Legend by first-time novelist Marie Lu treads ground that has been covered by many other YA books in recent years. A young but gifted underclass teen nicknamed Day goes underground to try to save his family and his community from oppression by the elite who rule his repressive post-apocalyptic America. He is opposed, and later joined, by June, a girl who matches him in smarts, athletic ability, and good looks.

It’s one part Hunger Games, one part Little Brother, and a bit of City of Ember and Truancy – with a dash of Les Miz (which she caught on TV while thinking about how to build a story around the character of Day) thrown in for good measure. Yet even though Lu’s book is a variation on a by now well-worn theme, I was surprised at how well-written, fast-paced and enjoyable it was, with characters I came to like almost in spite of myself.

Legend is set in a crumbling Los Angeles, in a landscape reshaped by rising ocean levels. California is the center of the Republic of America, ruled by the glorious Elector and constantly at war with the surrounding Colonies in neighboring states. In the poor sectors of town, yearly plagues keep the population weak and helpless.

But both rich and poor must submit at age 10 to a Trial, in which their academic and athletic scores determine whether they get to go on to high school and college, are doomed to a life as an uneducated worker, or disappear altogether to mysterious work camps from which none have ever returned.

While Lu’s imagined world doesn’t have quite as many layers as Hunger Games, the care she takes to make it believable and consistent pays off. Anyone with the most basic understanding of the issues facing us today will be able to sympathize with the challenges Lu’s characters face. Her competent female characters help buoy the story and turn the damsel-in-distress cliché on its head. Day himself, who is only 15, has a Peter Pan appeal that teen girl readers will love. (I also wonder how much the popularity of these kind of stories is due to the independence of their protagonists, compared to the overprotected lives many teens lead today.) All in all, it is a dystopian tale that is not quite as bleak or scary as many YA novels, which makes it more appealing to me as an adult reader. I enjoyed Legend — in fact, my only disappointment came towards the end, when I realized the series of revelations about the true nature of the book’s world was a just a set-up for future sequels (the first is due next fall).

What is perhaps most exciting is that Lu is still young — she only graduated from the University of Southern California in 2006 — and her skill as a storyteller has many years to grow. She is the art director at Online Alchemy, a video game company; according to her website her plans to expand her fledgling franchise include a movie (CBS owns the rights) and a cartoon show for younger audiences following the earlier adventures of Day.

This book received an advance push so big (mailings to reviewers started last May, and included an entire package of material — and a refrigerator magnet) that it made me and other critics wary. However, as others have already pointed out, this is one “buzzy” book that seems to have been (almost) worth the hype. For lovers of Les Miz and Hunger Games, I highly recommend Legend.

Ever need to explain the life and death of Darth Vader to a friend, but didn’t have time to sit through the 13 hours and 23 minutes of the Star Wars saga with them? Fortunately, some Italian designers have solved that problem with a pictogram that tells someone everything they need to know about the Dark Lord.

The History of Darth Vader (source: H-57)

“The History of Darth Vader” is part of a series of historical pictograms that explain and satirize the life arcs of iconic people in history (real or fictional). The posters — created by H-57, an advertising and design studio located in Milan, Italy — came from a collaboration with the blog-slash-studio First Floor Under.

For the H-57 principles — Matteo Civaschi, Gianmarco Milesi, and Sabrina Di Gregorio — this isn’t the first (nor probably the last) Star Wars themed project. According to the official Star Wars blog, the three are huge fans of the Saga. Last September, H-57 initiated a series of typographic posters to benefit children. Each poster depicts a key character, built exclusively from type fonts.

They printed some as gifts for customers to show H-57’s creativity. Then the images of Darth Vader, Yoda, and a Stormtrooper — using typefaces with names like Bodoni Bold and Helvetica Light Condensed — were posted online and within days went viral.

A pet cat gets credit for inspiring the designers, having knocked Civaschi’s Darth Vader mask to the floor and into little letter-shaped pieces.

Use Your Force To Help Children posters are raising money for Make-a-Wish (source: H-57)

With help from Lucasfilm, posters for the “Use Your Force to Help Children” campaign were available on eBay — through the end of this month — with proceeds going to Make-A-Wish Italy, part of the worldwide organization raising money to grant wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. The poster for the November exhibit of these special canvas editions is also worth a look.

Star Wars is a popular subject for other artists at FFU. For some other Star Wars related work, check out the illustrations of different perspectives on famous Saga scenes using the signature dangling legs of FFU. That art is credited to designers at TBWA/Italy. Also, illustrator Liam Brazier has a series of abstract posters of Star Wars characters.

h/t: @panah

2007:

The United States Supreme Court ruled yesterday against a home care aide from Queens and upheld federal regulations that exempt most home care workers from minimum-wage and overtime protections.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he would seek to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to ensure that home aides were protected. He said the court decision highlighted “a significant gap in the protections of our laws,” and added that he would work with his colleagues “on a fair solution that treats these hardworking caregivers with the dignity and respect they deserve”.

The home care aide’s name was Evelyn Coke, and she died in 2009:

Year in and year out, Evelyn Coke left her Queens house early to go to the homes of elderly, sick, often dying people. She bathed them, cooked for them, helped them dress and monitored their medications. She sometimes worked three consecutive 24-hour shifts. She loved the work, but she earned only around $7 an hour and got no overtime pay. For years Ms. Coke, a single mother of five, quietly grumbled, and then, quite uncharacteristically, rebelled. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 2007, Ms. Coke sued to reverse federal labor regulations that exempt home care agencies from having to pay overtime.

Yesterday:

The Obama administration proposed regulations on Thursday to give the nation’s nearly two million home care workers minimum wage and overtime protections. Those workers have long been exempted from coverage. Labor unions and advocates for low-wage workers have pushed for the changes, contending that the 37-year-old exemption improperly swept these workers, who care for many elderly and disabled Americans, into the same “companion” category as baby sitters. The administration’s move calls for home care aides to be protected under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the nation’s main wage and hour law.
The White House said 92 percent of these workers were women, nearly 30 percent were African-American and 12 percent Hispanic. Nearly 40 percent rely on public benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. While industry experts say an overwhelming majority are paid at least the minimum wage, many do not receive a time-and-a-half premium when they work more than 40 hours a week. Twenty-two states do not include home health care workers under their wage and hour laws.
Noting that nearly 90 percent of the nation’s home care aides work for agencies, Labor Department officials said such aides would receive the new wage and hour protections. The department said some companions employed by individuals for activities like helping them take walks or engage in hobbies would still be exempt from minimum wage and overtime coverage.

