Beth Dillon at our sister blog Notes on Game Dev wrote a very personal post yesterday about her frustration with the subtly chauvinist attitudes in the game industry and issued a call for other women in her business to share their experiences. Beth recounted how, again and again, she would hear the same line from by recruiters at industry...
Findability and Search Engine Optimization have been on my mind lately (and on everyone else’s I suppose). Some SEO experts seem to look at the whole thing as a game that you win by getting your page ranked number one on a search result with particular keywords. I do appreciate that search engine ranking is a concrete result (for...
Well, really I mean when users’ needs conflict. How do you design a site that meets the needs of two different groups of users? Mostly I run into this with the sites I create for non-profit organizations. Who are the two groups of users? One group is the people that the organization helps. These are the ones I think...
Look out, Fashion Week and Restaurant Week, there’s a new week on the block! This summer, the City of New York will celebrate its thriving internet community by introducing the week-long festival New York Internet Week from June 3 – 10. The event is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in cooperation with the The...
I recently switched web hosts for a client. I hate switching hosts, but it seems like a lot of hosts that start out great (good price, good customer service) hit a certain size and then go down hill rapidly. I’ve had that experience with Frogee and now with Midphase. So, I looked at the site, checked what email addresses...
No doubt you already know the value of tracking your site’s traffic. You know to look at visit totals. You know to look at what sites your visitors are coming from. You know never to rely on the number of hits. But there can be even more interesting information found in common site statistics that you can use to...
Introduction This is the second in a series of articles I’m writing to cover a number of quick, easy usability tests that designers can do in very little time and at low or no cost. The first article covered testing button label clarity and effectiveness. This article addresses a test for something more ephemeral—branding and ethos. Test #2 –...
I know I’ve posted about it once, maybe even twice, but table-based web designers (myself included)… your days are numbered. I’m always surprised when I see so many web designers using tables for layout, but I can understand it. Most designers started with tables, and while tabled layouts are so inflexible, they’re quick and easy to create. Making the...
Earlier this week, I began my final installment of this series about Google’s Webmaster Tools with a discussion of the robot.txt file, geographic targeting and the enhanced image search capability. Today, we’ll delve even deeper into the Tools Section. I’ll talk about site verification, crawl rates and preferred domains, and I’ll also tell you how to remove URLs from...
We’re finally nearing the end of our series about Google’s Webmaster Tools. We’ve covered almost every aspect of the service, everything from diagnostics to statistics, links to sitemaps. All that’s left to examine are a few handy functions buried within the Tools Section. We’ll discuss a few of theses items today, and the rest in a post later this...
