Recently Jakob Nielsen published an alertbox proclaiming that computer screens are getting bigger. He is, by and large, right – excluding mobiles and tablets they are indeed getting bigger.
What he fails to mention is that the browser viewport isn’t increasing at any where near the same rate.
You know that big automatic rotating banner you ordered for your start page? Yeah, that’s right. It’s rubbish.
This edition’s collection of links includes posts related to: Intranets, UX, Web design and web development, web strategy and web tactics, Analysis and eye tracking.
To save you visiting several blogs to get a grip of what’s hot within the world of Intranets, this article conveniently groups it all together for you in one post.
Just before Christmas the BBC has launched a new enhanced site search. This is a detailed write up of what they’ve done and why. There’s a lot of useful information here that could be applied to intranet and enterprise search solutions.
A blog post talking about mobiles, intranet, QR codes, and location based services was bound to get my juices flowing. Kristian outlines a number of interesting possible applications for the enhanced mobile intranet of the not too distant future.
Jane starts a discussion about breaking down Silos by using customization. This sparked a great discussion in the comments between Kristian Norling (featured in my previous recommendation above), myself, and Martin Risgaard on how to break down the geographical silo.
Long post about the death of RSS. I don’t agree. Completely. Yes, RSS and the browser is a dying combination – but with tablets and the age of curation, RSS has a healthy future as part of the wiring beneath the scenes. Non-techies/non-curators can blissfully ignore it but still reap the benefits. This week Kroc followed up his post with this constructive reply.
If you haven’t yet heard about responsive web design, then this article on Smashing Magazine is a good and information-rich place to start. We’re rapidly moving away from the one-size-fits-all website.
A tiny bit of javascript (less than 2KB) that gives you the possibility to add user-agent based CSS classes to your code. After reading about responsive web design in the article above, you will probably understand the usefulness of this.
I love this example of QR codes. It’s a wonderful example of an application of technology that benefits everyone involved. The teacher has more time for teaching (rather than just making sure everyone has typed in the right URL), the kids take to it like fish to water. It also gives a use for QR codes without using mobile phones.
James gives some calm and thoughtful analysis of fixed position footer toolbars from the viewpoint of web navigation.
Yet more wise words from Johan. Even though there are many of us that bang on about how a web site needs to be focused and task based, the corporate world at large is a number of years behind in it’s thinking. We’ll get there. I’d expand upon Johan’s recommendation of moving 10% of your media budget to content by clarifying “content” to include web management – you content needs to be lovingly dealt with.
Detailed post from Diana, and especially worth reading on the back of Johan’s post above on integrated communication.
Niche walled gardened channels are forming – from Apps to Gaming worlds – but one thing will remain – the web is where people will go to complain.
I often try to explain to people that the web isn’t simple. Yes, some tools make aspects of the web accessible and easy – but building and running a successfull web presence involves a huge list of competences. There’s hardly a discipline that isn’t touched. This post features a (non-exhausive) list and diagram of skills needed for a marketing technologist (you can switch that term for your web-title of preference)
Why your company’s website will never be finished. Something worth saving and remembering from this Swedish post is Magnus’s three focus areas he recommends spitting idea’s up into: improvements that bring more visitors, improvements that convert more visits, improvements to your products and services.
Mobile search is another aspect that we need to consider and work with. Here are some trends from SEOmoz. Don’t agree with the “single set of SERPs” claim. I don’t see, and I don’t see it being a trend either. Quite the opposite.
If any of you have heard me talk about usability testing with eye tracking, you may also have heard me say how worthless mouse tracking is as a substitute for real eye tracking. Here’s an article that backs that up.
A few years ago I wrote about how screen sizes were getting getting smaller, and this is proving to be the case. Tablets, Android devices/iPhones, iPads – the number of horizontal rows (in landscape mode) is really getting squeezed.
The amount of new websites appearing that are effectively broken when viewed on a laptop is alarming. Laptops and their screen sizes with relatively few number of horizontal rows aren’t going away any time soon. Neither are tablets.
In December 2010 at the time of writing, there were 2673 laptops listed on Swedish price comparison website Prisjakt, of which 1828 of them had a vertical resolution of less than 801 rows. That’s 68%.
Width-wise screen-size statistics and viewport statistics correspond pretty well. This is in part due to the number of laptop users that run their browser maximised to fill the screen. Maximised though, does not mean that you have the full screensize available to you and your web site design.
