Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

2nd Sep
Posted by
Andy Faulkner

The Essential Guide to Usability in Web Design: Part 2

For newcomers to the blog, back in Part 1 I introduced the series and defined usability. In this post, I shall be offering some of the examples of how we improved usability within the admin panel of our content management system, River CMS.

But where do you start?

With our usability enhancement program for River CMS, the cycle is on-going with enhancements happening regularly. There is no start or end to improving the system. But obviously the ideas for the improvements have to come from somewhere. The River CMS usability improvements come from various sources, as shown below:

12th Aug
Posted by
Hayley Senior

How to Improve the Effectiveness of Your Website

How effective is your website? Moreover… What makes up an effective website? Where do you begin? These are all key questions you need to ask yourself to ensure your website is performing soundly.

Website effectiveness can be measured in a number of ways. How effective the website is once the user has arrived there is what I’ll be focussing on. So these tips obviously rely on traffic getting onto the site in the first place!

The Basics: What are website goals?

Every website must have well-defined goals. The number of times the goals are achieved constitutes the effectiveness of the site. A goal is what you want your user to ultimately do once they have arrived on your site. It will also be measurable so you can clearly see whether it has been achieved. Read more →

1st Mar
Posted by
Andy Faulkner

The Essential Guide to Usability in Web Design: Part 1

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Introduction

Over the coming months I aim to jot down my thinking on various aspects of usability in web design. While this may not be the most structured series I’ve ever written, I hope the ideas portrayed throughout the series will help others out there. Discussion, debate and questions are most welcome.

The opinions are my own and come from the 7 years of web design, SEO and accessibility experience I’ve had. Most of the subjects I’ll be bringing up come about from my recent (and ongoing) user experience work on River CMS, what I hope is now a very usable CMS. Some thoughts are core to my way of thinking when building websites. Read more →

24th Feb
Posted by
Andy Faulkner

River CMS Speed Project

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In conjunction with the ongoing user experience improvements of River CMS, Senior is also dedicated to increasing the speed that pages load both on the websites powered by River CMS and their admin panels.

Why?

Beyond the obvious reasons that website visitors will have an improved experience, there are other less evident reasons behind increasing page load speed.

22nd Feb
Posted by
Edward Smith

ASP.NET Quick Tip #2

Within programming there are many common idioms such as if statements that are used on a regular basis.

Visual Studio has an extensive list of predefined snippets to aid in quick development.

Intellisense will often pick up on these snippets presenting you with a dialog such as the following:

What many people don’t realise is that at this point you can double tap the ‘tab’ key and Visual Studio will automatically generate the syntax for the snippet. You can then keep pressing tab to cycle through the options for easy population. Read more →

17th Feb
Posted by
Andy Faulkner

A Way Of Thinking: PageRank Is An SEO By-Product

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PageRank (PR) is a word which will never disappear from the SEO/SEM arena. For some, it’s an obsession. For me, it’s one of the most pointless factors when considering an internet marketing campaign, mainly due to the following factors:

  • You can only see a change in PageRank on a site every few months. Why focus all of your marketing around something which you can only measure three or four times a year?
  • It’s a number (one to ten.) It seems ridiculous to put a lot of time and effort with the main aim of changing this number.
  • A higher PageRank does not equal a better site. Nor does it mean a higher ranking site.

I don’t like being negative and I’m not one to rant. Besides, the “PageRank is bad” argument has been done to death. It’s not bad, it’s simply not worth bothering about. This post has the aim of: (a) convincing the PageRank obsessed folks to change their outlook and (b) helping fellow designers/developers/internet marketers to explain to people that what they heard from their friend simply isn’t true. Take the advice or leave it. Read more →

8th Feb
Posted by
Edward Smith

ASP.NET Quick Tip #1

When coding in Visual Studio look out for the icon. It will often appear helping you to identify issues such as a missing namespace. If you see this icon appear you can press ‘Ctrl + .’ and it will bring up a helpful dialog with options to resolve the issue.

For Example:

In this situation pressing ‘Ctrl + .’ will bring up the option to include the ‘System.Text’ namespace or directly reference it preceding ‘StringBuilder’.

Hit the ‘Enter’ Key and it will take the first option in the list, automatically adding the namespace to your page.

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