fall short due to a few small areas of neglect.

We as a community and as an industry have become very good at most aspects of building websites. Just looking through a few CSS Galleries clearly shows the quality of design that is being produced and how much it has improved in just a few years. If you look a layer deeper and view the source of these websites you will see beautiful and semantic XHTML/CSS. It seems the days of table based layouts is finally gone.

The amount of functionality and rich experience that sites have now day are creative, impressive and engaging. Powerful javascript libraries such as jQuery, MooTools and prototype make it easy to produce these experiences rapidly and effortlessly.

But a website is more than the design, code and effects/functionality. Sometimes we have to rethink our approach and find out what is really important. What are the sites objectives and what are our users objectives? More often than not you will find that you could improve the following areas of your websites:

1. Web forms

While they are far from the sexiest part of web design, web forms are arguably one of the most important. In almost all cases a web form also functions as a conversion point (a point where a user performs an action that accomplishes a site objective).

Here a user is going to enter in some of their personal information so that they can get something in return. This establishes interest and provides the site owner with some valuable information.

Web forms are often neglected in two ways:

There is not enough attention in making them usable. This could be poor validation, improper labeling of required fields, making them too long or poor form layout.
There is not enough attention to what information is asked from the user.

You have a real opportunity to learn more about the people who use your website. That information can not only help you build a better website but also a better business. This marketing information could easily lead to R&D improvements and better products.

Do some research and learn how you can make more effective forms. Your clients, bosses and website owners will thank you many times over.

Resources

2. The Content

Content is king. In a recent study 25% of users noted that the number one reason they were to leave a website was due to “weak web copy.” The only reason anyone ever goes to any website is because of the content, yet so many website owners neglect the content. Despite it’s importance content becomes an afterthought. Appearance, search rankings and conversions tend to be the focal point of most web design projects. What we may forget is that with out great content you still have a poor appearance, you won’t rank high and no one will convert.

Rather than trying to write all of the content yourself, hire someone. It will be worth it, I promise you. If nothing else write the bulk of the copy and hire someone to make it consistent with the proper voice and tone.

Resources

3. The Footer

With a little thought it becomes painfully obvious, most website footers are absolutely useless. A user takes the time and effort to read (or scan) through an entire page, and when they reach the bottom they are rewarded with links that don’t fit anywhere else, a copyright notice and maybe an address and phone number.

The point where page content ends is a very high action zone. That means that users who get to that point have a high probability of clicking on any link that comes below it. Rather than some meaningless legal links and an address create a footer that gives the user a place to find additional content that may interest them.

This could be:

Related pages / articles / posts
Links to rich media
Latest news / updates
Previously viewed pages
A contact form
Ways to save / share the page
Newsletter sign up

Resources

4. The Print Version

Many designers fail to realize how many people still prefer to print off websites rather than try and read them on screen. There are two significant benefits to paying attention to the print version.

The most obvious benefit is that it can improve the user experience of the site. Users who visit your site and print it out will actually read the content and are more likely to revisit the site and make an action (or conversion). If the printed version is difficult to read and work with they are highly likely to simply recycle the paper and forget they ever visited your site in the first place.

The second benefit is it could be a real competitive advantage. If a user prints off two web sites, and yours clearly has more attention to detail in the print version, they are much more likely to use your product/services over the competitors.

You can improve the print version simply by:

Turning off unnecessary items such as the header, footer, navigation, search box etc…
Changing the font to serif, increase the font size and space out the line height to make the print version more legible
Adjust the columns or remove sidebars so that only the primary content prints out

Resources

5. Analytics

How users behave and use a website is one of the most important factors you could possibly focus on. Despite this fact it is so commonly neglected by both website owners and website designers. Businesses need to spend more money on the analysis of user behavior and web design companies need to promote the service more heavily.

Even a website that is built using an effective strategy, user testing and best practices is a best guess at what will be most effective.

If you actually pay attention to how users behave and analyize that behavior you can discover countless ways to continually improve your website.

Are users leaving a specific page more than others? Maybe they are not finding what they are looking for and that page can bet altered
Do you have a page where a lot of people are entering the site other than the homepage? You need to start thinking of those pages as landing pages
Are there important pages that don’t get a lot of traffic? Figure out how you can make those pages more prominent

Resources

Fixing a Bad Feedburner Subscriber Count 12 Creative and Cool Uses for the CSS Border Property

The Year In Review: 2008