Link round-up (3/27/07)
• Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site
• How to: Receiving Customer Feedback
• Wireframing With Patterns
• Time Rich or Time Poor?
• Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services
• Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise
• 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle
• Do These Headlines Work For You?
• 12 ways to pimp your office
• Temporarily pause active applications
- Redesigning the ExpressionEngine Site
“Years ago, I would have jumped head-first into a project like this, and started working on detailed mockups from day one. This approach forced me into making several different design decisions about layout, color, typography, etc., all at the same time, and usually would result in design gridlock. For this reason, I now tend to split my design process into somewhat separate phases: wireframing, design exploration, and detailing. In this article, I’ll attempt to detail those phases with some practical examples from the design of the ExpressionEngine.com website, as well as demonstrate what to do if the process encounters snags.”
- How to: Receiving Customer Feedback
“A necessarily numbered list of tips from our experiences… […] Some great examples of smart data collection is Last.fm and DIGG. Both companies have great examples of going against user feedback and opting for using the data to change directions to create a healthier community. For example, DIGG’s removal of the top diggers list was not popular, but did a great deal for balancing the ecosystem. Last.fm’s mining of the attention data has informed their smart feature roll-outs all along.”
- Wireframing With Patterns
“Wireframes can comprise many different patterns, each of which is a discrete element that provides specific functionality and may include instructive copy, images, text fields, buttons, links, etcetera. Together, the patterns create a complete Web page. Of course, when wireframing in patterns, it always helps if there is a pre-existing library of patterns to draw from, but I have found that getting through the first wireframe reveals most of the reusable patterns.”
- Time Rich or Time Poor?
“Broadly speaking, there are two types of internet users, Time Rich and Time Poor. I’d speculate that many of the readers of this blog fall into the Time Poor category, but the vast majority of internet users fall into the Time Rich category. […] its important to know who your audience is, and to make sure that you don’t let your own experience and that of other Time Poor people guide you wrong.”
- Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services
“Today’s Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by ‘Web 3.0′ is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.”
- Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise
“Your Business Needs an Attention Strategy […] This applies to all marketing efforts—even yours. You might feel that, well, your industry is a little different. People will take their time with it. You don’t need to rush to get to the point. But your industry isn’t different. Your customers are human, and humans have a lot of distractions. Regardless of your line of work, or your medium of communication, it’s essential that you maximize your use of potential customers’ attention.”
- 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle
“Great posts are hard to do consistently on a day-to-day basis. Probloggers really have to work at it. I thought about all the different ways and angles a blogger can approach choosing posting topics. Here are 101 different ideas that I think are great to stimulate your mind and jumpstart your blogging.”
- Do These Headlines Work For You?
“Often the key to great editing is knowing when to keep your hands off, despite the fact that we might have taken a different approach ourselves. Feel free to voice contrary opinions in the comments—I always love to hear suggestions on how to make any headline better.”
- 12 ways to pimp your office (hat tip: Jason Macemore)
“I’m not going to claim that a fancy desk or a weird chair is going to magically improve your creativity and productivity - but I am damn sure, that all that sameness and eternal corporate grayness, does nothing good for your ability to come up with great new ideas.”
- Temporarily pause active applications (for Mac users)
“Every program you’re using on your Mac (obviously) uses some portion of your CPU. And the more you’re asking a given program to do, generally speaking, the more of your CPU it will use. For instance, Safari with one window open isn’t going to load your CPU too heavily. But open seven new windows, put six tabs in each window, and then load up 42 of your favorite web-based Flash games, and you’ll find that Safari is now demanding quite a bit from the CPU.”
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