Information Architecture (IA) refers to the organization and presentation of information on your website. Sounds simple enough, but many website owners and designers give it very little (if any) thought. Fundamental to the IA process is thinking through what information your visitors might come to your website to find, and providing obvious pathways designed to
Maybe you saw another company’s website and decided you wanted one just like it. Same bells, same whistles, same cheesy photo of two disembodied hands sealing the deal on the homepage. So you reworked your content to fit into a container that was created for another company’s web presence. Or maybe your company has only
Ah, the good old days, when the web was a simpler place: you could just take your company brochure and put it online. Often, the only interactive feature was an email link. It was all about companies putting their message out to their market, which was presumed to be unable to contain itself waiting to
You’ve seen them: surprisingly bad websites representing good companies or organizations. Websites with Flash intro screens, incomprehensible menus, bad links, and no discernible message. Websites that drop you off unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere with no clear indication how to get back without hitting your browser’s back button. Websites with so little traffic that
A certain amount of confusion exists about designing for different screen resolutions. Many web designers assume that 800×600 resolution gives them 800 pixels in screen width, and 600 pixels of depth that can be considered "above-the-fold." However, this is far from the case. All browser windows have scrollbars and toolbars that must be accounted for,
One of the blogs I follow recently recommended an online translation application. For some reason, I was not able to submit a comment on the post, so I’ll air my comment here. The service suggested was Nice Translator. My wife, Angela, is a professional translator, which gives me some insight into translation issues. First, most
The following table appears in the book Stories that Sell that a friend of ours (Casey Hibbard, success-story guru) is about to publish. The result of surveys by the University of Massachusetts in 1997 and Bridge Ratings in 2007, it illustrates a shift in how people value information from various sources when considering what products
