Make Your Website Better

 
The New Yorker is written at 5th-grade level. The New York Times at a 6th-grade level. The Economist at an 8th-grade level. They all have lots of subscribers, and I’ve never heard anyone say they feel “talked down to.” I read The New Yorker and the Times regularly, and their articles are well-written, engaging and often [...]

Most visitors who arrive at your site from a Google search land on a page within your site, rather than on your home page. That’s one good reason to make sure you include breadcrumb navigation on your site. You’ll see it on many websites, in the upper left corner beneath the navigation menu. It shows [...]

I’m revisiting William Zinsser’s  classic, On Writing Well, in preparation for a writing workshop I’m teaching in a couple of weeks. I’m enjoying re-reading a book that taught me a lot early in my career. Here are a few tidbits:
“Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual–it catches the eye befor it has a chance to capture the brain. Short paragraphs put [...]

Like most Americans, I’m horrified and sickened by the disaster in the Gulf (which is not, as some seem to think, a “natural” disaster). And I’m enraged by BP’s response.
BP CEO Tony Hayward’s performance this week in front of Congress provided further proof of BP’s sociopathic inability to empathize with the incalculable destruction the company [...]

Last month I received an email from someone pointing out many mistakes on my own web site. A couple of these were really bad mistakes. I have a section describing classes I’m offering at PVCC, our community college. I gave the same description for two entirely different classes, and got the date wrong on one [...]

In her all-day day session at EDUI2009, “Usability Testing Without the Scary,” Dana Chisnell laid out the entire process for usability testing. Breaking the process down into small parts that are easy to understand, Dana showed us how to be comfortable with the process, rather than intimidated. Here’s what she shared about creation of the [...]

The University of Virginia hosted an outstanding usability-focused conference yesterday and today, EDUI 2009. The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia, in partnership with User Interface Engineering, produced the conference, featuring a star-studded roster of presenters (forgive the hyperbole, but this conference was an amazing value for the cost of attendance). Today [...]

Silicon Alley Insider published an important article warning about the perils of using the URL shorteners that are so common for Twitter and Facebook posts. Author Dan Frommer says they should not become a critical part of your comapny’s infrastructure because the short URL services “are fun by small, modetly funded startups that could easily shut [...]

Mashable.com points to an updated presentation that provides plenty of solid evidence on the effectiveness of social media: What The F**k is Social Media: One Year Later. It’s a nice little slide presentation with pithy data on social media and engaging visuals. It gives six good reasons why you should care about social media:

3 out [...]

Yesterday I met with the web team at the University of Virginia College of Arts & Sciences to review results of user testing we conducted to learn more about the usability of a design template for academic departments. We conducted the test at the end of April, timed to take place before students began studying [...]