An Information Architecture, Web Design and Games Blog
The new Visit Suffolk website has been put live yesterday afternoon!
The website features some stunning imagery and inspiring text, coupled with good copy-writing. The site was designed by Jack Saunders and built by Tom Boyd on NVG’s modular CMS Pro, and features a wealth of cool features to provide visitors with a fantastic experience even before visiting this destination.
Click here to visit the new Visit Suffolk website.
Good times! 🙂
We have just launched Visit Newbury!
The website was designed by myself and built by Severine Perherin and me, and features a lot of new content and is based on New Vision Group‘s new modular CMS Pro and features a host of new options and modules to maintain and update the site, from dynamic tabbers, accordions, content-managed slideshows, live availability information and more.
The site also has some lovely imagery, so it is definelty worth having a look!
Click here to visit VisitNewbury.org.uk
Good times 🙂
Over the last week or so, the discussion “should we continue to support IE6” has been gaining more and more momentum. Digg, Mashable, Techcrunch and other websites ran features about why IE6 should be given the boot, websites like facebook and youtube are starting to phase out the browser, hinting users to upgrade their browser.
This sparked a long and heated debate in a number of web design agencies and clients I am working with (or have worked with / for), whether it would be worth just dropping the support for Internet Explorer 6 and ask users to upgrade their browsers so that they can enjoy the website to the fullest.
Coming from a usability, accessibility, SEO and web dev background, I thought it might be a good idea writing why I would recommend supporting (or not supporting) IE6 in the industry I am working for.
With more and more consumers spending time on the web looking for online bargains (let’s be honest, if I see a game for £27.99 online but £34.99 in shops then I wouldn’t be thinking twice either) instead of shops, companies must ask themselves if their website is not only showing the right prices, but is also usable enough to order items from.
In 2005 there was a huge wave of online shops reworking their ordering processes to make them more usable and accessible to people, which was a sounding success for many companies. These days however more offline stores are trying to expand to the web and are asking for advice. Here are ten ways to improve the usability of your e-commerce site to maximise your conversion rate and help convert ‘browsing your wares’ into ‘placing an order’:
Usability is a serious concern for many websites – what does the customer want when he arrives on your website? Does the user know where to go, what to do and how to ask questions or enquire / purchase?
Knowing the usability heuristics is already a very good start, but how can you make sure your website can be enjoyed by as many people as possible without causing headaches or frustration?
I bumped into a former student of mine this evening – pleasant surprise. We had a quick chat about work and life, and he asked me if there was a quick way to explain the Usability Heuristics to someone in his company that would not involve a lot of reference material.
“Heuristic evaluation” means identifying usability problems with your website by checking the website (layout, design, outer template, content) against 10 so-called best-practice guidelines published by Jakob Nielsen. Even after reading these “10 commandments of usability” you may end up a little confused as to what they mean and how to relate to them in the real (web) world. So let’s have a look at them…
Those of you following me on twitter know I tend to spend a bit of time every couple of days in finding new extensions for FireFox (and sometimes Thunderbird) which are making my life as an Information Architect, Web Designer or Project Development Manager easier. These extensions may be some all of us have been using for ages but never really realised we had them installed, or some we really wanted to see or use for some time, but never really spent the time researching whether these extensions are actually available. This is the list of February…
My day to day work consists of a lot of time spending on the internet, looking at web presences of current clients, prospective clients and their (and our) competition. My tool of the trade being FireFox 3 (especially considering that IE seems to have a little problem). I am using a number of addons which really help my work-flow in the fields of usability, accessibility, SEO and occasionally information architecture.
I was asked by a couple of fellow twitter users to divulge my plugin list, and since I keep track of them myself at times I thought this post would come in handy for everyone.