Thanks to Eric for posting this video on his Digital Design Diary site.

Mo Serious brings us a seriously cool video about website design, coding and SEO principles, all set to rap music. Who would have thought? I’m in love with this guy - he’s a genius.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has written a great post about batch processing his blogging-related tasks. Doing similar tasks in batches is a great time-saving (and sanity-saving) technique for most activities in life, not just blogging. Darren goes into detail about how he does it, and it’s well worth a read.

Read the whole article: How Batch Processing Made Me 10 Times More Productive

Read more . . .

When Google first created its beta (first draft) home page and set up a test to see how well it would work, there was a problem.

“[Our beta testers] would sit in front of the Google screen for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute…Google was perplexed.”

Interested in what the problem was and how easily it was fixed? Read the article:

What You Never Noticed About Google

Read more . . .

Visitors to your website don’t come just to look at your design and to figure out how to get all your fancy special effects to work. They come with questions they want answered. Your job is to make that information that they seek as easy to find as possible. Anything that stands in the way of your visitor finding out what they want to know quickly and simply makes your website a nightmare to use.

Smashing Magazine has a list of 10 Usability Nightmares you should be aware of with examples from real sites. There is also a list of 8 usability checkpoints:

1. Don’t use pop-ups.
2. Don’t change users’ window size.
3. Don’t use too-small font sizes.
4. Don’t have unclear link text.
5. Don’t have dead links.
6. Have at most one animation per page.
7. Make it easy to contact you.
8. Make links open in the same window.

Do you agree with the article? Do you know of any other usability nightmares that they missed?

10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of ~ Smashing Magazine

On a side note, comment #142 for this article was very amusing:

“I think that every designer should design for their grandma. If she can get around the site, only then can you pat yourself on the back. I have had customers that when I said click on the link, they actually picked up the mouse, put it on the screen and then clicked.”

Oh, dear.

Here’s a great ready-made To Do List of quick improvements you can make to your website. Definitely one to bookmark. I know I’ll be working through them. I may not agree with 100% of them, but most look pretty spot-on.

Here are a few items from the list:

• Keep background colors and images at a minimum. Backgrounds are often less than visually appealing and can make your site load slowly.
• Reduce choices. Avoid overwhelming your visitor with lots of different options.
• Stay consistent. Check to make sure that colors and design are in the same general scheme so that visitors know they’re still on your site.
• Validate design in alternative browsers. See how your design renders in browsers like Safari, Opera and Firefox to make sure that it looks right no matter who is viewing it.

101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Website

photo credit: booleansplit