I found this large collection of attribution free social media icon sets to be a very useful resource, with some great designs.
Archive for the 'Website Design' CategoryI recently enjoyed a post on SEOmoz about presenting web traffic stats in a more meaningful and useful way. I found this to be a great way to visualize how traffic to different sections of a site compares over time. I’d been wondering how the different sections of my Elements of Design site had been performing and so thought it would be useful to do the same analysis for it. Here’s the chart that resulted (covering the most popular sections of the site): Surprised to see that mystery meat navigation is still alive and kicking (on an otherwise very nicely designed site): 
Hull Digital Live website navigation menu Movie review aggregator website Metacritic underwent a complete redesign last week, much to the dismay of its regular users. Although the new site sports a more modern design (though it is arguable how attractive it is), the feedback overwhelmingly reports that the site is now harder to use. Here’s how the new site looks: 
The Glasgow Collective breadcrumb trail Breadcrumb trails can be a useful secondary navigation tool for large sites such as online stores. They facilitate easy navigation back up the hierarchy of a website as well as providing a location indicator for visitors who may have arrived directly at the page (via search or a referring link) without navigating to it. I thought it would be useful to look at some of the better and more visually interesting implementations of breadcrumb trail design. View the breadcrumb trail showcase. Further ReadingThis post from Performable on writing catchy headlines is a good read. In particular, the concept of these seven basic types of headlines is useful not only from the perspective of driving traffic but also as a basis for developing the content in the first place. Here’s the list in brief:
I, for one, should start mixing up my own headlines a little more. I think I rely on numbers one and two a little too much. I’ve been using Xenu’s link sleuth to do some website cleanup recently and wanted to make sure I was getting the most out of it. A little research resulted in several useful articles about how much more you can do with this tool than just check for broken links:
I really enjoyed browsing through this collection of design pattern libraries, gathered together by Erin Lynn Young. Despite my own interest in the subject, there were a lot of sites I hadn’t seen before. Search is an important component of any large website, especially an online retailer with thousands of products. However, when visiting different sites I’ve seen little consensus on how many characters should be viewable in a search box, even though being able to read what you’ve typed is key to search usability. I thought it would be interesting to review the search boxes of web retailers to see if there were any best practices that could be learned from them regarding search box size. Rather than pick sites at random, I took my list of online stores from Internet Retailer’s top 500 list and picked out the top 30. After all, for these sites search should be an even more critical component as it would be used so frequently. A recent article on Get Elastic — The 4 Pillars of Ecommerce Copywriting — got me thinking about the ’2nd pillar’ mentioned in the article, writing to persuade. How do different retailers approach writing persuasive copy for the a product that they all sell? Do they just use the manufacturer’s product description followed by a bulleted list of specs, or do they tailor the copy in any way? So I looked at how a number of online retailers wrote product overviews for Samsung’s LN55C650 55″ LCD television. Given the high pricepoint — around $1700 — I expected that the copy for this product would be pretty well crafted in order to draw the customer in and drive a buying decision. |
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