Medicare and Medicaid cover 75% of the cost of home care aides, but nursing homes, the alternative to home care, are ruinously expensive for state and federal governments. Home care aides are a good deal all around, so we should pay them, don’t you think? We’ll hear the usual screeching from conservative politicians and lobbyists but if this bloviating, useless gas bag can make $1.6 million for lobbying members of Congress we can certainly afford time and a half for the women who care for the people who can’t work anymore. If we can’t, if we can’t pay these workers properly, when 40% of them are eligible for food stamps, then all that bullshit we’re always spouting about the inherent dignity of honest labor is about as meaningful as any of the 676 GOP debates on cable television.

Evelyn Coke lost her court case, and Kennedy didn’t get it done in the time he had, but I’m sure both Kennedy and Ms. Coke would be pleased to know advocates kept pushing until they won.

This game is awesome. I’m a big fan of games where you sit down with a handful of friends or family, everyone has their beverage of choice (usually hot tea at our house), and you play a good-paced, interesting, strategy game. Settlers of Catan has been the long-time favorite in the Blanc household. Lately we’ve been having fun with Ticket to Ride and Power Grid.

A few weeks ago my sister and brother-in-law came over for game night and we all learned the game for the first time. We all loved it and picked up on it quickly. And so now, Puerto Rico is a contender for favorite board game. And that says a lot.

Two things I like about Puerto Rico: (1) there are no dice to roll and so it’s almost entirely a strategy based game with no good or bad luck injected to swing the game one way or the other; and (2) even though it has rounds and turns, everyone is playing all the time — it’s very involved and doesn’t get boring.



Get it from Amazon

To give your Instapaper account a boost for the holidays, here’s a hand-picked selection of great 2011 stories from the editor of Give Me Something To Read, Richard Dunlop-Walters.

(He’s British and may or may not own a monocle, so you know he has good taste in writing.)

∞ Permalink

Most of you probably don’t know that for every summer in high school and college I worked for my father’s commercial construction company doing manual labor and carpentry. It was a great job that gave me a great skill set, but more importantly I learned about what tools were crap and what tools were great.
Most tools on a carpenters tool belt start at $20 and when you think about how many they carry it is easy to see how fast that all adds up — so carpenters are prone to buying the best they can afford so that it lasts a really long time.
One of the best tools I was every introduced to was this Klein screwdriver.
Usually I would say run away from these types of multi-bit screwdrivers, but not this time. I own four of them. Yes, four. I bought my first one back in 2003 and I still have it and use it.
I beat things in place with the back of it and have never had an issue. I keep one in my car, one at my desk, one in both of my tool bags. This is something that really everyone should own — it is truly fantastic.
∞

Drop caps have been around for years in the print industry, but they are still pretty rare in the web world despite the :first-letter selector having been around for a fair few years. Let’s take a look at how we can create a cool drop cap for our web designs and spice it up with some stylish CSS3 text-shadow effects.

The design we’ll be creating features a large drop cap at the start of a block of text. The actual drop cap effect will be created with the :first-letter selector, while the extra effects are added with the help of CSS text-shadow.
View the CSS drop cap demo
The HTML structure
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>CSS Drop Shadow</title>

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" />

</head>

<body>

<div>
<p>You either die a hero or You live long enough to see yourself become the villain.</p>
</div>

</body>
</html>
Every web project begins with the basic HTML structure. For this demo file the HTML page is made up of the usual Doctype and Head elements before the quote is laid out as a basic paragraph element. We’ll be using CSS selectors to create our drop cap so no special IDs or classes are required.
The CSS styling
body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, img, form, fieldset, input, textarea, blockquote {
margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0;
}

body {
font-family: "Chunk", Sans-Serif; color: #fff;
background: #566074 url(bg.png);
}

@font-face {
font-family: Chunk;
src: url("Chunk.ttf") format("truetype");
}

div {
width: 730px; margin: 150px auto;
}
The CSS demo file begins with a reset to remove any default browser styling, then the main font styling is added to the body. You’ll notice the use of the “Chunk” font; this custom font is being added with the help of @font-face.

p {
font-size: 50px; line-height: 80px;
text-transform: uppercase;
text-shadow: 10px 10px 0 rgba(255,255,255,0.07);
}
Now the slab-serif font is in place the size and line-height of the typography can be set. The text-transform property ensures all the text appears in caps despite how it is written in the HTML file, then the text-shadow property is used along with RGBa colour values to add a subtle ghost effect to the text.

p:first-child:first-letter {
font-size: 160px; float: left; margin: 20px 20px 0 0; line-height: 0.8;
}
Now the main text is in place we can finally get around to styling up the drop cap. The first letter is targeted with the handy :first-letter selector, but to avoid having drop caps on every paragraph on our page we also need to use the :first-child selector to target only the first letter of the first paragraph. Just four CSS declarations are needed to correctly style up the drop cap. First the letter is increased in size so it’s large enough to span across two lines of the paragraph, then it is floated left to allow it to break out of the paragraph’s flow. A touch of margin on the top and right help tweak the drop cap into place and add some space between this first letter and the remainder of the sentence. Everything looks fine in Firefox so far, but if we test it out in WebKit browsers (Safari & Chrome) they both seem to place the drop cap higher than Firefox. We can easily fix this with an extra line-height declaration. This makes no difference to the Firefox version while lining everything up in Safari and Chrome.

p:first-child:first-letter {
font-size: 160px; float: left; margin: 20px 20px 0 0; line-height: 0.8;;
text-shadow: 4px 4px 0 #566074, 7px 7px 0 #fff;
}
The basic drop cap is complete, but traditionally drop caps come along in all kinds of fancy styling. We can add some cool effects of our own with the help of the CSS3 text-shadow property. A duplicate of the text is created and offset by 4px, then a second duplicate is created at 7px. When the first duplicate is set to the same colour as the background it creates a cool retro style effect. For more drop cap effects check out my old text-shadow effects post.
The final drop cap effect
View the CSS drop cap demo

The 2012 Neu Year productivity calendar shows you the whole year at once as one large poster. It’s broken up by week (rather than month) because most people plan and organize their live in week increments. It’s two-sided so you can hang it vertically or horizontally based on where you want to place it.



Get it from Neu Year

Advertise here with BSA
So far in our Best of 2011 series, we’ve shown you our picks for the best free fonts and the best jQuery plugins. For this week, we’ve went back through all the UI PSDs that’s been released over the past year and picked our favorites. We saw plenty of these types of UI files being released in 2011, so it was very difficult to sift through them and find the ones that really stood out.

Classic Grey Psd Web UI Set

A complete classic and light grey themed psd web user interface to design any clean and modern website. Buttons, Slider, Input, Pagination and more.

