By Cameron Chapman
There have been tons of posts about minimalist and simple web design. It’s something every designer should consider and study, as minimalist and simple design principles are important in a lot of website designs. But there’s been such a focus on clean and minimalist design in recent years that many designers shy away from more visually-complex designs…
Usability is common sense. Good design is common sense. After all, there is no point building a site that is unusable, or a site that isn’t designed well.
Typically, talk of usability orients around function i.e. ensuring websites are easier to use by streamlining content and making navigation clearer. The problem, like with any set of functional guidelines, is that usability is about much more than functional interaction…
Last month I wrote about emotion and web site design in Creating An Emotional Response From Your Web Site. How often do you have a happy, fun, relaxing and utterly satisfying experience while browsing an online retail web site? Do web site designers know or even care what puts us in the [...]
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By Cameron Chapman
Occasionally, clients might present us with inspiration for a design that doesn’t come in the form of other website or graphic designs. In many cases it’s their product, packaging, or something else closely related to their business. But in other cases, it’s something entirely unrelated that they just like the looks of. In either case, it can often lead us feeling a little puzzled…
By Jeremy Davis
It’s been said that the key to a civilization’s success is mastery of the food system. Unless a group of people can effectively control the basic needs for survival, they will never achieve greatness. Likewise, before CSS skills can be expanded to an advanced level, the basics must become instinct to any CSS coder. Develop these habits and you lay a solid foundation to apply advanced CSS techniques…
Guest Post by Fonts2U
Being a specific form of art, typography has always been coherent with the general progress of art and cultural growth of humanity. This is why the history of western typography reflects the development of art in Europe to a considerable degree. The epoch of Roman Empire, Renaissance, Baroque, and the art of Industrialization period – we can track the traces of each stage of art development in the design of particular typefaces, born during a respective period of time…
By Cameron Chapman
Single-page websites are becoming more popular among web designers, both for their own projects and for client sites. There are a lot of cases out there in which a single-page site makes a lot of sense: if there isn’t a ton of content; if the content is all closely related; or in cases where a particular stylistic element works best on a single page.
In any case, single-page sites are cropping up all over the place…
SeeWhy Inc, a company who specializes in understanding and improving abandonment rates on websites, recently released a list of the top 10 converting websites. You can find further information about the criteria of their selections on their blog, check out a quick list of the top 10 below.
Guest Post by Webcopyplus
Website design, development and copywriting can be done faster, more accurately and creatively with the help of Lean manufacturing techniques, which help companies around the globe accomplish industry-leading results. Lean is a production practice that helps identify resource use that’s not directly tied to creating value for customers, so it can be eliminated…
Adobe is hosting a CS5 launch event on Monday (Apr 12) at 11am EST/8am PST. Personally, I’m very excited for this event. If you haven’t signed up yet, hurry! Adobe’s team will be sharing a first look at the top five killer features of CS5 for design, web, video, and photography. I have five CS5 tshirts (from Adobe) to giveaway. To join the contest, simply post a comment in this post about your favorite new feature demonstrated in the launch event…
Just wanted to jot down a quick blog post with my thoughts about two blog posts about speed. Matt Cutts has been writing both on his own blog and on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog to tell everyone what we knew was coming: site speed is now an official ranking factor.
Now I want to remind you that I’ve been writing about site speed for quite a while. I wrote about WordPress template optimization (a quite dated post now, btw) back in january 2008…
“Your baby is ugly.” What an endearing way to kick-off a presentation, right? Tim Ash’s session Seven Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design Optimization: The Definition guide to Testing and Tuning Conversions at eMetrics Canada 2010 had the audience engaged from start to finish and well into post-delivery.
So what did he mean when he referred to your baby as an “ugly, ugly little misshapen munchkin?” And how did these claims that “every parent is delusional, viewing their baby as beautiful” translate to landing page optimization? The point was: we all have the same biased, rose-colored view of our web marketing program…
This weeks guest was Al Carlton of SelfMadeMinds.com and Coolest Gadgets, amongst many other blogs. We talked about how Al outsources everything on his blogs, so much that he doesn’t even have to write on them himself anymore. Some of the things he mentioned doing:
Reliable web hosting is fundamental to the success of a web site. Not all web hosts understand that that the web has changed and now applications like WordPress are how today’s interactive sites are powered and managed. On this show we interview Nick Nelson of http://vps.net/ and discuss:
Also, in news:
Did your smartphone suddenly start blinking and buzzing like crazy? No need to worry– it’s probably just getting excited about AdWords for mobile, our new mobile interface for Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices.We’ve heard that your smartphone and AdWords account have been pining for each other. Over the past few months, many of you have let us know how much you’d like to have fast and easy mobile access to AdWords, which is why we’re now testing a streamlined mobile experience…
Check out my latest new WordPress theme called Koi (view demo). The design is based on my current theme at N.Design Studio. It has threaded comments, multi-level drop down menus, social media buttons, one sidebar widget and three footer widgets. The theme also includes an option where you can config the menu, favicon, social media buttons, and footer tracking code. (more…)
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Today I’m going to talk about a rarely used but extremely useful CSS property, the word-wrap. You can force long (unbroken) text to wrap in a new line by specifying break-word with the word-wrap property. For example, you can use it to prevent text extending out the box and breaking the layout. This commonly happens when you have a long URL in the sidebar or comment list. Word-wrap is supported in IE 5…
Weebly is an online site builder (with visual editor) for anyone to create a website without having to know any coding. They are hosting a theme design contest with $13,000 in prizes: first prize = $10,000, second = $2,000, and third = $1,000. The contest will be judged by Andrew Wilkinson, Dustin Curtis, Jason Putorti, Michael Cronan, Rob Martin and Scott Thomas. The theme submission deadline is April 30th, 2010…
SEOmoz is one of the world’s largest providers of tools for search engine optimization (SEO). The company was already highly successful, having a list of Fortune 500 clients as long as your arm. It had also conducted many split tests on its site. In fact, previous SEOmoz split tests were the subject of 14 pages in an industry “best practices” guide for landing page optimization.
