Categories (scroll down or click on the link)Content, Writing for the Web, and Content Management Website and Email Design, Usability Internet and Web Marketing, SEO, and Search Engines E-commerce Reports
How start-ups can survive
Ask the Expert—Advice for businesses/ website owners / web novice
Security
Security research and blog, University of Cambridge: www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/ The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation: www.snopes.com
Craigs List on avoiding scams and fraud 5 Tips from CNET about securing your laptop wireless in public areas
IMSafer is a new service designed to protect children using instant messaging from online predators
Consumer Reports (September 2006) ranks antispam software including:
Trend Micro, Allume Systems SpamCatcher, Cloudmark, PC Tools, BitDefender, McAfee, Symantec, Sunbelt Software, Blue Squirrel, and CA/eTrust.
Consumer Reports (September 2006) ranks antivirus software including:
BitDefender, Zone Labs (ZoneAlarm), Kaspersky Labs, Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro, Alwil Avast, F-Secure, Panda Software, CA/eTrust, and PC Tools.
Spam proof your email Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace
Content, Writing for the Web, and Content Management
Writing Words for the Web and connecting To New Audiences by John Alexander How Web is different from print Quality content is at the heart of all great websites. If your redesigned website isn’t working and you’re wondering whether it is the technology, graphics or layout - 9 times out of 10 it will be the content. Hidden Costs of Self-Service Obsessed by technology: technology is wonderful but we still need trained professionals to help manage content Jakob Nielsen: About pages should summarize company; what information should be included in About pages How to manage out of date content Gerry McGovern: Low value content is destroying your website Google Marketing: Every Millisecond Counts
Gerry McGovern :
Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go
online...instead of dawdling on websites many users want
simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.
Writing Style for Print vs. Web: Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments. Jakob Nielsen :
The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online. Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave. Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.
Jakob Nielsen: Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? ...bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money. Eye-tracking research, dos and dont's for writing on the web
The word farms of the web. The growing number of websites that mix and match low-quality articles produced by amateurs in order to generate traffic is causing concern, reports Danny Bradbury Jakob Nielsen: Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill? Evidence-based website management Time for content to be more scientific Web information—driving tasks on a web site Task Completion—key to website success The Problem of Dirty Data Six Tips for Writing Concisely Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers - Digits Boost Usability and Credibility Words that work: search words versus website words Links are the Grammar of the Web Google changes information management—information management will ask the question, "What was the person trying to do and did our information help them do it easily and quickly? Read why PDFS ARE EVIL, LAZY, SLOTHFUL AND SINFUL and PowerPoints are not much better Jakob Nielsen: Writing for the web Jakob Nielsen: How users read on the web Do not optimize for search engines; optimize for people who search. Some organizations believe all they need to create a better website is to choose the right content management software—they are not thinking about the quality and
effectiveness of the content. "They’ll employ junior people to
put up this content, and then a couple of years later they’ll
wonder where it all went wrong". Jakob Nielsen: Users search using familiar words. There’s more to website success than simply being found, but it is the first step. Use old words and you’ll be that step ahead of the competition and their useless new words.
25:5 rule—25 percent of demand is for 5
percent of tasks; that 5 percent of content is read by 25
percent of people (he long neck)
Eight Essential Writing Skills For Techies by ewriteonline.com
Checklist: How Tech-Savvy Is Your Reader?
Publish on the web to further your career The Importance of a Customer-Centric Design Approach: An Interview with Gerry McGovern Gerry McGovern: Killer content for intranet Recent Canadian research shows that website visitors decide in 1/20 of a second the quality of a site.
Websites reflect the true face of an organization. A website is increasingly the place where customers get that vital first impression...learn if they are self-centered or customer-centered. Is the website structured so as to solve your problems fast, or is it based on some internal organization structure? Web Writing For The World: Five Tips On Writing For Global Readers
Google's 5 Objectives of Website Copy - scroll to bottom left Jakob Nielsen, Writing for the Web Writing for the Web by Jakob Nielsen and Jonathan Fox, editor-in-chief, www.sun.com Nine Things We Thought You Knew About Web Writing To maximize value you must publish high-quality content (killer
web content). That requires significant skill and active
management. Low quality content is easy to get...Give
authors control and let them publish what they want.
Raising the Perceived Value of Your Website
Incompetent Email Marketing = Lost Future Opportunities - Jakob Nielsen The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused.
Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don't try
and force the Web to be what it's not.
Graphic Design Plays a Minor Role on the Web
Number One Skill for Managing a Website . The web is a self-service environment, and self-service is about convenience, speed and price.
Why Web Managers are Leaders
What happens when you have more content than you have people to manage? The quality of content declines
Why it Matters to Focus on your Reader
Web Editors have a Great Future
How to Measure the Value of you Web Content
Web Content is a Hidden Asset
It's the Content, Stupid: Search Engine Optimization
Web Content Management: Top 10 Predictions for 2005
How Do We Use Our Knowledge Effectively
Some Business Effects of Customer Experience [The "multiplier effect" - the leverage that a good online customer experience has on the offline business. One obvious conclusion to draw is that it's more important than ever to make sure the website is fast, easy, clear, and a great experience overall.] and [GE links executive compensation to the customer experience]
Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content On the Web, words come before looks .
The primary activity on the Web is reading. It's very
fast scan reading by impatient people who find web reading
harder than print reading.
Why it Matters to Focus on your Reader Web Content is not Data Management The Web is Not About Technology - it's About Content and People Who Read the Content In Praise of Web Experts...The Web is Maturing Websites: easy to start, hard to manage
Exercise in Customer Experience
Web content management
Websites need to be professionally managed
Secrets of Great Web Headings and Summaries
Less is more for university websites
Less is more for government websites
What Makes a Great Website?
Why content management fails? hint: get an editor
Getting serious about metadata
Recognition for creating good content
Design for the rule, not exception - every added piece of content makes your website a little harder to navigate
Web content management a process, not a project
The essence of a website is self-service. There are three core things that self-service needs to get right: convenience, speed, and price
Focus on the content that is directly applicable to your organization’s objectives . Any other content confuses. It wastes time and money.
How to design for the tunnel reader
How to tell people what else you do on your website
44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files,
Users only come to the website when they have a goal - usually finding a
specific piece of information, or conducting a specific transaction.
The Goal is very specific, and it's the defining motivator
of that user's experience on the website.
Fulfill the Goal quickly and easily, and it's a good experience;
otherwise, users will try to avoid the site in the future.
How to make links work for your website
Web content management predictions for 2004
Avoid Santa Claus Approach to Content Management - Gerry McGovern
The dangers of publishing your website in another language (content matters)
The intranet gets serious
The intranet gets serious: Part 2: making knowledge sharing work
Content management: web publishing needs real discipline
Information Pollution: Removing half of a website's words doubles amount of information users actually get - Jakob Nielsen
Measuring your web content management processes
Summary gateway pages for PDF files
Information foraging
Taking full responsibility for your content
Metadata may be the difference between web content that succeeds or fails
Poor content wastes time, wasting time is wasting money!
Poor content on your website damages your brand and reputation
buying content management software
The Most Hated Advertising Techniques
The Paradox of Choice
Website and Email Design, Usability
Jakob Nielsen: When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods Jakob Nielsen on website statistics/bounce rates and some advice : change low-credibility design, fluffy content, or confusing navigation. Google User Experience Designing user-friendly left navigation menus Jakob Nielsen: User skills improving slightly, browser and research skills poor, Google gullibility Local Government Local Tasks Made Easy - Gerry McGovern Jakob Nielsen: building tabs right Intranet Personalization: Does it Work? Jakob Nielsen strongly advises the vast majority of websites to scale back their features and dramatically simplify the user experience for initial use... to progress to the deeper engagement levels, prospective customers must first successfully pass through the initial use phase Jakob Nielsen: Having a specialized usability person is best, but smaller design teams can still benefit when designers do their own user testing and other usability work. Classificatin: everything that is added to a classification subtracts from what is already there, prompting the question: Has more been added
than subtracted?
