Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers creates an excellent list of 11 Free Tools for Creating Websites and Simple Webpages. These websites will let you quickly build your own Web pages, and they’ll even host them for you. Here are the top five:

1. Wix
2. Whatfolio
3. Weebly
4. Webs
5. Yola

Method, Inc. writes for UX Magazine about the development of a community-based video website community for K-12 teachers and the challenges faced in its design. Facilitating Effortless Discovery of Content for Teaching brings up some excellent points with regard to developing content-rich websites, many of which could be applied to library websites as well as educational ones, such as:

“For a content-heavy site, the primary search model should be questioned and rethought to best surface content for the user”

Mollie Vandor, Associate Product Manager at Cooking.com gathers 17 Web Resources for Improving Your Design Skills for Mashable. This is an excellent list of the best web resources for web design education.

Scott McDonald, co-founder and managing director of Modus Associates, writes for UX Magazine about Five Popular Web Strategies That Don’t Work. This insightful article discusses the following tactics:

• Strategy #1: Parity
• Strategy #2: Novelty
• Strategy #3: Usability
• Strategy #4: Technology
• Strategy #5: Epiphany

Kevin O’Connor, President of User Insight writes for UX Magazine about Personas: The Foundation of a Great User Experience. This excellent article provides a guide to the role of personas in marketing, product and service development and more. This quick intro to persona development answers the following questions:

• “What Is a Persona?
• How Are Personas Built?
• Where Does Persona Development Begin?
• What Is a Typical Persona Investment?
• How Can Companies Optimize Their Investments in Personas?
• What Can Companies Do If They Don’t Have the Budget for Full-Fledged Personas?

Kelli Shaver at Mashable rounds up 8 Powerful & Inexpensive Desktop Design Apps. Each list entry is less than $50 and some that made the list are free. Entries include platform information, cost, a brief review of features, and a screenshot.

Rich Brooks at the Social Media Examiner recommends 9 Ways to Transform Your Website Into a Social Media Hub. If you want to make the transition from a static website into an interesting social media–enabled destination, you’ll want to check out this post. Here are the first few suggestions:

• #1: Add social media buttons to your home page
• #2: Connect your blog with your website
• #3: Embed videos on your website
• #4: Make your website shareable

If you’re a WordPress blogger and have always wanted to be able to create or edit your own themes, you won’t want to miss this helpful guide to 8 Fantastic Tutorials On How To Build Your Own Custom WordPress Theme. Here are just a few of the tutorials:

• How to create WordPress Themes from scratch
• The ultimate WordPress Theme tutorial
• Build a Newspaper Theme with WP_Query and the 960CSS Framework

Aaron Schmidt, Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library, has a new User Experience column at Library Journal titled Resist That Redesign. This thought-provoking article recommends holding off on the grand redesign in favor of a slow evolution of your library’s website.

“Website redesign projects take a long time, often more than a year. During that time, a lack of visible progress can lower staff morale and leave users with a stagnant, unimproved site for months at a time. Likewise, maintaining a current site and building a new one divides efforts. By contrast, small iterative changes can boost staff morale with frequent, demonstrable (if small) victories. Think of it this way: if you make a dozen modest changes—one a month for a year—you could easily end up with a site that’s better by leaps and bounds than what you’d be able to design from scratch in the same interval.”

via Tame the Web

Yogesh Mankani at SaveDelete creates a mega-list of the 50 Most Creative Free WordPress Themes Of Year 2010. These are each stunning templates that can be downloaded and used on your own WordPress blog for free.

Are you redesigning your website and looking for navigation inspriation? If so, you won’t want to miss Gisele Muller’s roundup of 30 Inspiring Website Navigation Menus at Web Design Ledger

Aaron Schmidt, Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library, shares his excellent slides presented at Internet Librarian 2010 on Content Strategy & Writing for the Web. This quick presentation is a great primer, or reminder for anyone seeking to improve their organization’s website.

Alexander Negash, Analytics and User Experience Manager at the American Cancer Society, writes about leveraging social media platforms in design and strategy in The Evolved User Experience: Using social media technologies to drive UX design and product strategy.

“UX teams need to think beyond traditional user research methods and adopt new social technologies to take advantage of the opportunities that are provided by the technology in terms of understanding user behavior and leveraging them for user participation in the project cycles. In addition, these technologies allow researchers to be more agile and to iterate design ideas based on real user feedback.”

Phong Thai Cao at Six Revisions gathers up 10 Free Website Chat Widgets to Make Your Site Interactive. Many of these look good, and the post discusses the advantages to each in addition to a screenshot.

Paul Seys at UXBooth rounds up 10 recommended User Experience Books for Beginners. Head of User Experience at Redweb, a UK based digital agency, Seys briefly reviews each title in this handy list.