Nevertheless, in the first split test that Conversion Rate Experts conducted for SEOmoz, we generated a 52% improvement in sales…
As you may probably know mobile design is getting more and more popular, particularly the iPhone design. Almost every popular website or web app offers a mobile version now. In this post, I’ve collected a list of 38 nicely designed sites (ranging from personal, blog, portoflio, editoral, web app, etc.) that are optimized for iPhone. I hope this list will come in handy when you need to design a mobile site for yourself or clients…
One “mistake” that we consistently see when conducting one of our AdWords account audit and strategy sessions or when beginning work with a new client is that the AdWords report center is not used effectively, or maybe even not at all. In order to know what is working, what is not working and how to make your account better you need to make use of this feature.
You can access the report center by clicking the “Reporting” tab found at the top of the AdWords user interface and selecting reports…
The music industry can teach web marketers a valuable lesson about how to maximize conversions. If you’re looking at buying multivariate testing software, this article will help you put things into perspective.
As you probably already know, multivariate testing software (such as Google Website Optimizer) is software that tells you which version of your page generates the most conversions…
Last week I posted a CSS3 dropdown menu and someone complained that I didn’t explain the CSS code in detail. Well, here is a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know.
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This week Joost is joined by Jeff Chandler of the WordPress Tavern and Grant Griffiths of the Headway theme. They discussed all of the implications of themes and plugins being GPL or not, and why people would and in Joost’s opinion should choose to be GPL. Also some discussion came up about how theme and plugin authors should be credited.
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While I was coding the Notepad theme, I’ve learned some new CSS3 features and now I would like to share it with you. View the demo to see a Mac-like multi-level dropdown menu that I’ve created using border-radius, box-shadow, and text-shadow. It renders perfect on Firefox, Safari and Chrome. The dropdown also works on non-CSS3 compitable browsers such as IE7+, but the rounded corners and shadow will not be rendered…
Which should you use: the free Google Website Optimizer or a $50,000 alternative?
We’ve just launched a website that you’ll find really useful. It’s a comparison site for split testing software (like Google Website Optimizer). It allows you to…
I will be hosting a workshop with Refresh Events on advance WordPress theme coding. The event will take place in Toronto, March 25th 2010 at Rich Media Institute, 156 Augusta Ave. This workshop is for designers with CSS skills who want to learn how to convert a HTML template into a WordPress theme (no PHP skills required). You will learn how to advance themes using conditional tags, page templates, custom fields, and more…
Today I would like to talk about blogs that have a unique design for each post. They break the traditional blog layout by designing a different theme for each post based on the topic. Designing a different layout for each topic requires a lot of time and creativity. So, we should appreciate these blogazines who spend their extra time to make your reading more pleasurable. If you would like to join this unique post trend, below are some excellent examples and WordPress tips on how to implement it…
I’m back into the WordPress theme design. Check out my latest release — the Notepad theme. Inspired by the iPhone’s Notes app, Notepad is a modern theme with a subtle touch of the sketchy and texturized background. The theme is widget compatible with threaded & paged comments, social media buttons, and multi-level dropdown menus. It has been tested on WordPress 2.9 with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE7+…
At the start of 2009, Voices.com, one of the leading marketplaces for voice-over talent, began working with Conversion Rate Experts. The result? Their conversion rate increased by over 400%—from less than 5% to 22%.
How we got those improvements
The most important part of any project is the exploratory work that occurs at the beginning; in FORTUNE’s article about us, they described this stage as the “detective work…
You're looking at my set of tools. The custom search engine helps me find the answers to questions more quickly. The RSS aggregator keeps me updated with industry news that matters. And, in the near future, I plan on documenting the major steps and considerations used in SEM as a check list (although it will also work well as a list of tutorials).
While I built (and am improving) the above tools for myself, it seemed like a waste to keep them to myself. After all, good will breeds good will, and perhaps you'll even help me find more great blogs to follow.
In the name of good karma, all my outgoing links on this site are followed. Treat others as you wish to be treated, right? Besides, I think the authors who we read daily deserve all the thanks (links) we can give.
I hope you find the SEM News feed and the free SEO search tool helpful.
- Brett at semdaily.com
