Tag Archives: web

Web Visitors vs Users, Impatient vs Bored and how they affect Website Change Management

By Matt Simner | Published: March 4, 2010

Why are users on your site? To look around? To do or achieve something? I pondered this question after reading Gerry McGovern’s discussion on Impatient vs Bored.  He suggests that people using (or rather choosing ‘not’ to use) websites are actually more likely to be impatient than just bored with your content. I think we [...]

Posted in Development Process, Usability, Web | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

Making Web Wireframes easier with Visio – The Pixel Dimensions Shape

By Matt Simner | Published: June 9, 2009

Many people use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop for designing Web layouts, but a lot of companies use Visio – especially for higer level ‘wireframes’.  One of Visio’s problems (<= 2003 anyway) is that it doesn’t support pixel units.  This means you’ll always be approximating the sizes of content areas and page elements, making the developer’s [...]

Posted in Creative Design, Miscellaneous, Tools, Usability | Also tagged , , | Comments closed

10 Essential Checks before releasing a Web Site

By Matt Simner | Published: April 7, 2009

More goodness from Smashing Magazine This is all fairly well known stuff, but it’s amazinf how often I’ve seen sites go live without ‘most’ of these.  Now of course every website’s different, but this is a great list for reference and for learning.

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Using CSS Frameworks to do the heavy layout lifting

By Matt Simner | Published: September 14, 2008

CSS is great, until you’re faced with a deadline and a broken IE6 layout.  You get the cowboy gear out and – ‘Welcome to Hacksville!’   There’s been a growing trend of CSS frameworks recently as people are obviously crying out for ‘something’ to save them from the madness.  I’m trying out the 960 grid system [...]

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Favicon Browser Support Chart. How different browsers support the Favourites Icon

By Matt Simner | Published: July 27, 2008

At last I’ve found a good reference on which browsers support which types of icons/png’s etc for the Favicon.  I guess the news is that you need more than one approach if you’re wanting to serve a favicon to the most potential users.

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When is XHTML not XHTML?

By Matt Simner | Published: June 4, 2008

Well you may think it’s just a matter of rendering some well-formed markup and setting your doctype… <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”> right?  Wrong! Different browsers render in different ways.  What’s common however is that unless your response’s content type is “application/xhtml+xml” then you may not pass go and pick up $200.  [...]

Posted in ASP.NET, Web, XML | Also tagged , | Comments closed

Getting the most out of ASP.NET Web Deployment Projects

By Matt Simner | Published: May 21, 2008

In my ongoing love (but mostly) hate relationship with ASP.NET Web ‘Site’s’ I’ve been using Web Deployment projects to make things more bearable.  I currently swap in connection strings from 3 files – one for each build configuration (debug, test, release – connectionstrings.debug.config etc ).  This works fine as per the doco on WDP.  I use [...]

Posted in ASP.NET, Setup and Deployment, Tools, Visual Studio | Also tagged , , , | Comments closed

Do Web Sites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

By Matt Simner | Published: February 19, 2008

It’s on the internet so it must be right http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ Does that mean I can go home now?   …but seriously, it does make you stop and think a little and get a bit of perspective

Posted in IT Musings, Web | Also tagged , , | Comments closed