Retro Web Ribbons Vintage Pack

A complete set of retro and vintage web menu ribbons, retro social icons, vintage web buttons. Ideal to create a vintage web design and make your project stands out.

Minimalist Dark Psd Web UI Set

A minimalist dark psd web ui with web elements to make your website design stands out in the crowd. It comes with a myriad of colors for the elements hover states. Web page elements include: Buttons, Search Box, Social Icons, Tabs, Pagination and more.

Cloudy UI Kit

A light and airy, but highly detailed UI kit. It includes loads of buttons, sliders, and more.

Butterscotch UI Kit

A gorgeous UI kit with resizable shape layers in a clean, well organized PSD file.

Sleek UI Elements

This PSD contains a number of useful elements in a modern, sleek style.

Black UI Kit

A fully layered and very well organized PSD with all the elements you need for designing a web site or app in a dark style.

iTunes Inspired UI Kit

A full UI kit which was originally inspired by the iTunes UI. The kit includes all sorts of toggles, tabs, buttons, sliders and fields.

Vertical Navigation Menu

A sweet and simple vertical navigation menu with styles for sub menus thrown in for good measure.

Moonify UI

Moonify UI is a detailed PSD containing over 60 elements, all well organized and easily editable.

Virtually everybody I know with Instapaper and/or Read It Later uses it all the time — the ability to read long articles in a clean format, at your leisure, on planes or subways or just when you have a few minutes to kill standing in line at the supermarket, is a great improvement to quality of life. And both of them are now popular enough that they can start extracting interesting patterns from their data.

Read It Later has a new post up about which authors are the most read on its platform, and the results are quite startling: the list of most-saved authors, and the list of authors with the highest return rate (the authors who people actually read, after they’ve saved an article) are both dominated by a lot of Gawker Media writers. “Nick Denton’s Gawker Media properties (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Deadspin, Gawker),” write Coco Krumme and Mark Armstrong, “are among the most popular any way you cut it.”

This is partly because Gawker Media is a big and popular media company. But it’s also, I think, indicative of an important trend in the way that information is presented and consumed online.

There’s no doubt that our digital lives are becoming increasingly cluttered, and that we’re presented with more information per minute spent online than at any time in the past. There’s been a steady rise in the density of information that websites present to us, and the most successful websites (the Huffington Post and the Daily Mail are prime examples here) tend to fill their pages with enormous numbers of links and shiny things to click on.

One of the things that the Gawker redesign did was to make every Gawker Media webpage extremely dense, with lots of links to lots of stories. That’s a good thing. But it also makes it harder to give individual stories, especially long ones, the kind of space that readers like. And so those readers turn to tools like Read It Later when they come across a Gawker Media post they want to give real attention to.

Call it the density barbell: information is being presented in either a very dense form, or else in a very clean and sparse form. Both have their uses. And as tools like Instapaper and Read It Later become more widely used, websites can be even more aggressive in ramping up the density on their pages, safe in the knowledge readers can easily strip it away if they want to.

This kind of binary approach to information stands in stark contrast to what’s going on at Google, where a redesign of Google Reader, Gmail and other web apps has met with a vast outpouring of unhappiness. What’s happened there is that Google, in an attempt to make information easier to read, has massively decreased the density of its pages — even as the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction. For any one piece of information, that’s great — it’s easier to find and read. But for information consumption and navigation purposes, it’s dreadful: the redesigns slow down productivity, in a world where Reader and Gmail are key productivity tools.

What Google should have done, I think, is go in the other direction, and increase the density of the information in its apps — while adding some kind of simple tool allowing extraneous information to be eradicated at the touch of a button. People like simple and uncluttered in theory, but in practice we’re on an inexorable ride towards complex and cluttered — with tools then added on top for the purposes of filtering or reading. Give me everything, and then give me an easy way to find and read what I want. Don’t give me an unacceptable subset of everything and ask me to make do.

Suggested Names for the Dogs I See in the Neighborhood All the Time
Elvis Costello Albums We Should Pretend Do Not Exist
Grievances Against America, Volume XII
Books We Should Collectively Opt Out of Believing We Should Read
Cheese Rank Index
Preferred Pirate Nicknames
List of People I Know Who Ball Their Socks
Lucky Ones
Crazy Ones
Unnecessary Flavors of Ice Cream
Things Believed to Be Said by Oscar Wilde That Weren’t
Good Ideas Had While Showering
Worthwhile Arguments
Suggested Names for Yoga Poses
Desired Animals for Domestication
Favorite Canadians
Imaginary Muppets for Your Consideration
Ways to Initiate a Mutiny

Leave it to Restoration Hardware to find a way to wrap up our iPhone and USB charging cables in dark brown leather. This Roll Up Travel Charger is basically a charging port that includes chargers for iDevices, USB, mini USB, and Samsung mobiles. Everything wraps up nicely into a leather roll and is easy to toss into a bag, as opposed to fighting cable clutter. And if you travel a lot, having a companion like this as your dedicated traveling charger would be quite nice (and classy) indeed. (Via 52 Tiger.)



Get it from Restoration Hardware

Shifty Jelly’s counterargument to some of my Android opinions, which provides a concrete data point showing that money can be made on Android, concludes with this:

Finally, we’d like to publicly challenge Marco Arment to bring Instapaper to Android and drop the negative attitude. We’ll bet you one large cup of our finest Australian Coffee that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by just how great the Google Market is. In many ways it’s a better place to be than iOS, since so many developers are ignoring it, and yet there is a massive install base waiting to give you their money.

I can’t afford to invest months of development time into learning the platform and making an Android app, then supporting and maintaining it in parallel with my iOS app indefinitely, with so many other data points telling me that it almost certainly won’t be worth the investment.

So I’ll make it more interesting. Instapaper has a public API. I’m not aware of any good, stable, feature-rich Android Instapaper clients that actually use it and aren’t just ripping off my iOS app’s private API.

If you make the first great Android Instapaper client that:

uses the official API
contains a significant portion of the iOS app’s features, the details of which we’d work out privately
runs on a wide variety of Android devices and OS versions including modern smartphones, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, and whichever 10” tablet matters at the time of completion
is priced at $2.99 or higher in the U.S. with approximately equivalent pricing elsewhere, and satisfies requirements to be sold in the Google Marketplace, Amazon Appstore, and whatever B&N uses for the Nook Tablet

I’ll call it the official Instapaper app for Android, I’ll promote it on the Instapaper site, I’ll drop the subscription requirement for its API access, you’ll answer all support email that comes from it, and we’ll split the net revenue 50/50.

What do you say?

