Archive for September, 2009
Website Navigation Then and Now
Posted on 30. Sep, 2009 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
I recently came across a collection of website navigation bars from a few years ago. I couldn’t help but wonder how those navbars looked today, and how the impact of site growth, redesigns, branding updates, etc. have affected them.
Here’s a comparison of the old versus the new (click on an image to view a larger version).
Old Navy
Old Navy: then
Old Navy: now
Shopping.com
Shopping.com: then
Shopping.com: now
Adobe
Adobe: then
Adobe: now
Weather Channel
Weather Channel: then
Weather Channel: now
REI
REI: then
REI: now
Amazon
Amazon: then
Amazon: now
Apple
Apple: then
Apple: now
Google: then
Google: now
Netflix
Netflix: then
Netflix: now
Expedia
Expedia: then
Expedia: now
Walmart
Walmart: then
Walmart: now
Pogo
Pogo: then
Pogo: now
All Recipes
All Recipes: then
All Recipes: now
Bank of America
Bank of America: then
Bank of America: now (it hasn’t changed!)
Buy.com
Buy.com: then
Buy.com: now
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Does Your AdWords Suck – What can we do for you?
Posted on 28. Sep, 2009 by Dave Collado.
When it comes to traffic there are basically two ways to get targeted and interested buyers to go to your site. That is organic (search engines or writing articles), and yes like anything else with organic in the title this does require more time and rarely ever does it come with a guarantee, then there’s the alternative, which of course is pay per clicks (Google adWords and the like). And that is what I want to talk to you about – because once they realize that all you have to do to get an audience is to pay Google to get you traffic many make the huge mistake of thinking that just by creating an AdWords campaign their phone should start ringing off the hook. And that is never the case.
Well, the secret is not actually getting people to come to website it is in what you plan for them when they get there – so now I’m going to show you by example two of the biggest mistakes people make by not having the right landing page…
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My drawing for the Travelling Moleskines
Posted on 15. Sep, 2009 by veerle@duoh.com.
A while ago I received an invitation from Jon Hicks to join a project called the Travelling Moleskines. It immediately triggered my interest to accept the invite as I love to sketch…
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Make A Custom Craigslist Ad And Auto Post & Repost Ads on CL
Posted on 15. Sep, 2009 by Dave Collado.
In the past you heard me mention our custom craigslist ad design service – basically with a custom craiglist ad we can change the look of your simple text ad into a flashy piece of advertisement using graphics.
Also what a custom craingslist ad can do for you is make your services stand out more and look more professional – people go from looking at the plain-text ads of your competitors to looking at a custom graphically rich advertisement and that makes a huge difference in getting you more responses.
Now I know after we design your ad you still have to post it on craigslist and not only post it but keep it posted and repost every so often so that the ad does not get stale and stays on top and I know that’s a pain in the ass. So today I’m writing to tell you about this new service I just found out about called CraigslistPoster.com…
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Redesigning the Mint.com Bugeting Screen
Posted on 12. Sep, 2009 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
Not too long ago, Mint, a popular online service for managing your finances, redesigned a great feature which enables you to set a monthly budget and track your progress against it.
My wife, who is the main Mint user in our household has been struggling with it ever since.
One of the main issues is that the redesign of the budgeting page (for some reason they call it ‘Planning’ which makes no sense to me) is now much longer. Consequently, it now requires much more scrolling up and down the page in order to get an complete picture of your current budget status.
A comment in the support forums echoes this view:
The budget section is nice but takes up too much space – make this smaller so that it is more usable and concise – the old view was much better.
Sample from the Mint budgeting page: before
However, with a few CSS tweaks, I was able to reduce the length of our budget screen by 20%. In the example below, you can see that 6 budget items are now visible in the same space that could previously only fit 5.
Sample from the Mint budgeting page: after
I also took the opportunity to make some of the very light gray text darker in order to make it easier to read. Mint is a great tool for managing your finances, but I do feel that they have a way to go on its usability in certain areas.
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Which is Better Magento or osCommerce?
Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by Dave Collado.
As a freelance developer I must say that since they released Magento last year I’ve been really dreading the idea of making the switch over from osCommerce. I just thought osCommerce has been around a while and, as such, there is a very well established community whom are fairly responsive to any unfathomable problems you may have, should you post within their forums.
Plus there is a ton of “contribution” or “modules” to be found on the OS site. Need a CMS on your site? It’s there. Need to make and dispatch money off coupons? Sorted. Want the increasingly popular lightbox effect on your images? All doable.
Beside everything comes with clear instructions and, on the whole, are regularly updated with bug fixes so if you get one that’s a few months old, chances are it’ll work just fine.
However, what finally caught my attention about Magento was not all those great features, like coupons, specials, multiple checkout and shipping options, with all those option things start to get a little too complex, actually the one thing that really peaked my interest is that I learned that templatemonster was getting in on that action – so today it is my pleasure to announce and present you our new Magento themes!!!
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Rotating Text with CSS
Posted on 10. Sep, 2009 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
If you look up you’ll notice I made a small update to the way dates are presented in my headings. It’s not a big change, but I wanted to include the year without increasing the height of the date stamp.
Rotating text to the rescue! Following Jonathan Snook’s article it was easy to implement the few lines of CSS necessary to make this adjustment.
Getting it to look right in IE7 and IE8 was a different matter. In the end I used the *:first-child+html hack for IE7 and the \9 hack for IE 8.
I realize that I should replace these hacks with conditional comments (should I?), but for now they’ll suffice. Also, with a little more research it looks like this IE7/8 hack would have been more elegant.
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EECI2009, the first ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference
Posted on 07. Sep, 2009 by veerle@duoh.com.
In October I’ll be traveling to Leiden, The Netherlands. Never been there but apparently the city is famous for its almshouses, university, museums and glorious history – and the spirit of the Golden Age lives on here. This is a place where Rembrandt was born and inspired so many other influential painters. Read on for free tickets and a special Veerle’s blog reader discount.
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Another Satisfied Template Customization Client
Posted on 04. Sep, 2009 by Dave Collado.
While we may not run a huge operation like some of these other guys ( our main focus is fast and easy template customizations) once we finish a project our clients are typically very happy. Bernard Castro (MERCHANT LOGISTICS, LLC) signed up for our template customizations and we got this unsolicited letter from him today.
This letter comes to your organization to express my gratitude for the experience I had when designing my webpage with you. Thank you for making the entire process hassle free and convenient. I never had reason for concern or worry as to whether the website would meet my expectations, whatever I requested, your organization accomplished! You were very patient and professional; giving guidance and advice on how to best customize our website to make it effective, to be able to attract customers, and all the while using the content I formulated to describe what my company does. I was never made to feel as though I was a bother with countless requests and you were always happy to assist in any way possible…
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Lawn Care Business Marketing – 3 Ways to Fight Customer Attrition
Posted on 03. Sep, 2009 by Chestin Salisbury - EzineArticles Expert Author.
One of the BIGGEST challenges of growing any successful lawn care or landscaping business is making sure your customers stay with you month after month and hopefully year after year. Because it’s at least 5-10 times more expensive to land a brand new customer, you really should do everything within your power to keep those customers you already have. Here are 3 quick ideas you can quickly implement to help you fight customer attrition and hold onto them for longer, allowing you to make more money from each customer and grow your lawn care business faster.