Hi,

In the following video on Web usability, I talk about how fancy images can actually hurt your web pages in terms of ease of use. Watch the video for details:

About Web Usability

Making a website more user friendly is a tricky thing, because often times what looks good (in terms of design) actually gets in the way of the user – beautiful graphic often times makes the page more confusing. So, the tricky part is to make it look good while keeping it simple.

My Web usability tips:

• Pictures should NOT be links to click on.
• Use text links that stand out.
• Use icons and images that provide information about the links around it.

There is much more to be said about this.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Web usability is a very important aspect in web design. In fact, there are web professionals out there who call themselves ‘usability’ specialist.

What is Web Usability?

This is basically understanding how a web page and a web site are made easier to use .. from the web surfers perspective. This is really, really important stuff because the less usable a website is, the less likely the site will be successful. For example, if you have very unfriendly (bad usability) shopping cart installed in your site, you would see sales drop off … sometimes dramatically.

… This is bad, because then your client couldn’t afford to hire you again!!

In the following video, I show you a real life example of how simply moving a page widget over to the right of the page, had a dramatic impact. You will also see one of my old (circa 2004) web sites … ouch:

I hope you guys and girls find this useful.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

In the following video, I get into what web designers need to learn these days and how advances in web technology controls this.

Let me know what think .. is it too long, boring or just right?

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersitescom

My top four reasons for not creating a Flash only website:

1. Limited search engine visibility.
2. Harder to update because you have to crack open Flash source files.
3. Harder to find Flash developers/designers than it is HTML/CSS nerds.
4. Apple’s iPhone and iPad can’t see Flash.

Learn from the past …

Back in the 1990’s, Flash only websites became a big thing for a while … then people realized that it was a bad idea, and the Web returned to traditional HTML and CSS based web sites. Let’s not make the same mistake.

Attack of the KILLER APPLE

Another fact that should make you reconsider Flash only sites, is that Apple is now in open warfare against Flash, where they will not let Flash work on the very popular iPhone and soon to be released (with much hype) iPad. That means that a Flash only website cannot be seen by millions of iPhone users.

Flash should only be used for:

1. Application development.
2. Only in parts of your HTML web sites – to do things like play video, audio or some other multimedia use.

This short article may piss-off some Flash maniacs … but what can I say, sometimes the truth hurts.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

I don’t want to bore you guys to tears, but Apple’s latest move to not support Flash (and thus 99% of web video) on the iPad is very disturbing.

The facts are simple:

• Millions of web pages with Flash content will break on iPhones and iPads.
• Like it or not Flash is ubiquitous.
• Flash is controlled by Adobe but free to anyone to write code against.
• Apple is doing this to try and control content distribution – IMHO.
• HTML 5’s video support is years away from being an option to use on commercial web sites.

Since Flash is not supported by the iPad or the iPhone and since the vast majority of web surfers don’t have HTML 5, if we want to deliver video on the Web, we have to support two methods of delivery.

… Just like it was during the 1990’s browser wars, where we had to write code for IE and code for Netscape. Thanks Apple for bringing back the good old days! Jerks.

Apple has to stop being a bunch of iJerks and support Flash.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

It seems that Apple wants to start a new 1990’s style browser war – this really sucks!

Instead of the war being centered around HTML and the DOM, Apple has decided to make it about rich media delivery – Apple does not like Adobe Flash and they are not supporting it on iPad and iPhone.

… Hey Apple, did you hear that Flash IS THE Web standard for rich media?

Because everyone uses Flash to embed video and audio on the Web today, blocking Flash on the iPhone and iPad (with special exceptions made for Youtube of course!) … is NO DIFFERENT than the proprietary tag wars of the 1990’s between Microsoft and Netscape.

In the original browser war’s, it was all about the software, Netscape vs. Explorer … this time the browser is the physical device .. iPad and iPhone vs practically every other device in the world that can surf the Web. Man this is really beginning to piss me off!

