Found a very funny song about web design while looking for good articles today. Perhaps it will give you a laugh too, since I found it so sadly familiar. Click here for 'Make the Logo Bigger' (warning, it autoplays).
Matt Gifford, (aka ColdFuMonkeh) twittered an article that has lead me to a startling conclusion: Ruby on Rails is a dead language! Read more to find out why.
So, is it bad that I've become so interested in analytics that when I first saw this graphic from an article on Web Design Tuts about form design, I immediately wanted to know what caused the dip on the left and the spike near the middle? I blame Click! for making me want to know what caused these simultaneous dips and spikes in interest.
I just counted over 20 social links off of a single site. My apocalyptic forecast for next year: the social bubble will pop.
Me on Twitter – December 30, 2008
How much social networking is too much social networking? I've been wondering about this for a few months now, as I look at trying to identify which, if any, social links I should have on my site. Are the standard BlogCFC array of Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati enough? Are they too many? Are they the right ones for my blog?
I'm beginning to think that there are just too many social sites; everyone knows the "social" buzzword now, so these kind of services are a dime a dozen. Are there too many? If not, which ones should you join? This article on mashable.com says you can be in four, but I'm only on three (linkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter), and I don't even check all of those in a month (and the mashable.com interviewee doesn't check her four either).
In the end, I think that dedicated social networking and social referral sites are going to need to consolidate and thin out in order to make themselves more useful. Social elements like reviews and ratings on sites are here to stay, but how many social book marking sites can the web really sustain?
I just saw this cool article on the User Interface Engineering website, called The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch. This article calls out the "big relaunch" as being a potential pain point with users, and I have to agree whole heartedly. It doesn't really mention it in the article, but I think incremental role out of new features can also help to make realistic expectations for the results of updates. Its hard to get over hyped about updates to a single navigation menu. It also doesn't say that this is the perfect way to find out what changes are increasing your conversion rate; implementing one change at a time over a period of weeks lets you know which change is having an impact, and how.
I've been working on tons of little projects the last couple of weeks, but unfortunately, they have all been generated by Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday and Sandra Neihaus. This book is awesome. Its got me looking at all kinds of sites and thinking, "How can I maximize conversion on this?"
If you do anything remotely like front or user interface design, this book is for you.
I'm Jon Hartmann and I'm a Javascript fanatic, UX/UI evangelist and former ColdFusion master. I blog about mysterious error messages, user interface design questions, and all things baffling and irksome about programming for the web.