Business owners: your Web site might be talking behind your back. People naturally infer things from design, and the same holds true for your Web site.
Example 1: I was visiting a Web site recently for a company that is supposedly all about networking: connecting people with other people. But their Web site sends a very [...]

For my clients, I do a lot of little stuff for free. Sometimes the client notices, sometimes they don’t. For example, I was reviewing the old Web site for a new client today, and I noticed that the folks who built their old site never put in a “favicon.” (That’s the little icon that shows [...]

Ok, need your opinions on this: do you mind waiting for heavy Web pages to load? It kinda drives me nuts (see Please Wait…Loading…), but maybe the rest of you don’t mind.
Today I was on M&Ms Web site, to vote for Orange as my favorite color (poor Eric K, he’s in last place right now…). [...]

A client recently launched a new Web site that had been designed by a volunteer agency, but has asked me to stay involved to help with technical issues. The new site looks and works fine, except for some poor front-page communication, but under the surface…
The other guys put a different Google Analytics code into their [...]

Two separate customer service issues today… both drove me a little nuts.
Rant #1: Endless voice prompts. Called PayPal in regards to a transaction. After entering my account info, I get dumped into the voice prompting system — “you can say, ‘payments,’ ‘account issues,’ or ‘refunds.’”
Aha… I’ve been in this trap before, and I know to [...]

Last night after hours I get a message from a client: “Hey, my domain name is expiring tomorrow. Can you take care of that for me? Thanks.”
Umm, thanks indeed. Thanks for missing the half-dozen or so messages that you’ve already received in the past month telling you that your domain is expiring soon. Thanks [...]

I’m in WYSIWYG hell… and I’m not alone. (For those who don’t know, What You See Is What You Get — the acronym is pronounced whizzy-wig — is a term for any visual HTML editor such as the ones in Web-based email editors, blogs or content management systems. It’s supposed to let you do basic [...]

Thirty-six seconds. That’s how long it took to crack my password a few years ago.
Years back, the IT guys at a company where I worked called me to ask if they could use my account passwords to run a test. They wanted to try to hack an account on the system, to test their security [...]

Okay, we all know that junk email is a problem. But today, within the space of about 15 minutes, three things happened, and they illustrate a problem…

A Facebook friend has apparently picked up Koobface, the Facebook virus whose least-troublesome symptom is spamming all your friends with posts (which link to the virus file — therein [...]

I’ve had a few projects recently where an existing site need a lot of help in a lot of areas: poorly organized, ineffective design, hardware or programming problems, inconsistent integration of various services, etc.
Problem is, design is visual, and clients get that. So they know they want a new design. The other things are harder [...]