With the HTML/DOM browser wars, in the end, everybody lost … and I lost a lot of hair trying to build cross browser compatible websites!!

Adobe fights back against the tyranny of an Apple

Adobe responds by giving Flash the ability output native iPad applications.

From the article:

The iPhone and iPod Touch were the first devices to popularize surfing the Web from a small screen, using multitouch input to allow users to zoom in and out of Web sites that were originally designed to be seen on larger screens. But the iPhone and iPod Touch don’t support Flash, which is widely used for online multimedia content, and Apple hasn’t signalled that it’s interested in adding Flash support to its line of mobile devices.

… This doesn’t solve our web browsing issue but at least we can enjoy the creativity of the millions of Flash developers out there on the iPad and iPhone – something Apple does not want it seems.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

In this video I reveal a very important fact that will impact on your traffic .. something I learned first hand!

Check it out:

Thanks for watching,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

In the following video, I talk about the skill-sets that modern web designers need to know.

Let me know what you think. Oh yea, a high quality version of this video can be found in the killersites university.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

I occasionally use email questions sent to me as the basis for a quick article; this time around I had a question about Drupal:

Just enjoyed your website introduction video. I am a senior but am still a regular producer of ads books and booklets for my church, having been a printer all my life. A member has set up a Drupal site – I have been asked to ’smarten it up’ – I am new to it but I don’t see to prospect of arriving at a graphically attractive site from that program. I think I would be better suggesting we start afresh and build our own site.

What do you think?

Kind regards
John

Hi John,

Updating the look of a Drupal site can be a bit of a challenge since you have to work within the Drupal framework. What that means is that you need to understand basic web technologies:

- html
- css

… and the Drupal ‘theme’ architecture.

In the end though, using a content management system (nerds call them: CMS’) like Drupal will save you guys a huge amount of time updating and adding to the site over time – especially if you plan to have several contributors.

Another simpler to understand option that could work for you is to base the site on Wordpress. It has many of the Drupal advantages, yet the set up is less daunting and the number of available visual templates (called Themes in the Wordpress world) are many.

We have a video course on that subject here:

http://www.killersites.com/wordpress/wordpress-theme.php

And my basic HTML and CSS video course:

http://www.killersites.com/web-design/

I hope that helps,

Stefan

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

This is just going to be a quick blog post, because I am still busy getting killersites.com up and running properly after an emergency server move I had to make.

The short story …

I had been using the same hosting company for many years and generally with not too many issues. But in the last year, things started to go downhill fast. The server was very slow (overloaded) and it went down way too often.

The last straw that broke my weak nerd-back, was a complete shutdown of my account by some pencil-necked twit who decided that killersites.com had too much traffic … so this no-nothing nerd suspended the account!

… You have to understand, I had been with these guys for 5-6 years, I’ve spoken to the founder/owner on several occasions and they used killersites.com as a feather in their cap:

‘… we proudly host killersites.com.’

So this unannounced shut down of the entire site was shall we say, vexing.

When it get’s that bad, it’s time to leave fast!

A quick threat of legal action got the site back up quickly, but I was warned killersites.com had too much traffic and I had to move it. So, I moved it to our own dedicated servers right away … within hours.

So why did I not change over to our own dedicated server years ago?

Answer: Configuration.

Killersites.com has been around for about 13 years now and it has a lot of old legacy stuff floating around. Specifically, we are talking about old Perl scripts and a couple of Java based web applications.

… Once you get these sort of things working, you’d best leave them alone. That hassle combined with my general laziness caused me to keep killersites.com sitting on the old server, even when some early evidence of trouble started to brew. You can’t underestimate laziness!

Continued trouble …

So as I write, I have still to get the old Java forum up and running again and the Perl based directory is not fully operational. The nice thing though, is that all the PHP based applications:

- Wordpress blogs
- Newsletter script
- PHP based forum (to replace the Java created forum)

… migrated easily and are working fine. Once again, no hassles with PHP and I highly recommend you learn PHP as a web designer.

Bye for now.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com