Latest Design News, Daily
Latest Design News, Daily
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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.
Similar Posts
- 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.
- The Web Content Style Guide: The Essential Reference for Online Writers, Editors and Managers
- Quality Web Content
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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 CSS-Only Accordion Effect
- A Semantic List-Based CSS Calendar
- Equal Height Columns with jQuery
- Book-Style Chapter Introductions Using Pure CSS
- Intelligent Navigation Bars with JavaScript and CSS
- The CSS-Only Accordion Effect
- Six Ways to Style Blockquotes
- Horizontal CSS Dropdown Menus
- Intelligent Navigation Bars with JavaScript and CSS
- Show/Hide Content with CSS and JavaScript
- 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.
- 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
- Making a post about them every once in a while
- Having a top commenters widget
- Use gravitars
- 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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
Resources
The Year In Review: 2008
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.
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!
Happy New Year!
We had a great run this 2008. Thanks to all our loyal CSS Vault visitors and readers. Here’s to an exciting and better 2009!
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?”:
(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!
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:
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!
Interview with Håkon Wium Lie
Check out this Slashdot interview with Håkon Wium Lie, the originator of the CSS idea. (Can you believe it’s been over 10 years since CSS was proposed? Time flies when you’re coding with tables!) Lie currently serves as CTO of Opera Software.In the interview, Lie suggests that before releasing IE 7, Microsoft should ensure that the browser passes the Acid2 test and supports TrueType downloadable fonts. He also discusses XML, microformats, Ajax, and (of course) the future of CSS. Read the interview and watch him effortlessly knock down all suggestions that CSS is somehow lacking in capabilities.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
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:
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:
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.
WordPress 2.7 Released, Initial Impressions
For those who haven’t noticed, wordpress 2.7 has officially been released. While I have played around with the release candidates I am always eager to see the full release of new software, so I have already installed the update onto this site to get some initial impressions.
Obviously this is a big interface change from previous versions, and while many have hailed wordpress for having a simple and easy to use interface I never have fully agreed. Sure it is easier than some of the other CMS and blogging platforms out there, but it always had a lot to be desired in my opinion.
The Dashboard
The reorganization of the dashboard improves it’s functionality ten fold. With a quick post bar, easily to scan stats about your blog, and the news no longer takes up 75% of the page. Where previously I would instantly skip over the information on the dashboard as it was not easy to gain value or I had to hunt for what I was looking for— I now find myself glancing at the little bits before making my next action.
The New Menu
Despite some nice aesthetic improvements, the primary change that has improved the user experience is the navigation. Some of their initial menu and design decisions make sense considering the platform was originally built to be a blogging platform, and has evolved into what it is today (more of a framework). The new version really is an evolution of the platform itself to better fit the flexibility that it has adopted.
Better Labeling
While the previous versions of wordpress had fairly good labeling, the labeling of navigational elements has improved significantly. What was “Design” is now “Appearance,” and “Manage” has been forgone for a simple “Edit.”
Much Better Organization
The organization of the navigational structure has been improved leaps and bounds. Now that wordpress is used as a CMS more often pages and posts have been separated, which should make clients lives a lot easier. Both categories have logical sub categories of edit, add new, categories, etc. Media has been separated into it’s own section, no longer do you have to hunt for it in the ambiguous “manage” tab.
The administration navigation has been vastly improved, now in an area you can actually spot it seems much easier to use. A nice touch is the addition of the “tools” section, which will serve as an excellent spot for plug in settings and controls. Previously it seemed authors stuck plug in controls in any section, where this will be a bit more convenient and logical.
The New Editing Interface
The editing interface of both posts and pages has been vastly improved. Again this looks as if the changes were made to improve the capability of WordPress as a CMS. Previous versions of wordpress had what I called “option soup.” Where boxes of all sorts of options simply appeared… well… everywhere. Sure with plug ins you could turn off a lot of the options that didn’t seem to matter, but it was a hassle and certainly didn’t make wordpress easier on clients that were not tech savy.
The layout and labeling of the editor interface is much more intuitive. The more complicated items such as custom fields are located below the fold where most users can safely ignore them, and logical workflow boxes are placed where they should. For example excerpt is under the post, where tags and categories are to the right.
On the pages editor you have a handy “Page Attribute” section that allows you to select the page parent, template, and order.
Additionally in both editors you have easy options to turn on / off any section that seems unnecessary.
The Bad
The only area I have had significant trouble with is the image uploading interface. When I used the flash loader I seemed to be able to select files but not upload them, weird? Inserting the image into the post was a bit hidden, having to “show the image” and see the details in order to find the insert image is a bit clunky. Let’s face it, being able to put pictures into a site/blog is extremely important to most clients. This being as difficult as it was is not insignificant.
Overall…
Overall the upgrade is a huge improvement, especially looking from a clients perspective. The main areas I would love to see improvement is some ability to create custom write panels with out doing hacking, and easier linking interface (if you want to link to another page on your site you have to copy and paste it? come on now!) and better navigation control capabilities.
I am sure that in future releases these will be improved and wordpress will continue to excel as a framework.
It’s been real
Well, folks, today officially marks the final day of CSS Insider. I’ve had a lot of fun blogging here for the past 7 months, and hopefully my posts have been helpful and informative to you as well. Would I say CSS Insider has changed my life? Well… I tend to shy away from hyperbole; but one fact worth noting is that if it weren’t for my blogging here, I wouldn’t have met and interviewed Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jason Santa Maria.If you are so heartbroken at the thought of this blog going dark because you just can’t get enough of Amber Rhea, worry not! You can find me at the Georgia Podcast Network, where I pontificate about a variety of topics; and my personal blog, Being Amber Rhea. And you might just catch me somewhere else ’round the Weblogs, Inc. network, as well.
I’ll leave you with links to some of my favorite CSS news and info sites: Thanks, y’all.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments