Make your comments on blogs and community websites more personal with your Globally Recognized Avatar: GRAVATAR. Many sites enable gravatars, which means yours will automatically appear next to your comment when you use the email address to which it’s attached. You will rarely have to even think about it. When you want to change it,
While I’m highly skeptical that Microsoft will play a key role in bringing them into existence (they haven’t really been about innovation for more than a decade), this 5-minute video shows some intriguing possibilities for making digital information part of our everyday lives. Some of it is science fiction at this point, but a lot
This short video is a wonderful parody about how the design process too often works; or doesn’t work. It demonstrates what happens when design is not valued or recognized as a means of clearly communicating the central or primary message. If you’ve been a designer for any length of time, you’ve found yourself in a
Giving away stuff on your website is a really smart thing to do. It’s an opportunity to spread your ideas or information about your products and services, sometimes in exchange for a little bit of information that could be helpful in your marketing. It’s a very simple process, but companies screw it up all the
There are few things more difficult than setting aside your own knowledge and assumptions to look at things from someone else’s perspective. (If that were not the case, political "discussion" would be far more productive…but I digress.) It’s critical to the success of a website that it serve the needs of its audiences, but too
Splash pages represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the online medium. Often, they come from a print perspective ("books should have a cover"), or sometimes from a broadcast perspective ("a show should have an intro"). In user surveys, splash pages consistently rank as one of the most annoying things on the internet, but there are still
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
