In terms of making technology work for humans, I couldn’t agree more with Dave Feldman’s article on Boxes and Arrows (one of my favourite blogs): …I can’t help thinking we’ve skipped our vegetables and gone straight to dessert. We are insinuating ourselves into more and more of people’s lives, yet we haven’t managed to meet [...] Read more – ‘A Truly Ambitious Product Idea: Making Stuff for People’.
In our eagerness to promote our businesses on Twitter, we sometimes forget what the “social” in social media actually means. If we want people to follow and pay attention to us, then we need to follow the same rules of social intercourse that apply in the real world. Making interesting, useful and relevant contributions to [...] Read more – ‘How to write tweets that go viral! (well, almost viral)’.
Some interesting statistics on mobile device usage in Australia: How are Aussies using mobile phones? The mobile phone is clearly about more than standard calling and texting in our modern world. The survey found that in 2012 79% of respondents were getting information online, 76% were visiting websites or searching online, 72% were using their [...] Read more – ‘More Australians more mobile than ever’.
Well worth considering I think: I quit Facebook because I wanted to live deliberately. Seventeen months ago, I deleted my Facebook account — not just deactivated it, but fully deleted it — and the relief was tremendous. via Walled-in: Life Without Facebook : zenhabits Read more – ‘Walled-in: Life Without Facebook : zenhabits’.
When considering a mobile Web strategy and weighing responsive Web design against a separate mobile website, the most important metric is how functional the website is for the user. This goes beyond better content organization for smaller screens. Mobile (and desktop) websites should be easily found, easily shared, fast loading, easy to maintain and easy [...] Read more – ‘Why Responsive Web Design Has To Win Out’.
If people are on your website, they’re probably either skimming quickly, looking for something, or they’ve found what they’re looking for and want to read it as easily as possible. Either way, keeping text readable will help them achieve their goal. Read all at Setting Weights And Styles With The @font-face Declaration | Smashing Coding. Read more – ‘Setting Weights And Styles With The @font-face Declaration | Smashing Coding’.
Sharing knowledge and information to be accessed freely is what drives me and makes me happy to be in the business I’m in – yes, whether it’s an e-Commerce site, a community portal or an artists portfolio. Watch this inspirational video. This YouTube video link was sent to me in an email from Wikepedia as [...] Read more – ‘Why I’m in the web business’.
For many, this is how font licensing feels. Some licenses assume that design agencies are a utopia of organization and efficiency with nothing better to do than sit around and count page views for their clients. One large agency I talked to recently, actually forbids the use of licensed fonts outside of one collection they [...] Read more – ‘Cross Your Fingers and Hope for the Best | Fontspring’.
I’m putting this contract template out there as a contribution to the web dev community and I hope someone can make use of it, specially since it seems there are few Australian contracts accessible online at the moment that are half descent. Currently, this is a copy of my paper version, but I don’t see any reason [...] Read more – ‘Contract template’.
An online website sitemap planning tool. It seems to use an outdated way of planning as a website these days is not as 2 dimensional as a simple sitemap. But I can see that for some applications it could be useful, especially the sharing aspect (perhaps planning a website for a corporation or organisation who [...] Read more – ‘Sitemap Creation | Website Flowchart’.
Designed and produced by the World Wide Web Foundation, the Web Index is the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web’s growth, utility and impact on people and nations. It covers 61 developed and developing countries, incorporating indicators that assess the political, economic and social impact of the Web, as well as indicators of Web [...] Read more – ‘World Wide Web Foundation | The Web Index’.
About 2 years ago Jakob Nielsen wrote an “Alertbox” titled How little do users read?. His research suggests that users will read only 18% of your content. Read the full article: Estimated reading time in web design. Read more – ‘Estimated reading time in web design’.
The web today is a growing universe of interlinked web pages and web apps, teeming with videos, photos and interactive content. What the average user doesn’t see is the interplay of web technologies and browsers that makes all this possible. Over time, web technologies have evolved to give web developers the ability to create new [...] Read more – ‘The Evolution of the Web’.
