As I mentioned yesterday usability experts like Jakob Nielsen have been advising against Click here as a link title for years.  But the problem is still very much with us.  In this article from Smashing Magazine, we bring the problem right up to date.  Packed with great examples this really is a great article. Read on... Are you still using "Click Here" for a link?.…

So I’ve talked a lot about tone of voice a few times, but I really like this article from Smashing Mag.  Giving examples from various sites they show how tone of voice can really help to give a unique feeling when you read a site. Here’s two examples, first Starbucks: “To say that Starbucks purchases and roasts high-quality whole bean coffee is very true. That’s the essence of what we do — but it hardly tells the whole story. Our coffeehouses have become a beacon for coffee lovers everywhere. Why do they insist on Starbucks? Because they know they…

The real advantage of a good blog is that it can humanise your company.  Many good business blogs are light hearted, more irreverent - yet still managing to deliver a information which is on message.  This article discusses finding your blogging voice, and uses examples from the MailChimp blog. Read on... Finding your voice.…

I’ve mentioned some of the trends from 2012 that are set to grow in 2013, in a recent few posts.  Well infinite scroll certainly went mainstream in 2012, with Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest all using it.   Personally, few things drive me more more crazy than the infinite scrolling on Facebook which stops me from reaching the footer navigation which has links you can’t access elsewhere.  But beyond that there is some evidence that users access more content through infinite scrolling interfaces than where traditional pagination is used. This article from Econsultancy gives a good short overview the pros and cons.…

We’ve talked quite a bit about Responsive Design recently on this blog, mainly because we love it so much for our Simple Sites projects.  This article by Ethan Marcotte is where it all began.  Inspired by the emergent discipline of Responsive Architecture, Marcotte’s concepts were based on a collection of CSS3 technologies that were only just beginning to see widespread browser support back when the article was written in 2010.  But almost three years later these technologies now enjoy much greater support, making Responsive Design a practical technology. Now, as I say we very much enjoying the current trend…

You’ve been playing around with responsive design for a while, but what to do about those pesky tables?  They don’t render well on small devices do they?  Well the good folks at Zurb have put some thought into that, and have come up with a solution to responsive tables.  With fixed and scrolling columns just like Excel this, you just need to include a JS and CSS file and then attached a .responsive class to your tables.  This is pretty easy to setup in Umbraco, as it only uses a class on the Table. We use Foundation from Zurb on…