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Friday, August 03, 2007
Product not found: Mathew Street Festival 2007 (and maybe 2008?)
This morning's Daily Post coment (sic) says it all, 'The only explanation is unmitigated incompetence'.
Obviously, the first thing that crossed my mind was how would you react if you were editing one of the promoter's websites? Firstly, I'd add a news story on the front page of my site, both Liverpool08 and Visit Liverpool did this. Secondly, and more importantly, I'd make sure that the existing pages are edited to carry a clear announcement.
Or maybe I'd just delete all information and hope it quietly goes away....
Here's the Visit Liverpool Mathew Street Festival event page:
How about a search for Mathew Street on Liverpool08.com?
OK, the Mathew Street festival website then, www.mathewstreetfestival.com (with the great user-friendly homepage page title MSF index!). Click logo to enter and:
Obviously, the first thing that crossed my mind was how would you react if you were editing one of the promoter's websites? Firstly, I'd add a news story on the front page of my site, both Liverpool08 and Visit Liverpool did this. Secondly, and more importantly, I'd make sure that the existing pages are edited to carry a clear announcement.
Or maybe I'd just delete all information and hope it quietly goes away....
Here's the Visit Liverpool Mathew Street Festival event page:
How about a search for Mathew Street on Liverpool08.com?
OK, the Mathew Street festival website then, www.mathewstreetfestival.com (with the great user-friendly homepage page title MSF index!). Click logo to enter and:
Labels: liverpool, website management
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Best 404 error pages on the web
Great roundup of customised 404 error pages.
Great roundup of customised 404 error pages.
Labels: website, website management
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Friday, July 13, 2007
TalkCrunch meets HotOrNot
TalkCrunch is an irregular series of interviews from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. The latest interview is with James Hong, co-founder of HotOrNot, which I haven't heard anyone mention in five years.
It's a great interview, covering the start of the website (they sent an email to 40 friends and had 40000 hits by the end of the first day), monetising the site through subscription, moving on to free subscription and supported by advertising, dubious claims of 10 weddings a day caused through the site, their early use of virtual products (selling virtual flowers three years ago) and their new HotList product.
TalkCrunch is an irregular series of interviews from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. The latest interview is with James Hong, co-founder of HotOrNot, which I haven't heard anyone mention in five years.
It's a great interview, covering the start of the website (they sent an email to 40 friends and had 40000 hits by the end of the first day), monetising the site through subscription, moving on to free subscription and supported by advertising, dubious claims of 10 weddings a day caused through the site, their early use of virtual products (selling virtual flowers three years ago) and their new HotList product.
Labels: blog, podcast, website management
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Sudden Oak Death with Joe Clark
I listened to the first talk from the @media 2007 podcast yesterday, Joe Clark's talk, 'When accessibility is not your problem'.
Joe starts off with a lengthy preamble about WCAG Samurai. Spurred by a controversial article he wrote last year, To Hell with WCAG 2, Joe decided to stop waiting for the WCAG 2 guidelines to be finalised and, together with a few chosen contemporaries, return to making the best of WCAG 1. WCAG Samurai is the result of this project.
The delay in the production of the WCAG 2 guidelines is well documented, WCAG 1 was published in 1999! Another talk I listened to in the last week gave a good job of explaining the current(ish) situation from the working group perspective, Accessibility Wars: A report from the trenches.
The main part of Joe's @media talk looked at four areas in which he felt web content producers are currently wrongly assuming responsibility for accessibility.
All four have come up in recent work I've been involved with, they are:
I listened to the first talk from the @media 2007 podcast yesterday, Joe Clark's talk, 'When accessibility is not your problem'.
Joe starts off with a lengthy preamble about WCAG Samurai. Spurred by a controversial article he wrote last year, To Hell with WCAG 2, Joe decided to stop waiting for the WCAG 2 guidelines to be finalised and, together with a few chosen contemporaries, return to making the best of WCAG 1. WCAG Samurai is the result of this project.
The delay in the production of the WCAG 2 guidelines is well documented, WCAG 1 was published in 1999! Another talk I listened to in the last week gave a good job of explaining the current(ish) situation from the working group perspective, Accessibility Wars: A report from the trenches.
The main part of Joe's @media talk looked at four areas in which he felt web content producers are currently wrongly assuming responsibility for accessibility.
All four have come up in recent work I've been involved with, they are:
- font resizing - he sees this as a browser issue. Fair enough if you're only worried about accessibility compliance but if you're concerned with usability you can't just pass responsibility on to browser designers and users
- headings and links out of context - he says that headings and links shouldn't have to make sense if a tool takes them out of context
- abbreviations - language is a lot more complex than HTML can ever allow for. Loads of great examples
- cognitive disabilities - Joe stresses the fact that the clearest and simplest language should be used appropriate for a site's content. I would add that different language can be appropriate for different sections of the same site.
Labels: accessibility, podcast, website management
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Thursday, July 05, 2007
@media 2007 London podcast
@media 2007 was held in London last month. Recordings of the talks from Day One are now on their website. As I've mentioned before, it's becoming standard for web conferences to post their recordings free online, a fantastic resource. The @media podcast is also improved by including pdfs of the slides used by the lecturers.
Talks and topics: (I haven't included links as the summary pages don't include links to the mp3s. all mp3s available through the link above)
@media 2007 was held in London last month. Recordings of the talks from Day One are now on their website. As I've mentioned before, it's becoming standard for web conferences to post their recordings free online, a fantastic resource. The @media podcast is also improved by including pdfs of the slides used by the lecturers.
Talks and topics: (I haven't included links as the summary pages don't include links to the mp3s. all mp3s available through the link above)
- Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path on 'Beyond Ajax'
- Molly Holzschlag on 'Solving the browser problem once and for all'
- Jason Santa Maria on 'Diabolical design: the devil is in the detail'
- Nate Koechley on 'High performance web pages'
- Dan Cederholm on 'Interface Juggling'
- Richard Ishida on 'Designing for international users'
- Mark Boulton on '5 simple steps to better typography'
- Tantek Celik on 'Microformats'
- Joe Clark on 'When web accessibility is not your problem'
Labels: podcast, website management
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Monday, May 28, 2007
Wisdom of Crowds
I'm waiting for a copy of James Surowiecki's 'The Wisdom of Crowds' to arrive from Amazon (is their free delivery option deliberately slow?). Surowiecki explores the theory that large groups of people of people are smarter than an elite few.
After Michael Vaughan's century for England I might cancel the order.
Labels: information architecture, internet, website management
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Thursday, May 17, 2007
Vauxhall Road pubs
Experiment using slideshow from Slide.
Labels: flickr, liverpool, website management
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Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Seth Godin on misusing Google Analytics
I love Google Analytics but I only use a tiny percentage of what it offers. Seth Godin echoes someone else's comment to me today, saying that
I'm not sure (I think I get a lot out of the application already - analysing trends, user navigation, referrals, client browser environment), but I'll look into how to apply goal tracking and funnel analysis to non-commercial websites.
if you don't understand how to do goal tracking and funnel analysis, don't use Analytics until you do.
I'm not sure (I think I get a lot out of the application already - analysing trends, user navigation, referrals, client browser environment), but I'll look into how to apply goal tracking and funnel analysis to non-commercial websites.
Labels: website management
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