UPDATE: I don’t intend for multiple developers to compete for this with whoever gets it “first” winning, causing everyone else to have invested a lot of effort for nothing. That’s too close to spec work for my taste, and I wouldn’t ask anyone to do that.

I’m talking with Shifty Jelly and a small number of other developers to see if we should take this somewhere. If we proceed, I will choose one developer to proceed with before anyone else does any work.

∞ Permalink

When I was a kid, not only did I have to walk to school in the snow (uphill both ways, mind you), but I also had to keep my Legos in a big, heavy, plastic bin. I spent half of my play time digging around in that 2-foot-deep bin looking for a particular Lego (until finally conceding, and just dumping the whole bin of Legos onto the floor). Then I would spend the other half of play time picking up all those Legos and putting them back into the bin. If only the Storage Bag and Play Mat-in-One had existed 20 years ago…



Get it from The Spoon Sisters

Amazon’s new Kindle Touch, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch (my review), and the Kobo Touch are surprisingly similar.

Nook Simple Touch, Kindle Touch, and Kobo Touch

They all have the same E-Ink Pearl screen with the same contrast, the same resolution, and the same type of IR touch-screen sensor. (Any screen differences in the photos are the result of uneven lighting, not any real differences.)

They’re all available for $99, but the Kindle and Kobo both show ads (“special offers”) at that price — if you’re looking for an ad-free reader, the Nook is the least expensive at $99, with the ad-free Kobo at $129 and the ad-free Kindle at $139.

Content libraries and ecosystems

All of the major e-readers have similar content libraries these days.

The Nook is particularly good for magazine availability, even slightly exceeding the Kindle’s availability in my searches. But Barnes & Noble’s content store is very buggy for me: I often get errors claiming unspecified problems with purchases, downloads, or connectivity. (This also happens on the Nook Tablet.)

Kobo’s ecosystem is still a disadvantage. In my searches, while book availability was pretty good, it had the highest prices most often. And critically, its magazine and newspaper selection is abysmal — if you intend to read magazines or newspapers on your e-reader, you shouldn’t consider Kobo.

Hardware and bezels

They’re all similar sizes. The Nook is the thickest and chunkiest. The Kobo is the lightest, at 185g versus 211g for the Nook and Kindle.

The thick IR-touch bezels are all deeper than on non-touch readers. The Nook’s is deepest and the Kobo’s is the most shallow:

From the top of the stack: Nook, Kindle, Kobo bezels under diagonal lighting

As I emphasized with the lighting angle here, the deep IR bezels cast shadows onto the screen margins. This is especially noticeable with close, single-point light, like a lamp on an end table or night stand.

The shadows amplify the perceived depth of the bezels, and they can be particularly problematic when they cover text or interface elements too close to the screen margins. The deeper bezels also make it more awkward to hit touch targets near the screen edges.

The Kobo’s touch sensor seems to work as well as the others, so I’m curious why the Nook and Kindle needed such deep bezels.

The non-touch Kindle 4

The 2011 $79 Kindle with buttons, which people have settled on calling the Kindle 4 (therefore, so will I), remains a strong competitor here, too.

Kindle Touch (left) and Kindle 4

Compared to all three touch readers, it’s cheaper ($79 with ads, $109 without), thinner, and noticeably lighter (166g).

It lacks the audio features of the Kindle Touch and previous Kindles, such as text-to-speech and MP3 playback, but I’ve never used those features or seen anyone else use them. (If you actually will use those features, the Kindle Touch is the only option for you.)

The Kindle 4 also has a shallower screen bezel than any of the touch readers:

From the top of the stack: Kindle Touch, Kindle 4 bezels under diagonal lighting

Again, this reduces shadows in the reading area and make it easier to read with light hitting the screen at an angle, which for me is almost always.

Page-turning and performance

The Kobo Touch is the slowest at page-turns, followed closely by the Kindle Touch. In fact, my old Kindle 2 turns pages slightly faster than the Kindle Touch. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

The Kindle 4 and Nook both turn pages at about the same speed (I can’t tell the difference, at least), and they’re much faster than the others. This is interesting: the Nook’s speed means that it is possible to make a touch-screen e-reader turn pages as quickly as one with buttons.

Of the touch readers, only the Nook has hardware page-turn buttons that you can optionally use, but they’re uncomfortable to use because they require too much pressure. On the Kindle and Kobo, you must turn pages by tapping the screen. I wish they all had good page-turn buttons — you’d think the hardware would be optimized for the most common action that people perform when using e-readers, but that’s unfortunately not the case.

With page-turn buttons, you can simply rest your finger on them while reading and push down slightly to advance to the next page. I miss this ability on the touch readers: you need to move your finger from wherever it’s resting (which can’t be the screen, of course) into the screen area and tap each time. My ideal e-reader would have a touch screen as responsive as the Nook’s and good hardware page-turn buttons, but that doesn’t exist today.

Don’t worry, fingerprints aren’t very noticeable on the touch readers. The matte e-ink screen surface minimizes their appearance, and they’re easily wiped off.

The mysteriously slow Kindle Touch

The entire Kindle Touch interface feels sluggish. Page turns, menus, and navigation all respond to touches only after lengthy delays. Its overall performance is similar to the Kindle 2.

Here’s a quick video of the Kindle Touch and Kindle 4, side by side, turning pages and then going to the home screen:

(Sorry, your browser does not support modern videos.)Page-flipping responsiveness of the Kindle Touch (left) and Kindle 4. Download.

E-ink is always sluggish compared to traditional LCDs, and the IR touch-screen could plausibly add latency to touch responses, but we know from the Nook that it’s possible to make a much faster touch-screen e-reader than the Kindle Touch.

It doesn’t seem like the touch input is at fault. Even pressing the home button on the Kindle Touch results in a long delay before the home screen appears. The Kindle 4 is much faster at that, and everything else. Presumably, the higher-end Touch doesn’t have a slower CPU, so this is likely a software problem.

The Nook Simple Touch wasn’t particularly fast when it launched nearly 6 months ago, but Barnes & Noble improved its performance with software updates, and it’s now just as responsive as the non-touch Kindle 4. I hope Amazon can achieve similar gains with a software fix for the Kindle Touch very soon, because its sluggish performance makes it difficult to recommend.

Text controls

Both Kindles’ text controls are mostly unchanged from the Kindle 3 (now renamed the “Kindle Keyboard”).

My impression of the Nook’s text controls still stands from the review: I can’t find a comfortable margin width or text size, since the increments available are too far apart. The margin is especially problematic: the smallest-margins setting, the only usable width in my opinion, puts the text too close to the deep bezel and its shadow.

