Archive by Author
Supercharge Your Website Maintenance with Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Posted on 25. Jul, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
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I've been using Xenu's link sleuth to do some website cleanup recently and wanted to make sure I was getting the most out of it.
A little research resulted in several useful articles about how much more you can do with this tool than just check for br...
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Design Pattern Collections
Posted on 24. Jul, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
I really enjoyed browsing through this collection of design pattern libraries, gathered together by Erin Lynn Young. Despite my own interest in the subject, there were a lot of sites I hadn't seen before.Continue Reading
What’s the Best Search Box Size?
Posted on 21. Jul, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
Search is an important component of any large website, especially an online retailer with thousands of products. However, when visiting different sites I've seen little consensus on how many characters should be viewable in a search box, even though b...Continue Reading
Ecommerce Copywriting: 11 Product Descriptions Compared
Posted on 11. Jul, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
A recent article on Get Elastic — The 4 Pillars of Ecommerce Copywriting — got me thinking about the '2nd pillar' mentioned in the article, writing to persuade. How do different retailers approach writing persuasive copy for the a product ...Continue Reading
To Click or Not to Click
Posted on 08. Jul, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
It's common these days for news-oriented sites to practice 'link hoarding' whereby when referencing a topic, rather than linking out to external websites they link mainly to their own internal archive of content about that topic. Take this example art...Continue Reading
Interactive Media Awards Top 10 Websites of 2009
Posted on 03. Jul, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
I'm not a huge fan of web awards programs, largely because you typically have to pay to be considered and so the pool of contenders is somewhat self-selected. That being said, the IMA is a fairly well established awards program that attracts some good...Continue Reading
Aren’t Websites Supposed to Save Money?
Posted on 29. Jun, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
A $6M website A recent BBC news article writes that the British government spent £94M last year developing and running websites. This includes £4M spent on developing the UK Trade and Investment website alone — a site that averages ...Continue Reading
Are Your Error Messages Easily Understood?
Posted on 15. Jun, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
As I was finishing installing Microsoft Office on my home PC, I was presented with this alert: Microsoft Office installation alert message What does this even mean?! What are the consequences if I say yes? Web application error messages and alerts a...Continue Reading
Website Redesign: Big Bang, Gradual or Evolutionary Approach?
Posted on 10. Jun, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
I'd like to look at three approaches to redesigning a website: Big bang — move completely from an old to a new design in one go Gradual — implement the redesign by sections over time Evolutionary — avoid redesigning altogether and ...Continue Reading
JavaScript Physics Engine
Posted on 02. Jun, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
This is a pretty amazing example of what you can do with JavaScript these days. Click around the screen and don’t forget to try shaking your browser window. It works well in Firefox and is even faster in Chrome. You can learn more about this experim...Continue Reading
Recover Data from a Damaged Hard Drive Using a Live CD
Posted on 17. May, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
Last week my hard drive started looking like it might be on its last legs. The built-in diagnostic tool that comes with my HP computer was returning a "BIOHD-8" error, which suggested that my hard drive was not feeling too healthy.Unfortunately, the la...Continue Reading
How to Apologize for Service Issues
Posted on 02. May, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
I've been giving We Rule a try on my iPhone (username 'chwats'). Recently though, I've been having connection problems, with the game being slow to load and play, and sometimes unavailable. Yes, all online services have issues sometimes, but this was g...Continue Reading
UK Election Special, Part 1: Labour Party Website
Posted on 27. Apr, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
In case you didn't know, Britain will be electing its next government on May 6. In keeping with the spirit of the election, I am taking a look at the websites of the three main parties, starting with the incumbent, the Labour Party.Labour Party home pa...Continue Reading
$150 Discount on “Voices That Matter” Web Design Conference
Posted on 21. Apr, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
If you're in the San Francisco area at the end of June you may want to check this out. New Riders' Voices That Matter web design conference takes place June 28-29. It features such web luminaries as Jesse James Garrett, Dan Cederholm, Tantek Çe...Continue Reading
Your Home Page is NOT Your Website
Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
Gerry McGovern's recent post on the decline of the home page reminded me of a similar post I wrote last year. However, while I wholeheartedly agree with the overall point he is making, the issue is not that…too many marketers and communicators ...Continue Reading
New Website Launched: Bike and the Like
Posted on 09. Apr, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
I don't do much freelance work any more. Mainly because work + family + gaming habit + blog doesn't leave time for too much else. However, I do have a couple of clients and I recently redesigned the website for one of them — Bike and the Like.Bik...Continue Reading
A ‘More Natural’ Login Button Placement?
Posted on 27. Mar, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
I like the way that My Starbucks Idea login button has been incorporated into the instructional text that goes with it. My Starbucks Idea login button Placing the button within the text makes it fit more naturally with the wording and I like the econ...Continue Reading
Netflix Movie Page Redesign Causes Community Outrage
Posted on 15. Mar, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
Netflix recently overhauled their movie details pages, ostensibly (according to the official blog post) to pull important information to the top of the page, better support episodic content like TV shows, and to make it easier to find similar content. ...Continue Reading
Components of a Great Website Footer
Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
Footer design has come a long way in the last few years, as can be seen in the many footer design showcases on various web design-related blogs. Creativity and aesthetics aside, what are the elements that make up a great footer design?Site Map Many we...Continue Reading
Instant Placeholder Image Generator
Posted on 14. Feb, 2010 by Smiley Cat: Christian Watson's Web Design Blog.
The Dummy Image Generator makes it a snap to create placeholder images for use in a design or even to include when you're building out HTML code but don't have final assets. For example, to create the image above you'd just use the following code: ...Continue Reading
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