The browser, it’s chrome, it’s toolbars, your add-ons and bookmarks – all eat away at the number of horizontal rows that are left for your website to fill.
Most browsers are going to eat up at least 100 pixels of your vertical resolution (number of horizontal rows), and quite easily more (it only takes one Google Toolbar to eat up another 30 rows).
If we return to our price comparison site and include the laptops that have a vertical resolution of 900 and below, we find that 2346 of 2673 of new laptops have a likely browser viewport of less than 800 rows. That’s 88%.
In addition to laptops we have tablets and smartphones. The iPad, iPhone, and every single Android device currently in existence also fail to knock up a potential viewport height of over 800 pixels.
Let’s walk through some stats using visits to this blog as an example. The normal visitor to this website is someone who works with the web, or perhaps communication. You are by no means a normal, average person. The general understanding would be that visitors to web tech sites would have higher screen resolutions than normal. With this in mind, the statistics become even more startling.
The focus in the web design industry is still on the screen size of the visitor. This is understandable as a numver of major statistics tools (such as Google Analytics) don’t offer any data about the browser viewport. Although understandable, it’s not acceptable.
Do you provide viewport statistics to your web designers?
As a web designer do you consider the viewport size?
A whopping 20 article post this time covering 4 weeks of articles spotted on my web-travels. Enjoy!
Perhaps it’s not SharePoint thats rubbish, but the way it was implemented in your organisation?
You get the chance to start from scratch – how would you build your company’s IT organisation? Throw IT into the cloud! A provocative but insightful article.
Last month the Global Intranet Trends report for this year was released. An executive summary and a some sample pages are included.
And once you’ve read the sample report from the Global Intranet Trends, why not compare and contrast its findings with these 10 predictions for 2011 from the Internet Benchmark Forum.
Carolyn gives a few quick tips on how you can build a better intranet and then finishes off the post with a fine list of Intranet Twitter people.
It’s a people centric world, individuals are catching up quicker than businesses. Employees are circumnavigating policies and restrictions in the way they work in order to get the job done. Michael gives some suggestions of how you can act from both customer and employee perspectives.
Kristian’s excellent series of posts continues with a look at how his organisation gathers and acts upon the search statistics that they gather on their intranet.
Insights into how the intranet and collaboration works at IBM. With over 400,000 employees IBM is like a small country. The sheer volume of content has forced IBM to embrace employee generated content and curation.
Selling web standards is no easy task. Clients need sites that are effective, but it’s our job as web professionals to bake web standards into our work – the client doesn’t really need to know the dirty details, just how (more) effective their website is.
A wiki filled with examples of user interfaces (web sites) that are designed to trick people. Forget Wikileaks, this is the naming and shaming you should be reading. Educating and enlightening.
Google Preview has the potential to make quite an impact in how people decide to click on a result in SERPs. Just now I suspect previews are not widely seen – but it’s wise to put a bit of thought into how your pages look in it – and an important web management task to check your preview thumbnails.
For anyone managing a website, you should read this FAQ. It pretty much explains everything you need to know about how Google collects, generates and uses the preview thumbnails. Many sites will need some tweaking – and right now i’m not talking about design tweaks, but under the hood stuff.
The PNG image format has become the de facto standard in web design. This is probably the best guide and explanation i’ve read about PNG.
Pseudo-classes? Child-selectors? Descendant Combinator? Ever struggled to remember what all these odd sounding CSS terms mean? well now you’ve got an easy to read reference to help you out.
There are numerous aspects and angles to managing an effective web site and web presence. In this post Dan details some example scenarios and describes some possible solutions.
A well researched and well written blog post by Andreas. My dumb-ass executive summary: Storytelling is da shit.
Johan drums a similar drum sometimes in his posts, but it’s a drum that’s worth beating. He has my permission to keep writing this kind of blog post until the majority of companies have heeded his advice.
As I highlighted in my blog post almost a year ago, the world-wide distribution of smartphone usage and Mobile OS usage is not uniform. The picture in India and Asia is vastly different to North America and Europe. It’s not all iPhone and Android y’know.
And finally… More “Will it eye track” fun from the Acuity ETS blog. This time they show off some eye tracking data gathered from abseiling down a hotel. Pointless fun – well, almost pointless – it was for charity…