The Kobo’s controls are very good, with very fine-grained increments for text size, margins, and line spacing. It’s also the only one to offer a toggle for text justification. Since it won’t hyphenate, its justification isn’t very good, but it’s nice to be able to turn justification off.

The Nook and Kindles often justify text with no option to disable it. The Kindles won’t hyphenate at all, and the Nook hyphenates too aggressively.

All of the readers except the Kobo use book-style indented paragraphs, while the Kobo uses web-style block paragraphs.

The Nook and Kindles offer the nice Caecilia font (the only Kindle font available before the Kindle 3), which I prefer to the other options available on those readers. The Kobo doesn’t, but its default Rockwell font is similar and is also highly readable on e-ink.

Touch versus non-touch controls

The biggest problems I keep running into with the touch readers are non-obvious tap zones and gestures.

When navigating lists and menus, I often find myself wondering where I’m supposed to tap, and whether I should tap, tap-and-hold, or swipe. This is exacerbated in magazines and newspapers, since reading them involves so much navigation.

The interfaces are more obvious on the non-touch Kindle 4, since hardware buttons and on-screen cursors and highlights make it more obvious what to do. But I also keep touching the screen and being disappointed that it “doesn’t work”.

I thought touch readers would be definitively better than non-touch models, but I was wrong: in reality, it’s a toss-up.

Magazines and newspapers

You’d think a touch e-reader would be a huge improvement for magazines and newspapers. Jumping between sections and articles can be faster on a touch screen, but it isn’t always.

Periodical navigation is most intuitive to me on the Kindle 4, followed by the Kindle Touch. I perform navigational errors more often on the Nook. (I didn’t test periodicals on the Kobo because the selection is so poor.)

This was a surprise: I expected the Kindle Touch to be the best for periodicals, but its poor performance hurts it, and navigating lists can be unintuitive.

Highlights, notes, and typing

The non-touch Kindle 4 is understandably awful at text input, requiring you to move a cursor around the on-screen keyboard with the directional buttons to select each letter (arranged alphabetically, not as a QWERTY keyboard), much like the painful process of entering text on a game console or an Apple TV. If you plan to do a lot of highlighting and note-taking, definitely don’t get the Kindle 4.

Highlighting and note-taking on a touch reader is much easier, but it’s still not as easy, responsive, or precise as on an iPhone or iPad.

Among the touch readers, the Kindle Touch has the worst text selection: you need to tap and hold on the first word, then drag to the last word and release. There’s no way to modify a selection if you want to expand or refine it, and it’s difficult to reliably get it right the first time. The Nook and Kobo both offer iOS-like “handles” on the sides of the selection that you can easily drag to refine it. The Nook is best here, beating the Kobo in responsivenes[…]

In the internet marketing arena, ‘call to action’ is a critical term that is commonly used in web design and user experience i.e. UX. This term refers to those components on a web page or website that ask for a desired action from the visitor or the potential customer. The most frequent manifestation of a call to action in web pages comes out in the form of clickable buttons. Such buttons are specially designed to perform the predefined action when they are clicked.

In this collection, we are revealing an assortment of websites that demonstrate extremely effective call to action buttons that perform their predefined actions quite smartly. Here is the full list after this jump, enjoy!

Showcase of Convincing Call to Action Buttons
Light CMS

Ronin App

Vision

Alan Power

Mozilla

GetShopped

Storeenvy

Commercial

Wufoo

Web App Heaven

Resume Baking

Concept Engine

Nowup

Reynolds Digital

Custom Bags HQ

Make It Bead

Geekletics

Dunnellon Depot

Remember The Milk

Dailymile

Plan

Skype

NCover

Basecamp

280 Slides

Live Resto

InstantLoop

Transmission Apps

Dashboard

FileShare

Mobile Web Book

Elegant Themes

The Highland Fling

Fresh Books

Xero

Play in Traffik

Manageme7

Boagworld

Volusion

Wijmo

Date My Mate

Concentrate

Launchlist

Capo

Bloomfire

Codecanyon

Conclusion
This collection is presented to give you some idea of distinctive and creative approaches to create your own calls to action buttons that actually work. Share with us what you feel about this collection and which call to action button pleases you the most and why? Also do let us know what is your approach to creating call to action buttons for your website?

Creating Slick, Stylish and Scalable CSS3 ButtonsA Discovery Into 30 Beautiful And Inspirational Korean Websites DesignThe Art Of Applying Rule Of Five Plus Or Minus Two For An Effective Wireframe10 Principles Of Navigation Design And Why Quality Navigation Is So Critical
Written by: Jameel Khan for Onextrapixel - Showcasing Web Treats Without A Hitch | 6 comments

Post Topic(s): Inspiration

People always ask what font I use to create my annotated code examples in my web design tutorials here on Line25, so I figured a roundup of the best hand drawn fonts would prove quite handy. This post rounds up a range of free fonts based on various handwriting styles. If you’re in need of a font to add a human touch to your design in the form of a note or a personal message, you can be sure you’ll find the perfect font in this collection.

Jenna Sue
Hand of Sean
Daniel
GoodDog
Sweetly Broken
Lovely Eunike Hans
Max’s Handwritin
Angelina
Journal
Jinky
Throw My Hands Up in the Air
Christopher Hand
Rabiohead
Joy Like Sunshine Through My Windowpane
The Great Escape
Akbar
Talking to the Moon
Dear Joe
Gunny
Skinny
A Year Without Rain
Yank
Faraco Hand (As seen on Line25!)

Exactly what it says on the tin. Brew Methods is a collection of links to coffee brewing methods. Including Aeropress, french press, pour over, siphon, stove top, etc. If you’re feeling adventurous and want to deviate from the daily grind of how you normally brew your coffee, you’re sure to find a few new methods here.

✚ Permalink

Brutal.

Here’s what Microsoft executive Craig Mundie told Forbes about Siri:

People are infatuated with Apple announcing it. It’s good
marketing, but at least as the technological capability you could
argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows
Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.

“Good marketing.”

 ★ 

Rian van der Merwe:

I’m worried that the wells of attention are being drilled to
depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps”
and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be
“consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning — just
enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs.

As advertising clickthrough rates continue to drop, the ads become
more desperate and invasive, and readers are starting to notice
and do something about it.

 ★ 

Infographics is a new way of showing information through graphical representation. We recently posted some interesting posts on infographics that you can also find on the net. Infographics not only show the information in a neat and clean manner but also is very easy to understand. Through inforgraphics, a large amount of information can be presented in a well summarized format.

At the moment, we are going to demonstrate you how infographics can increase your understanding of the interlinking world of social media and it’s impact on the global internet users.

You are welcome if you want to share more social media related infographic that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com, just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.

