September 20, 2023
August 16, 2023
December 24, 2010
Twitter is not an RSS feed. Facebook is not a list of promotions. Your Web site isn’t a board-driven portal for internal documents and buzz words. Content isn’t simply the conduit with which you disseminate press releases. Yet, some of you continue to treat it that way. Oh. No. I get it. You’re trying hard. […]
December 9, 2010
This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat. It’s unadorned. “It’s just a hat,” you’d think, if you saw it in the wild. If you saw it in a museum, surrounded by other items, you might think it was just another dead person’s hat. You’d be okay in thinking that. It’s no different from that Monopoly guy’s hat. […]
October 18, 2010
Spoiler alert, you guys. So New York Magazine’s Vulture blog posted a little ditty about whether or not Don Draper chose the right woman on Mad Men’s season finale, complete with an episode spoiler right in the headline: “Is Megan Really Right for Don?” Spoilers in the headline? One comment summed it all up: “It’d […]
October 6, 2010
“…And we’d like to put our mission statement on the home page.” No. No, you wouldn’t. Your mission statement is for you. It’s for your board of directors, your senior vice presidents, your employees, your partners, your backers. It’s for your company, and your company alone. Your mission is not for your customers. Your mission […]
September 20, 2010
Your home page is no longer your start page. It’s a home base, for sure – a quick escape to the front, an ejector seat for a lost user – but it’s no longer first contact. And it hasn’t been for a while, actually. The fact is, your start page is different for every user. […]
August 16, 2010
There’s an underlying belief throughout the non-tech-savvy that computer and Web programmers are a secluded, arrogant group; fiercely loyal to their language, looking out for themselves, unable to share their findings lest they make themselves obsolete. It’s this belief that leads us to stop trusting our company’s IT department and automatically mistrust the kid Web […]
August 10, 2010
I have been reading Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers for all of 10 pages and I’ve already found awesomeness: namely, the term “The Priority of Constituencies.” Sounds fancy. It’s not – it’s painfully simple, actually. It’s a design term, stating that, “in case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over […]
July 29, 2010
When we become familiar with our surroundings, two seemingly contrary things begin to happen: we start ignoring certain annoyances – and we uncover new ones. It happens in our everyday lives – we ignore the creaky floorboards of our house, but suddenly find fault in the loose cupboard doors; we become accustomed to one co-worker’s […]
July 14, 2010
While dorking out and reading Morville & Callender’s Search Patterns, I came across this sentence: “A few years ago, results were the only reply. Our goal was a subsecond response. Now, with autocomplete and autosuggest, the results may precede the query.” From Search Patterns – Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender This is space-aged, mind reading […]
June 30, 2010
Over two decades, my grandfather built two houses. They weren’t just houses. They were homes, for he and my grandmother, built out of an unwillingness to trust contractors and the lure of a low-cost solution. And because these homes were built from scratch, an intense pride of ownership developed. My grandparents took meticulous care of […]
