Web Design Blog

Sure, we all have faults, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them. Like Jim Wideman likes to say, “I never make the same mistake twice, there’s enough different ones I can make every time!”

Sometimes, it takes awhile for a mistake to become a mistake. When the internet was still in it’s infancy, not a lot of people had an email address. The phone book was still pretty popular, and usually, the easiest way to get more information on a particular company was to call them. As a result, there weren’t a lot of contact forms on websites. A simple mailto: link would suffice. As another supporting factor, not too long after email got popular, so did spam. Junk emails flooded our inboxes to the extent that we quit seeing email as a huge step forward in communication and began to see it as a necessary evil.

Thankfully, that’s changed. New steps taken by Google and others in their email services have put spam in it’s place for the most part and made it fun to have email again.

And still, the mailto: link hangs on. It’s everywhere.
Why? It’s outdated and inefficient. When you click on the “contact us” link of some site that is coded with a mailto: link it will open up that user’s local email. Or at least, it will try to. For those of you like me–who keep their email on the internet–it may not respond at all or may even freeze up your browser.

Now you, the business-owner who owns that domain name–what sort of impression do you think you just made on that potential client/customer?

Many of you might think this is just a rant against substandard code and my personal experience on certain websites, but underneath it all lies the single principle that we all need to remember.

Harvey MacKay had an interesting way of showing ties at the mens suit store he worked at: He picked the three that would look the best with that suit and let the customer pick from the three.

Keep it simple, folks. Make every decision as easy as possible for them and their decision to hire or buy from you will be just as easy.

Removing the confirmation password from signup forms has become a growing trend. Two recent examples I noticed include Twitter (follow me) and Raven SEO Tools. This is an awful move for usability. I’ve mistyped my password and confirmation password enough times to realize that I’m not a perfect typer. Nothing is more annoying than going through a forgot my password request, especially when a simple form confirmation would prevent this from happening.

Am I crazy? Why is this trend spreading?

Just when I thought I had seen all possible tools for web development and design, another one smacks me upside the head. Taskee is a free hosted solution (for now) that actually allows teams and clients to make comments on the web project directly from the web page. It’s built to allow you to log into a small iframe that shows information comments and tasks assigned based on page url.  It helps in four distinct ways: (Read more…)

Even you. (Read more…)