Social Media Brandsphere

Are Facebook Users More Trusting?

Social Media and College Admissions

Real Estate Professionals & Social Media Infographic

Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

Building a Company With Social Media

Airlines: The Future of Loyalty is Social

Twitter Perceptions of Google Buzz Over Time

The Social Media Effect

Age Distribution Per Site

Google Facts and Figures

How The World Spends Its Time Online

Twitter Users Profile

Google Vs Facebook

10 Levels of Intimacy in Today’s Communication

Social Marketing Compass

Balance Your Media Diet

Twitter Territory

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

Word of Mouth Visualized

Social Web Reputation Management Cycles

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits

Facebook, Social Media Juggernaut

China’s Social Media Map

Conversation Prism

Inside the Political Twittersphere

Popular Site Demographics

Twitter’s Meteoric Rise Compared to Facebook

The Boom of Social Sites

Web Trend Map

Most Viral Brand of 2010

The New Marketing Trifecta

Social Media : Facts and Figures for B2B Sales

The Revised Social Media Effect

 

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Not all teas are brewed the same way. Different types of tea (green, black, white, etc.) require different water temperatures and extraction times in order to brew just right. The Breville One-Touch Tea Maker takes all the guess work out of tea brewing. It is fully programmable for all types of tea, water temperatures, and steep times; it has a moving tea basket; and it has a timer so you can wake up to your tea already brewed for you. Moreover, the German-made Schott glass is not only durable, it’s also stain resistant.



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That is, the <hr> element. With the help of a few contributors, I put together this page of very simple styles for them. You could get a lot fancier with an element like a <div> that can hold content, but I like the semantics of a horizontal rule. It's an emphatic break between two sections [...]

A CSV (Comma Separated Value) file is usually sufficient for exporting MySQL data as an Excel Spreadsheet. These CSV files are data only though. A real Excel spreadsheet has formatting, formulas and perhaps even graphics — the difference between a simple method of data transfer and a professional report.
This tutorial shows how to [...]

Replacement Therapy - Magazine - The Atlantic:
It’s not our devices that wear thin, it’s our patience with them.

Excellent article about planned obsolescence shifting from supply side, to demand side.

Video games often use parallax scrolling technique to create an illusion of depth by moving multiple layers of images at different speed. This technique can also be applied in web design. This post consists a list of mind blowing parallax scrolling sites, design tips, and resource tutorials. If you are considering to start a parallax [...]Advertise here with BSA

Nice collection of shitty mobile web experiences, curated by Jen Simmons and Brad Frost.

 ★ 

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Tons of new websites are being created everyday and it is noticable that if you want to be unique and stand out from the crowd you need to find creative ways of using type, pictures and other design elements in any kind of work you produce. For that reason I would suggest you give a try on handwritten fonts.
Handwritten type are the perfect choice if you want to add some charm and personal touch to your work. With appropriate and well thought-out use of white space, handwritten fonts do bring your designs style and elegance. Nevertheless, you should avoid excessive use of handwritten fonts in your work because it can at times be hard to read. I would not recommend you use them as the main or focal font, use them with a little bit of subtetly instead.
In this collection I would like to present you my favorite handwritten fonts. I’ve collected these 25 beautiful and free handwritten fonts over the years and would like to share them with you. I am sure you will love them.
You might also like: 50 Beautiful and Fresh Free Fonts → Useful and Free Pictogram Dingbat Fonts → 25 Completely Free Fonts Perfect for @fontface → Top 20 Free Fonts for Distinctive Headlines and Titles → 34 Free and Elegant TrueType Mini Pixel Fonts →Jellyka – Estrya’s Handwriting
License: Free for a personal use.
Jenna Sue
License: Free for personal & commercial use.
Christopher Hand
License: Free for personal use.
Honey Script
License: Free.
Angelina
License: Free.
James Fajardo
License: Free.
Journal
License: Unknown.
Hand of Sean
License: Free for personal use.
Throw My Hands Up in the Air
License: Free for personal use.
Rolina
License: Free.
Note this!
License: Free.
Post-it Penscript
License: Free.
Mawns Handwriting
License: Free for personal use.
FFF Tusj
License: Free for personal and commercial use.
Jenny
License: Free for personal use.
Luna Bar
License: Shareware.
Just Me Again Down Here
License: Free for personal use.
PopStar Autograph
License: Free for personal use.
Carefree
License: Free for personal use.
CAC Pinafore
License: Unknown.
Designer Notes
License: Public domain / GNU GPL.
Pirmokas
License: Free for personal use.
Janda Romantic
License: Free for personal use.
Walt Disney Script
License: Freeware.
Kylie X
You might also like…50 Beautiful and Fresh Free Fonts → Useful and Free Pictogram Dingbat Fonts → 25 Completely Free Fonts Perfect for @fontface → 34 Free and Elegant TrueType Mini Pixel Fonts → Top 20 Free Fonts for Distinctive Headlines and Titles → Useful and Free Pictogram Dingbat Fonts →

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The best bluetooth headset I have ever owned. I love this thing. (Note: I have tested this and it has not survived the washing machine and dryer. Even with the standard rice treatment.)
Also comes in Midnight, Smokescreen, and Silverlining.
∞

After I posted the Tèo I received many emails about the no-nos of using teas that come in tea bags. One fine reader pointed out this Teastick Infuser that is great for brewing single cups of loose leaf tea with easy cleanup. The Teastick is made out of stainless steel and is designed so you can scoop the loose leaf tea, slide the filter grate down, and then brew your single cup of fresh and delicious hot tea.



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Html5 finally solves an age old problem of being able to upload files while also showing the upload progress. Essentially, what you need to do is hook into the server’s byte stream while it is receiving a file so you know how many bytes you’ve received and somehow convey that information back to the client browser, while it is still in the process of uploading the file.
Matlus has written a really throughout tutorial on how to make a HTML5 File Upload with Progress, which is uploading of files using XMLHttpRequest and providing upload progress information to the end-user. This solution does not require any change to the server side, at least insofar as handling the multipart/form-data protocol. So existing server side logic should remain unchanged, which makes adapting this technology that much easier.

Requirements: HTML5 Supported Browsers Demo: http://exposureroom.biz/upload.aspx License: MIT License
SponsorsProfessional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications

The holidays are quickly approaching, which means it’s almost time for the annual awkward tradition of giving and getting gifts. Whether you’re shopping for a designer or you are a designer working on your wish list, these fifteen gadgets and gifts are so awesome that you won’t want anything else.
Chopsticks, pens, gloves, these all [...]

Facebook has become an essential part of promoting a website or service online. Small blogs, discussion forums and huge commercial companies such as Coca-Cola and McDonalds are all using Facebook to promote their brand and interact with fans and [...]

