Dave Shea, creator or CSS Zen Garden, has redesigned his personal website, mezzoblue.
Archive for 2006
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Accessible HTML Form Design Tip: Checkboxes/Radio buttons
Quickly make your check boxes and radio buttons more accessible and usable by adding a label and an id.
visitmanchester.com – great idea, poor website
I live in Manchester, and I absolutely love it. I think it’s so great that loads of people should come and visit to see the city’s sights. So why does Manchester’s new tourism website visitmanchester.com not impress me in the slightest?
Ecommerce Conversion Tip: Remove distractions from the checkout process
A tip often mentioned for improving checkout drop-off rates is to remove distractions from the checkout process.
Certain figures get bandied about for checkout drop-off rates from 60-90%. Every ecommerce site’s products and therefore, customers are different and so are their checkout processes, so it’s difficult to state what is the average complete rate for an online checkout. The best solution is to monitor what drop-off rate and then try to improve it.
YouTube is brilliant
I can easily imagine myself becoming addicted to YouTube, quitting my job and spending the rest of my life watching fake amateur video blogs or kids robot dancing.
In fact I’ve just spent that last 5 minutes watching a guy who took a picture of himself everyday for the past 6 years then spliced it all up together – it’s hypnotic.
Getting people to click the ‘Zoom Image’ link
This week I embarked on an experiment to try and see if I could improve the number of people clicking on the ‘Zoom Image’ link that features underneath all product images on the product details page on the JJB Sports website.
The Zoom link is a very common feature on ecommerce sites therefore, you’d expect it to be highly used by the general public. I monitor everything on site with Google Analytics and I can tell you that less than 0.5% of people on the JJB site either click the zoom image text link below the image or the click the actual image.
Proof that little design changes can make a big difference to conversion
A month ago I wrote that little design changes can make a big difference to conversion and now here’s the conclusive proof.
John Lewis – great fluid design pity about the tables
This week I discovered the John Lewis website and I must say it has mightily impressed me. The only thing that troubles me is the HTML/Javascript code lying beneath.
Admittedly, isn’t as awful as some (we’ve all seen worse) it isn’t as forward thinking as the website would suggest. A quick View Source reveals the culprit… Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 7.0
Why I drive 35 miles every day to make websites
Whenever I tell somebody in Manchester that I work in Wigan, they can’t fathom it. They think it’s such a long way to go to work everyday (despite the fact that many people make the reverse trip).
For me, the task of designing websites and building them is really enjoyable so being given the opportunity to do exactly that for a big company is a no-brainer.
The other reason, is that I wanted to prove to the world that designing websites in the correct manner: accessible, usable, conforming to web standards was the way forward and that by designing sites this way the company behind the sites wouldn’t lose any sales.
G24 – a new era in newspaper publications
This week saw the launch of G24 – a PDF version of the Guardian that is updated throughout the day.
Here is the blurb:
G24 brings you the latest stories from the Guardian, Guardian Unlimited and the Observer – updated throughout the day. There are five pdfs to choose from: Top stories, World, Media, Business and Sport.
Read the rest of this entry »
Little design changes can make a big difference to conversion
In his article Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Re-align Cameron Moll talked about not redesigning a site completely and certainly not just for aesthetically reasons but mroe a redesign (or realignment) should be done purely for the purpose of improving the goals of a website.
Really small, some might say insignificant design changes can have large effects on your conversion rates, for instance at work last week, at the request of a colleague, I moved the add to basket form from below the product description – which for most people was below the 1024*768 page-fold – and low and behold the percentage of people adding items to their basket increased dramatically.
A small change plus another small change and another and so on and so on add up to a big change but without the disadvantage of alienating your customers who have to get used to your old design. By slightly changing certain aspects of you site you can upgrade your customer’s experience hopefully without them noticing anything has changed.
Understanding CSS floats
In my designs, I tend to use floats, as opposed to relative/absolute positioning, as I find it gives a design more power and a greater ability to scale vertically.
When I first approached CSS I couldn’t for the life of me understand how floats worked. My main struggle was trying to comprehend why floating something to the left or right led to so many other items being disrupted and not being cleared.
UK Football websites deconstructed
For the most part football (Americans, read soccer) websites are some of the worst I’ve seen from professional organisations.
The obvious reason for their appalling nature is that the people in charge have little knowledge of what makes a good information-based website. Certainly the web design agencies they hire seem to have no clue whatsoever.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how can it be achieved
The concept of good SEO is for your website to appear well in the natural rankings of Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc as opposed to the paid for listings (which cost money and don’t perform as well).
Ecommerce Mistakes: Having a separate online store & an instore website
Having a website that is little more than a splash page which offers visitors a choice of an online store or an instore-offers-website is a colossal mistake in web design.
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