Why didn’t I write this article first!?… Those rumors you heard are true. It IS possible and no, you’re not dreaming. Working while you’re away on vacation (and getting paid) is doable, with the right set of tools. Here are 10 items we think you can’t do without when doing a little business at the [...] Read more – ‘10 essential items to do business at the beach’.
Managing what you share about yourself online is a bit like having people over for dinner. You show them around. Cook a fantastic meal. But they’ll only see what you want them to see, because you probably prefer to keep some things to yourself (and will keep those hidden away). The same thing is true [...] Read more – ‘Me on the Web – Managing what you share’.
Passwords are the first line of defence against cyber criminals. It’s important to pick strong passwords that are different for each of your important accounts and to change them regularly. Here are some ideas to help create strong passwords… Passwords – Good to Know – Google. Read more – ‘Passwords – Good to Know info’.
Price Creep — On-Premises and in the Cloud Microsoft keeps adding to and refining the capabilities of its products and linking them together to drive demand for additional components of its strategy. For some, these changes are valuable; for others, not so much, which generates price frustration with Microsoft in a subset of the market. [...] Read more – ‘Google Upsetting Microsofts Cloud-Office System Ambitions’.
We have now added a new free service with Loud Mountain web hosting: Daily backups of your website’s database for past 2 weeks. Weekly backups of your database for the past month. Monthly backups of the entire website files and database for the past 6 months. This only applies to websites running on the WordPress [...] Read more – ‘Backup service’.
In January 2012, new Internet real estate will be introduced to allow for domain names to shift beyond the traditional .com to .anything. This dramatic shift will enable businesses, entrepreneurs and governments to apply for and acquire their own Top-Level Domain similar to .com, .net or .org. Known as the new Top-Level Domain Program, and [...] Read more – ‘New top-level domains’.
If you’ve set up your website so it’s easy for both customers and search engines to read but are still not happy with your search ranking, you might want to consider paying for advertising online. These days, the most common form of online advertising is known as pay per click (PPC) advertising. With pay per [...] Read more – ‘Pay Per Click advertising’.
My focus is on simplifying all this technology to something easy to grasp and use for a person of average technical prowess. Complex concepts, methods and terminology are reduced to their basic forms. The too often technological self-importance is brought back to it’s fundamental positive and constructive reason for existing – to be useful tools [...] Read more – ‘Stripping technology back to it’s fundamental reason for existing’.
The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration we’ve added significant [...] Read more – ‘WordPress releases version 3.3 “Sonny”’.
Search Engine Optimisation can be the ethical way or ‘spammy’ way. Even large corporations often don’t care, as long as they get their rankings up: Over the last few months, I’ve seen GoDaddy rise up in the rankings for a lot of hosting related terms. At first I suspected they were finally using their very [...] Read more – ‘GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques • Yoast’.
via chartsbin.com Pando Networks, a company specializing in delivering large quantities of online information to other companies, has released its most recent Global Internet Speed Study, which ranks 224 countries on their internet speed and download completion rate. The findings are based on the data from 27 million downloads by 20 million computers between January [...] Read more – ‘Top 15 Countries with the Fastest Internet’.
WordPress is, perhaps, the most prolific Content Management System of all time and it’s always amazing to see how much it continues to grow year over year. According to recent metrics, WordPress powers an amazing 14.7% of the top million websites in the world.In this ‘State of the Word’ address, Matt Mullenweg talks about this, and [...] Read more – ‘The Incredible Growth of WordPress | CMS Critic’.
I’m wondering whether the following misconception is too common and what is possibly slowing business response to listing on Foster Community Online. I had a phone conversation on Wednesday with a business who wanted a listing but didn’t want to give us their email address for fear of spam. I wanted to reply “why have an [...] Read more – ‘Open letter to our local Community’.