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Nowadays, the iPhone and the iPad play a big part in our life, from apps to social networking, we all make use of them…what I like at apps is that all of them has fancy and glossy icons which are populating our devices and therefore, In this to show you how to design a Facebook icon following some easy steps.
This is what we`ll be creating…
Download the Source FilesFacebook Icon Source Files
Step 1First step, open Photoshop and create a new document of 600x400px:

Step 2Stylize the background by applying a blue gradient overlay (double click the first layer):

Step 3To draw the icon, select the Rounded Rectangle Tool(U) and with a radius of 20px, draw a rectangle of 115x115px:

Step 4Now we need to apply some layer styles…

…Pattern Overlay…

…Inner Shadow…

…Drop Shadow…

…Your button should now look like this:

Step 5Now you need to draw a vertical line on the left side of the button while still maintaing the rounded corners. Ctrl+Click on the button’s layer thumbnail to reveal the selection.
Create a new layer and select the Rectangular Marquee Tool(M). Choose Intersect With Selection mode and draw a rectangle:

Step 6Grab the Paint Bucket Tool(G) and paint the selection with a dark-blue color. Then, apply the next layer styles to the layer:
Gradient Overlay first…

…Pattern Overlay…

…The button should now look like this:

Step 7Now, with the Line Tool(U), draw 2 vertical lines just next to the shape just created. Make sure to make one lighter and the other one darker than the icon, to create a nice in-depth effect.

Step 8Now, we add the Facebook logo, which is the “f” letter using the Arial-Bold font sized at 80px.

Step 9Stylize the text by adding some small layer styles…
…Gradient Ovelay…

…Inner Shadow…

…Inner Shadow…

…The icon should now look like this:

Step 10Alomost done!
The last step is to give your icon the distinctive IOS glossiness.
OK, Ctrl+Click the icon main layer thumbnail in order to reveal the entire selection of the icon. Create a new layer above all of them (because all of the effects will be applied to all the elements).
Grab the Elliptical Marquee Tool(M) and in “Intersect with Selection” mode, try to create a selection like this:
Paint the selection white and reduce the layer’s opacity to 10%. You should now have a nice shiny effect which is applied to all of the elements.
Finished!The icon is now complete and ready to stand out on your Apple device. Following these simple steps, you can create any icon you want. If you have an app but don’t have an icon, simply open Photoshop and draw something…it is very easy and the result may just be outstanding!
I thank you for reading my tutorial and hope to hear your thoughts and feedback below.
Here is the finished Facebook icon:

You might also like…A Round-Up of 50 Fresh Photoshop Tutorials and Techniques → The Best 40 Photoshop Text Effects from 2009 → 49 Most Creative Photoshop Tutorials of 2009 → 50 Imaginative Fantasy Art Tutorials for Photoshop → 37 Cool Movie Poster and Text Effects Photoshop Tutorials → 29 Cool and Creative Text Effects Photoshop Tutorials → 28 Incredible Photoshop Image Manipulation Techniques and Tutorials → 33 Photoshop Tutorials for Designing Amazing Posters and Ads → 25 Beautiful & Fresh Photoshop Brush Sets for Brush Lovers → 50 Beautiful Light Effects Photoshop Brush Packs (740 Brushes) → 50 Photoshop Brush Collections – 1000s of Brushes → 40 Amazing Photoshop Brush Directories and Collections → 38 Watercolor Photoshop Brush Sets (950 Brushes) → 1000 Grunge Photoshop Brushes (40 Sets) →

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Quite some time ago, I did a quick shout out for the MonoPrice iPhone Backup Battery for the iPhone 3G. I really liked that model and it was a permanent staple in my Bad Ass Bag for the whole time I owned an iPhone 3G.

With my acquisition of an iPhone 4 last year (a gift from my wife), I knew I would eventually get the upgraded pack compatible with that model – The 1500mAh Backup Battery Pack for iPhone / iPod (Designed for iPhone 4/4S)

I’ve had it for a few weeks now and it is great. It provides enough backup power to charge up the iPhone back to full from about 30%, more than enough to get a couple of hours more heavy usage. It charges over USB in about three and a half hours. Plus, it plays off of the iPhone 4 design with the same slimness so carrying this in a pocket is a non-issue. Great if you are going to be giving your iPhone some heavy use yet don’t want to have something else weighing you down too much. And, at under $18.00, the price is right.

I really like these and recommend them highly. Like all of the MonoPrice stuff I have tried (i.e. a whole lot), it is great quality at an almost unbelievable price. A square deal for all involved.

Now, my friends at MonoPrice were kind enough to give me an extra one to give to one lucky reader. Those in the know, know the deal. For those that don’t, here it is:

To enter, please send me a message to @minimalmac on Twitter with the phrase “I got your back!” before midnight (Central Standard Time) tonight. No entries will be considered afterwards. Also, no submissions to my personal Twitter account for those that know it will be considered (please read this last sentence twice).

One winner will be selected tomorrow at random and notified by reply to their Twitter message. In that reply, I will give instructions for emailing me shipping information.

Email me your shipping info and the iPhone Backup Battery Pack will be sent out via USPS by early next week so set your expectations accordingly.

Got it? Great. Now, I’ve got your back!

Tour pages are one of the most important components for websites advertising apps and/or services. The tour page is often where interested users will either make the firm decision to sign up or move on to something else.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of pressure as a designer to get this right! Fear not however, [...]

With huge attention to the subtle details, Rob Hampson (lead designer at Slipstream) takes you through the stages of using Photoshop to create a set of beautiful social media buttons and their fellow rollovers, with plenty of tips along the way

In this writer’s opinion, LaCie makes the finest and most reliable external hard drives you can buy. I have 2 of the 1TB LaCie Hard Disks that I use for my media storage and external backup redundancy, and I have a LaCie Quadra that I use for my nightly SuperDuper clones. When on the road for extended trips I always take a portable hard drive with me so I can continue to do nightly backups, and I have additional storage in case I need it for whatever reason.

Right now my portable hard drive is a Western Digital My Passport. I was in a rush to buy it and so I drove to the nearest Best Buy and this was all they had. When the WD bites the dust, you know I’ll be replacing it with a LaCie.



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I recently wrote a post talking about the importance of thoroughly researching business objectives before starting your next web project. Although the post focused on expert reviews, heuristic evaluation, stats and competitive analysis, it did make passing reference to stakeholder interviews.
For Headscape, stakeholder interviews are a crucial tool in our web design arsenal. But what [...]

