Responsive design is a method of applying different sets of display rules  to elements of a website based on the size of the viewport availale.

These rules are applied via Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) and can affect the appearance, position, size or visibility of specific elements such as navigation, sidebars, pictures and the main content.

A single code base is created for the website rather than building a different website to be viewed on mobile phones, tablets and desktop computers.

Responsive design isn’t just a technical issue. A good responsive design requires design decisions to be taken to determine which elements to change as the viewport changes.

To see an example of responsive design in action, visit www.smashingmagazine.com with your web browser maximized. Now slowly resize the window until it is as small as it can go. The layout changes as you do this and as the viewport reduces in size, different parts of the style sheet are triggered and applied to the layout.

In-app payments are a way of paying for additional features for software from within the application itself rather than at the time of purchase or install.

At the moment they are predominantly used in mobile phone applications such as games where a certain number of levels can be accessed, but to proceed beyond a certain level, you have to make a small payment.  The key feature of in-app payments is that the payment takes place within the application itself rather than having to go to the software creators website, make a payment and install a new version of the software of enter a serial number.

Software distribution is changing rapidly at the moment and we are seeing dedicated application stores set up for mobile phones, tablets and forthcoming versions of Apple OS X and Windows will have built in marketplaces that people can use to install software without leaving the desktop.

Most businesses strive to find ways to not just sell more of their product, but to maximise revenue from their products so in-app payments will be very attractive to software creators.

At the moment, PayPal are considered the leader in providing software creators with the ability to include in-app payments in their products.

Typekit is a font delivery and licensing service which enables web designers to use a much wider range of fonts in website than had previously been available. It is a commercial service which web site owners and web designers can subscribe to if they need to use specialist fonts in their HTML content.

Until recently, the HTML design process has been limited to a small range of common fonts that could be guaranteed to be found on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. (more…)

It’s all just words right so if it works in an email or a letter it’ll work on my web site?

No. Take time to read and rewrite the content of your website and if you have the budget, employ a proper copy editor. At least ensure that someone is given responsibility for “sense checking” all of the content that goes on your web site.

It’s great that as web site owners we can easily go back and correct typos or easily change the date of an event. That’s a luxury we don’t have in print. But try to catch sentences that clearly won’t make any sense once they are on the your web site.

It’s all about context. “Dear Sir, please find enclosed” may be fine in a letter or email, but it will look very odd on a web site and it’s likely that the enclosed item you are talking about won’t be there. Processes such as filling in registration forms must be dealt with differently on the web.

Another common culprit is the using phrase, “Please visit our web site for more information” on your web site. Again this probably derives from copy written for print materials, but just copying and pasting that into your web site will send your visitors into an endless loop of frustration.

Depending on the type of website you run, you may at some point have to include advertising on your site as part of your income stream.

In many cases, online advertising follows a formula that visitors have become very used to and therefore have adapted to effortlessly screening them out of their view.

If you are in the position to have a direct relationship with your advertisers, as is often the case with some small web site owners, see this as an opportunity to provide advertising that steps out of the mould and is interesting in its own right. Small adverts created specifically for your site or a small set of web sites are likely to be highly relevant and catch your visitor’s eye creating a win-win scenario for all parties.

People expect the experience that have on your web site to be as good as the last best online experience that they had elsewhere online. This means that the bar is continually being raised. New sites launch every day and new innovative techniques emerge to (hopefully!) make web sites easier to use.

To most people it’s all just the web. If site A has a really nice ticket booking procedure they don’t care that your site is older or built using a different technology. They just want it all to work well.

So how do you counter this continual pressure to have the best web site?

Start viewing the web through your web site owner’s eyes. As you use the web on a day to day basis, become aware of good practices and processes. Note down where you had a good experience, where something was easy to achieve a task or where your found something frustrating on someone else’s web site.

Have a policy of periodically assessing your own site and seeing things through a customers eyes. Make incremental changes. You don’t have to tear everything down and start all over again.

And remember, improving something doesn’t always have to mean the addition of a new feature. It could be the removal of some information or the streamlining of a process to make things more easy for your customers.

Dates are so important for context. Whenever you publish any content on your web site please make sure that you include the date that is was first published.

It’s also sometimes useful to included when the article was updated as well.

The title of this post probably seems really counter intuitive to many people and it’s not something that every web site owner wants to hear.

But it refers to the idea that you own web site may not be the best place to get your message across. Other people may well have much larger and much more relevant audiences that you. The key thing is that when you publish information, it should always refer back to you and your web site.

For example, let’s say you decide to interview your company director about a new product and you make a video of the interview. It makes sense to publish the video on a popular video portal like YouTube where it is most likely to be exposed to the largest audience. Then, you can embed the video in your own web site. Other people can also embed the video in their web sites as well.

Even if a web site has less visitors than your own, it may still be very productive to concentrate of getting coverage of your story on that web site rather than your own, especially if you are looking to reach new audiences and customers.

Consider another example. Imagine you run an membership association. A small part of your organisation’s remit may be to promote an annual professional development course to people in your industry. Rather than just announce the course on your web site, seek out blogs and web sites that deal specifically with professional development. They may well have much a smaller audience than your own web site but their readership is very focussed on the topic of professional development and you will likely get much more interest from their web site.

So don’t worry about having to publish everything on your own web site, just make sure that when another web site publishes information about one of your projects that the readers have all the information they need to complete the task you are interested in whether that’s a conference registration, a newsletter sign up or a product sale.

Good luck.

When we work closely with a project every working day, it becomes very easy to get too close to it and not see it in the way that others see it.

What seems obvious to you may not be obvious to someone being introduced to your project for the first time. So try and see your web site through the eyes of one of your own customers or new readers.

Have you delivered the information the were looking for? Have you provided context to help them get more information about your organisation if they need it? Have you explained acronyms and avoided using jargon?

Google Analytics is a great way to get insights into what’s happening on your web site and it’s free. It’s one of the most popular analytics packages around. But for some people all of the data can be overwhelming.

You don’t need to give everyone the same level of access to all of the data. Casual users in your organisation may only want to see the general trends in visitors numbers or the number of recent visits to a particular page.

If you have people in your organisation that want access to the analytics information, but just need an overview, I’d advise using Polaris from Desktop Reporting.

A screenshot from the polaris desktop reporting application

It’s a simple AIR application that anyone can install on their Windows, Mac or Linux machine and allows access to nearly all of the useful information in Google Analytics without overwhelming the user.

You can download it at Desktop Reporting