5 Key Characteristics of Web Brands
Why simplicity is essential to web design User Interface Engineering: Simplicity: The Ultimate Sophistication Command links in Vista, buy/check out buttons Jakob Nielsen: Location is Irrelevant for Usability Studies
Why the web demands simplicty
Jakob Nielsen, international usability expert, lists 10 redesign high priorities that can increase your return on investment ROI Banner blindness causes problems in voter elections in Florida and Website design: lacked a single expert on human-computer interaction Wikiasari: The convergence of USABILITY and SEO? The sooner you complete a usability study, the higher its impact on the design process; competitive studies Jakob Nielsen: optimize web pages for varying screen resolutions The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site (Release Early, Release Often
) An alternative to MySpace: create your own social networking site Jakob Nielsen: Eyetracking Research Overview for Websites User expectations for search / Jakob Nielsen: Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer When users go to the wrong section of the website most of the time, your site has an information architecture problem; article proposes 6 fixes
Designing Web Applications for Use from User Interface Engineering: If designers go back to the drawing board every time a user stumbles or hesitates or flinches, the results are same-old-same-old applications that stick users with so-so tools Clickstream heatmap study shows dynamic web / eyetracking HumanFactors.com: Leveraging heat maps (and other eye tracking data) to refine your information architecture
"Do users know where to start? Analyzed by evaluating how many warm spots there are on the page. (Lots is not good!) And critically, if the true target is ‘cold,’ or never gazed at."
"Are they confident when they find it? Evaluated by looking at how many times users look back and forth between options before they select one and click."
Jakob Nielsen: design/optimize web pages for 1024 x 768 resolution
There are two key characteristics of websites that fail: technology-centric and organization-centric. Belief that if you buy a "portal" or some other fancily-named software you will solve all your problems is unfortunately common and incredibly naive... websites that have succeeded have had two key characteristics: customer-centric and task-centric.
Insights into the Millennial generation The Millennials—email, multi-tasking, and the media User Interface Engineering: Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages What users hate most about Web sites (low on usability ...) Gerry McGovern: Are you using the wrong web metrics? Jakob Nielsen:Variability in User Performance
Read Jakob Nielsen’s study on user and online behavior; goal was to research the purchase of a portable computer projector for use during presentations.
Do you really need a search on your site? Jakob Nielsen: Eyetracking and Reading Web Content Jakob Nielsen: "Focus on fixing the basics to get a simple and communicative website. Simple steps don’t get hyped, but they drive much more business value for the average site than the issues that everyone writes about...we’re seeing more and more simple websites that meet customers’ needs and thus generate substantial business value. Often the sites that do nothing special are the best: it’s more important to focus on doing things right than to chase the latest fad." Jakob Nielsen: Search Engines as Leeches on the Web
Jakob Nielsen: Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First
Why Useless, Fancy Stuff Gets Promoted
Better Content
Elite Experience vs. User Experience
Top Three Design Priorities
Avoid Within-Page Links by Jakob Nielsen
Recent Canadian research shows that website visitors decide in milliseconds the quality of a site.
5-Second Test for Usability International Websites: Minimum Requirements The Power of Defaults Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings...Time Budgets for Usability Sessions Up to 40% of precious testing time is wasted while users engage in nonessential activities ...Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites Email Newsletter Usability, Nielsen Norman Group Report University websites come of age
Scrolling and Scrollbars, Usability Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes
Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
Putting A/B Testing in Its Place Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005
International Sites: Minimum Requirements
Usability's job is to research user behavior and find out what works. Usability should also defend users' rights and fight for simplicity .
Users have developed a firm mental model for how search is supposed to look and to work
Formal Usability Reports vs. Quick Findings | When to Use Formal Reports by Jakob Nielsen
Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design
Jakob Nielsen: Designs that support user empowerment Web task management principles Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design
Building your website for lower-literacy users and their unique needs improves success rate for higher-literacy users as well
Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point
Websites for Teenagers, Usability
Authentic Behavior in User Testing
Web-User Satisfaction on the Upswing
Heuristic Evaluation by Jakob Nielsen
The Ideologies of Web Design
The Need for Web Design Standards
The key to any customer-centered effort is to respect the customer
Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products: cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem
Why Google is such a Great Brand : clean, minimalist interface.
