Longform Writing

Heading out on your own to start a solo freelancing business can get complicated. These are some of the things that I’ve found are helpful to think about ahead of time.

The length of your instructional text is almost always inversely proportionate to the usability of your product. Unfortunately, I’ve been saying this for so long that I can’t remember if I stole the idea, modified the idea, or came up with it all on my…

I’m always intrigued by our industry. In particular, I think it’s incredible how web developers and designers are collaborating and sharing in ways that are unimaginable in other industries. We learn something new, a competitive advantage if you will,…

In business, design should enhance and support web site goals rather than be the goal. Design involves so much more than just pretty visuals, and visual design is not the single most important aspect of web development. The same goes for usability,…

As time moves on, it’s almost impossible to purchase a product without reading online reviews. Almost every online store now offers customer reviews of products. These are people who have actually used your products, and care enough to say something. To…

I offered up a subset of my Visio wireframe stencils over at YourTotalSite in the recent past, and there seemed to be some pretty good interest in seeing more. While I don’t have any wireframe examples to show the world just yet, I can do the next best…

After writing about the blending of design and programming the other day, it really got me thinking. I really think web design, and almost everything in the world is just one big balancing act. In politics, for every extreme conservative, there’s…

I’m fascinated by the increasing frequency with which designers are becoming interested in programming. It seems that every day I’ll run across another designer who wants to write code. Now, I’m not talking about hacking a couple spots of code here and…

After attending Edward Tufte’s course recently, I had a realization with regard to one idea being better than three. The success of the “one idea”? approach was not due to the fact that we only presented one idea, but rather due to the overwhelming…

Is it any less impressive if somebody creates a beautiful CSS site that completely falls apart at a different font size? I sure think so. I’m not saying a site should hold its visual design together if somebody bumps up the text 5 or 6 notches, but if…

Over at YourTotalSite, I wrote about how nice it is to see big and bold designs. Since there was more thought put into this site than you might guess at first glance, I wanted to take some time and provide some insight into the thought process that led…

Note: There is now a followup to this post. Make sure to check it out. More on the One Idea Approach While some people don’t need to worry too much about clients, the rest of still make a living helping others make the right decisions with their web…

While I firmly believe that the length of your instructional text is almost always inversely proportionate to the usability of your product, I also believe that the right help text at the right place and time can be invaluable to the usability of a web…

Now that “table” has become a bad word and many people have eliminated them from their repertoire, I wanted to shine a little more light on this misunderstood, but well-intentioned, piece of markup. Everybody is familiar with table, tr, and td tags, but…

I was thinking today and realized just how many different conversations I’ve had with people about buttons. What should the text be? Where should they be placed? Should they be regular HTML buttons or images? What about reset buttons? We’ll start with…

If it needs instructions or you have to explain it, there’s room for improvement.

Today’s error messages are a huge improvement of the error messages of latter years, however they still have a long way to go. I’ve put together the following list of the most common problems with error messages. Disclaimer: You should always use both…

The vast majority of cases where forms offer a button to reset the form would be better off foregoing the button entirely.

If people scroll to the bottom of a page, shouldn’t we provide useful links and content to help them decide where to go next?