Pixel Thread

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

“User experience is the most important aspect of having a compelling mobile product.”

Full details on Aza Raskin’s blog here

An article I’ve written on designing websites to work effectively at 1024×768 screen resolution is published in this month’s .Net magazine and on bbctraining.com (which also includes sample template files to download): Designing sites for 1024×768

Ben Newman’s a talented illustrator with a unique and distinct style. I came across his work in a small gallery in Clifton, then got in touch. I suggested he design a header for Ian Parkinson - parkinsonmedia and he’s going to design a logo for this blog soon : )

Illustration can be a really valuable element of web design. More organic, less digital.

I’ve just signed up for FOWD in London April 17-18. I’m sure I’m not quite cool enough for it, but the speaker list reads like a who’s who of high profile webbers, so it should be an interesting couple of days. I’d love to go out to South by Southwest in Texas next year, so far I haven’t been able to justify the cost (and probably won’t be able to next year either!).

I don’t think we’ll actually be discussing the future of web design, probably more about current web design. Nic says the web’s going to be your desktop within a few years - he’s probably right, it’s already happening. Google Docs has become my most used software after Photoshop and Firefox, and despite a few flaws, Basecamp’s become essential for bigger projects.

Anyway I’m looking forward to “interacting with innovators and thought leaders from across the design community” as FOWD put it on their pitch! See you there?

The importance of images in product description pages has been well documented.

A high quality pic can turn a browser into a customer. As broadband’s become the norm in the western world, online shops have been getting more adventurous with their use of images.

Combined some well written code, product pages are now giving the user the facility to closely inspect an item before buying. Great from the customer and the shop perspective.

Magneto product page has a nice image zoomer and Habitat’s product page has a very tidy mouseover inspection. Probably soon to become the norm across the web. In contrast, the mouseover action on the category home pages of Habitat leave me reeling! (Fail harder?)

The bigger online stores are lagging a bit behind in this respect. The ebay interface is still pretty clunky, Amazon’s product page is hugely cluttered.

I’ve been watching the development of Magento over the past year or so, and so far it ticks all the right boxes.
But the feature that clinches the deal for me is the one page checkout: instead of taking the user through a sequence of pages until they finally reach order confirmation, Magento does it all in one place, through the use of expandable / collapsible page sections. Neat.

Magento

Last week my post about designing for 1024 x 768 was added to stumbleupon.com. It had a huge effect on the traffic, on the best day, the blog had 4,384 readers - pretty incredible. Up to that point the number of people reading the blog a day was under 20.

I’m still working out how I want to use the blog. So I though I’d try publishing less often but meatier posts. The post about designing for 1024 x 768 was my first attempt at this tactic, needless to say I’m pretty pleased with the results.

But it’s not all roses, I think the visits from stumbledupon were pretty low value - there were few comments and few people clicked through to other pages.

In terms of clicks to other content, this could be partly my current WordPress template doesn’t list other links in the right column if a user views a specific article, or it could be because previous posts haven’t been interesting enough!

When I realised the traffic was going through the roof, I quickly set up a page I’d had in mind for a while with affiliate links to some of the best web design books on Amazon. Adrenaline pumping, I had visions of chalets in the Alps, holidays in the Caribbean… well maybe not quite, but I did think I might be able to pay for a few Christmas pressies with the Amazon commission. Sadly not, clicks: 20 sales: 0.

Although I thought I’d be crazy not to try and make some cash from the traffic, fortunately I didn’t write the post to make money from affiliate links, and this blog is very uncommercial.

It’s been a good reminder that I need to sort out my template asap. I’ve been meaning to do since I set up the blog, but always end up working on other things. For some reason I let this site slip down my priority list, when really it deserves more of my time.

It’s also been a good reminder of the power of social media for driving traffic to a site. Although I haven’t yet noticed a huge improvement in Bang Your Drum’s Google ranking.

Anyay, as far as I’m concerned the key to getting ’stumbled upon’ or to being ‘dug’ is simply to put effort into producing content that is useful and relevant. Content is king?

This little orange rectangle with the curved radio wave lines has become ubiquitous on the web. A quick google doesn’t reveal much other than the fact that it was used by Mozilla and adopted by Microsoft in 2005 .

The symbol has made the transition from design concept to becoming part of the web’s lexicon - quite a big move. It’s used in the address bar in Firefox, on the tool bar in IE7 (slightly adapted) and all over the web beside links to RSS feeds.

I’d be interested to know who originally designed it, and what the design process was - were there earlier contenders that got ruled out?

sIFR uses javascript, CSS and Flash to replace short passages of plain text with text rendered in any typeface - regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Update: sIFR 3 is now available here , although still in beta I think…