Usability and listening to customers have limits
Guidelines for links
Web Design: Never Let an Ad Agency Near Your Website
Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
KJ method for assigning priorities
Usability improves productivity
Common Myths about Web Design
Differences in Design from Multiple Companies in the same Industry - Competitive Testing
Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 - Jakob Nielsen
When performing simple internet tasks on websites, users fail 35% of the time
The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines - Jakob Nielsen
Four Words to Improve User Research
"About Us" -- Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website
Why personalization hasn't worked (aka stick to the basics)
Websites Require Flexible Not Fixed Design
GoodExperience.com's page paradigm
Misconceptions about Usability - Jakob Nielsen
Usability 101 - Jakob Nielsen
Paper Prototyping - getting data before you code
PDF [files]: Unfit for human consumption
Usability for $200 on small site
Convincing clients to pay for usability
Simple text, clear photos communicate better with users than high-end media
Top 10 web design mistakes of 2002
Usability redesigns increase website usability by 135%
How Usability-Focused Companies Think
Jakob Nielsen: Usability for Senior Citizen
Internet and Web
Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee (Inventor of the Web) Web metrics: Don’t be a slave to the next hit Jakob Nielsen: Generic commands give users increased power without increasing user-experience complexity CNET’s top web ware / applications for 2007 Web facilitates wisdom of crowds Future of the Web is collaborative The twilight of print Customer Power Driven by the Web: in the new Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase.
Marc Andreessen, inventor of the first Netscape browser, has released Ning, a site that lets everybody create their own social networks. The Web is the New Organization; it allows for new forms of organization that will have a profound impact on how we live, work and play over the next twenty years
Recommendation Systems: Last.fm is one of a relatively new breed of web applications called recommendation systems. Recommendation systems aggregate the online behavior of many people to find trends and make recommendations based
on them. The Coming Age of the Cellcast or Mobilcast: It”s likely only a matter of time that many users will be able remove the step of downloading audio/video content and then playing it on an iPod/MP3 player. Jakob Neilsen: 100 Million Websites , Nov. 2006Firefox 2 browser now claims 12% market share, compare pros and cons of new Internet Explorer 7 versus Firefire 2 illustion c|net List of top 10 research tools on the web Designing web based interfaces: Deconstructing Web Applications (User Interface Engineering)The End of Deference and the Rise of Customer Power on the Internet Jakob Nielsen: One Billion Internet Users as of 2005 and GrowingPolitical Blogosphere and the 2004 Election - Divided They Blog (PDF) by Natalie Glance, Intelliseek Applied Research Center
10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet’s First Decade of Public Use
in the virtual world, you win by being good
. Automation reduces the benefits of scale, the internet equalizes distribution, and reputation follows from quality rather than incessantly repeated slogans.
Inventor of the Internet/Web Tim Berners-Lee to be Knighted by Queen Elizabeth
Eyetracking - how users read a news website
Priceline.com and Ramada.com have agreed to make their Web pages easier to navigate for the blind and visually impaired as part of a settlement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
Free accessibility tools If you're on the Web, you're in sales
Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution - avoiding irrelevant information
Web used as primary means for obtaining key information
Shifting Trends of Internet Use by Americans - Pew Internet and American Life
How people evaluate a website's credibility - Stanford Research
Internet Now Treated as Household Utility, Necessity
Should you centralize or decentralize your publishing?
Life cycle of large websites
Web team roles and responsibilities are changing
Usable design saves money and saves jobs
Insights on investor relations website design
Marketing SEO / Search Engines
E-commerce
Reports
A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users PDF
Internet users and wireless connections Ten Revelations About Interacting
With College-Bound High SchoolStudents (PDF) by National Research Center for College & University AdmissionsPew Internet Project today releases a new report on Bloggers :
Pew Internet Reports. Demographics: How Women and Men Use the Internet: Women are catching up to men in most measures of online life. Men like the internet for the experiences it offers, while women like it for the human connections it promotes.
Pew Internet Reports Spam and Phishing : Email users get more spam, but the harmful impact of unsolicited messages is diminishing for them. More than a third of email users have gotten phishing solicitations
Pew Internet Reports Health Information Online : Eight in ten internet users have looked for health information online, with increased interest in diet, fitness, drugs, health insurance, experimental treatments, and particular doctors and hospitals
Protecting Teens Online : More than half of American families with teenagers use filters to limit access to potentially harmful content online. But both teens and parents believe that teens do things on the internet that their parents would not approve of
Pew Internet Reports Downloading Files : About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files (Music and Video Downloading Moves Beyond P2P)
Pew Internet Reports on Search Engines : Internet users are extremely positive about search engines and the experiences
they have when searching the internet.
But these same satisfied internet users are generally unsophisticated about why and
how they use search engines. Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results
A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life
Deep Web by Bright Planet [invisible web]
Consumer WebWatch: Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study..Websites
65% of Internet users have purchased a product online
Consumer Reports WebWatch Guidelines
Technology
Misc.
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