10 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 21-22, 2010)

The need for speed on the Web

“Customers are highly highly impatient” – Page loading times aren’t just an search engine optimisaton factor, people know what they want, and they give your page very little time to deliver it before moving on…

Efficiently Rendering CSS

The art of optimising page speed is not confined to network requests and server configuration. How you construct your CSS styles also pays a significant role.

Button Color Test: Red beats Green

There’s a fair bit of data out there saying that green and red buttons generally work best for “calls to action”, with red being the better of the two. Here Performable present data saying that red is as much as 21% better.

Google Studies How Search Behavior Changes When Searchers Are Faced with Difficult Questions

Not only is the paper from Google a great read, you could lose yourself for weeks reading all the other interesting papers cited!

Web Safe Font Cheat Sheet v.2 – Including Google Font API

An updated Web Safe Font Cheat Sheet also including Google Fonts. As a bonus the article takes a look at the results (and problems) with using the Google Font API as it is…

Identifying staff tasks

Hands on advice from James at Step Two on how to identify and collect intranet tasks. Tasks, rather than structure, should be your focus when improving an intranet.

Web Execution (Web Team): A Definition

Lisa, as usual, has published a detailed and well thought out article. This time explaining her suggestion of how to structure your web-team into an operative part and a management part. Doesn’t sound too revolutionary when I write it like that, but in reality it is.

10 words I’d ban from all websites

Catherine Toole, CEO of UK-based firm Sticky Content, lists 10 works she’d ban from websites. I think she did very well to restrain herself to just 10…

Your website is not a project

We spend six figures on a new [site], but usually can’t justify a single full time editor.” A number of very good points in this post.

Eye Gaze Data and the Correlation With Mouse Movement

Mouse movement and eye movement bear very little relation to each other – Mouse tracking *without* eye tracking will give you a distorted impression of behaviour.