So, it’s Friday at 4:25 and I’m getting ready to go home. Which reminds me of the gap between the 24×7 expectations of the Web and most people’s 40-ish hour work week.
IT folks have long struggled with extended hours (as have 911 operators, emergency personnel, etc.), and some of them wear their pagers/cell phones like […]

Try this: visit a Web page or two (ones you don’t regularly visit) and pay attention to the first thing you see on the page. I’ll bet it’s just above the center of the screen. ‘Course, if you’re on a slow modem, you’ll be looking at whatever loads first — unless you’re like me, and […]

The Web is great: I can publish content whenever I want, and it’s instantly available to my audience all around the world.
The Web sucks: I can’t keep up with all the changes I have to make.
New Web publishers, especially those that are used to traditional print cycles, are sometimes stymied by the rolling […]

Donny and his sibs were probably right about one bad apple not spoiling the whole bunch, girl. But on the Web, users make snap judgments — so one mistake, and can throw the whole site into question. (Kinda like a spelling error on a resume: probably doesn’t make you any worse at driving snow plows, […]

Like everything else in our keep-up-with-the-Joneses culture, design follows a herd mentality. So, someone created the first Flash splash page back in about 1999 — and suddenly everybody had to have one. Some companies spent a bundle on them, only to find out that most users immediately looked for the “Skip Intro” button. (Remember when […]

So, I’m a teensie bit jealous of designers/artists that get free reign to be as creative and original as they want to be. Me, I’m trapped in a very small box.
I’m redesigning our alumni site, and at best it’s an exercise in limitation; the afore-mentioned Alumni community Web product is rigidly designed with a […]

We’re reorganizing our Intranet right now — or, more accurately, keeping the department-centric organization but overlaying task-oriented navigation.
Task-oriented is customer-focused, and it’s a better way to organize information into useful groupings so that your target audience can find it. But task-oriented comes with its own set of problems, especially over time as new content and […]