Geek Dad is written by engineer, father, nerd, and author of Wired.com’s GeekDad weblog, Ken Denmead. With a son of my own due early next year, this book is full of exactly the sort of projects I’m looking forward to doing. Of course, those days are still a few years down the road for me, but that doesn’t mean I’m very excited for those days to come.



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Being on Twitter all day can be a huge time suck. Yet, at over 250 million Tweets posted each day, and over 460,000 people that are signing up daily, one has to find a way to make Twitter work.

So how are the Guy Kawasaki’s and TweetSmarter’s of the world doing it? The answer I have found is to make use of Twitter tools. There exist a lot of them out there and they are the absolute key for me to make Twitter work.

At over 1 million apps and one new one being registered every second, it is very hard to know which one to pick. So here are my top 10 tools to help you transform your Twitter experience into something a lot more efficient and powerful:

#1 TweetStats – Full analytics for all your Tweets
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” said Peter Drucker a long time ago. With TweetStats, you have a powerful tool to measure all your Twitter behavior in one place. It shows you your Tweet timeline to understand how much you are Tweeting each day and each month. It also dives deep into analyzing your best times to Tweet via a Tweet Density report and follower comparisons.

Pro Tip: What I like best is the @reply and Retweet analysis. It gives you a clear picture if you hit the right balance of engagement and content Tweets.

#2 Nurph – The Ultimate Twitter Hashtag Tool
One of my most recent discoveries is Nurph. The App has received a revamp and is now more powerful than ever. It lets you invite friends into a private chat room via a simple Tweet. This is amazing if you want to take a brief connection to a new level and have a longer conversation. A great example for using Nurph is to keep your Twitter community engaged in longer talks. I also had great results using it for support purposes if you want to get feedback on your product or service.

Pro Tip: What I like best is that the App offers featured channels as well as an archive for your chat conversation.

#3 MarketMeSuite – Your powerful Tweeting dashboard
Although there are a ton of Social Media dashboards out there, MarketMeSuite is a great new solution that boasts a ton of additional features. You can connect multiple social networks and the App also supports PeerIndex and Klout support. On top scheduling and pulling in RSS, MarketMeSuite also allows you to white label your Tweets.

Pro Tip: A great feature of MarketMeSuite is to create reply campaigns which allows you to geo-tag and target users a lot more specifically than normal Tweets.

#4 ManageFlitter – Send tweet reminders for important events
Sometimes, finding those updates which are most useful on Twitter are buried somewhere amongst irrelevant Tweets. Whenever this happens, it is time for me to go ahead and sweep out all those Twitter accounts, which don’t add any value for me. With ManageFlitter this is super easy to do. The App displays all accounts which are inactive, don’t follow you back or are spamming your stream and you can unfollow them with just one click.

Pro Tip: What makes ManageFlitter most recommendable is that you don’t have to sign up for anything. You can sign in with Twitter, unfollow the people which don’t add value and off you go.

#5 StrawberryJ.am – Reading Tweets made simple
Seeing through the clutter on Twitter can be very hard sometimes. With StrawberryJ.am, there is no more searching through your stream for finding the good stuff. The app automatically finds the top mentioned Tweets and shows them in a new order beginning with most retweeted update at the start. You can also create lists and search terms that StrawberryJ.am filters for you with their goodness.

Pro Tip: If you really don’t want to sign into another new website each day, try StrawberryJ.am’s handy email feature. They will email you a summary every evening, which is super convenient.

#6 SocialBro – Managing your Twitter community made easy
If you are looking for a tool that tightly focuses on managing your community, look no further than SocialBro. The app lets you manage your lists, see your community in a map and browse your community conveniently based on their engagement. On top of this the app allows you to bucket your followers according to time zones which is very useful to know when to best reach them.

Pro Tip: What I like best here is that SocialBro shows you how fast your followers have been growing over the past and at which times you have lost most followers.

#7 Tweriod – Find your most valuable Tweeting times
This is one of my favorite Apps particularly for its simplicity. All you have to do is sign in with Twitter on the landing page and the App crunches the numbers for you to find your best times to Tweet. It will then show you the results on a beautiful graph and with all your key results in one spot. You can also go ahead and export your results via .pdf very conveniently.

Pro Tip: Tweriod also gives you some great additional analysis showing you different optimal timing for different days of the week. I found this very powerful.

#8 Klout for Chrome – Find top influencers with one glance
Despite some of the recent uproar for Klout’s changes in its algorithm, I believe it is a fantastic way to cut down on time spent looking for the right people on Twitter. With its Chrome extension, you will be see immediately who the best people are you should start engaging with right inside Twitter.com. Since it is often hard to decide which Tweets to pick up and reply to, this is very helpful.

Pro Tip: What I like best is that you can click on each score and get to their Klout profile page to learn more about what they are up to.

#9 Twylah – Beautiful Twitter brand pages
Twylah is an up and coming must have tool for anyone who wants to be serious about Twitter. The App turns all your Tweets into a new, self-branded landing page filtered by the top topics you are Tweeting about. I found this to give a much better overview about what the person is Tweeting about than only looking at ones stream. The rich media display and concise summary of topics turns your Tweets into a great visual experience.

Pro Tip: Twylah also boasts a great feature called Power Tweets. You can send special Tweets, which are surrounded by other relevant content and have proven to decrease bounce rate by over 4x.

#10 WhoTweetedMe – Find out who is Tweeting any article
Always wondered who those people actually are that make the count go up on the Tweet button? With WhoTweetedMe you have a powerful to answer exactly this question. You can drop in any URL and the app will display who Tweeted it, at what times and with what reach. It is a very powerful measure to understand the impact a Tweet can have across the Twitter universe.

Pro Tip: WhoTweetedMe also gives you a list of the top influencers that have retweeted that article. Via the “thank you” button you can thank them right from inside the app.

Making use of these tools has improved my Twitter experience significantly. Staying on top of Twitter, tweeting frequently and at the best times is what has been facilitated tremendously through these Apps for me.

Over to you now. Do you think any of these tools can be of help for your Tweeting effort too?

About the Author: Leo Widrich is the Co-Founder of Buffer. Buffer is a smarter way to publish your Tweets and FB updates that has shown to increase clicks on links by 200%. He also writes a lot more Twitter tips on the Buffer blog.

How many years have we been forced to wrap the string of our Cellestial Season’s tea bag around our spoon and draw it tight to wring out the last of the tea? Or how many times have we used our fingers and suffered the heat of a tea bag just pulled out of steeping hot water? Well, my friends, no more. The Tèo from Alessi is here to solve our tea brewing woes. Made from stainless steel, this spoon was built and designed with one thing in mind: making it far easier and far more classy to wring out tea bags.



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Getting into Android development can be quite a challenge, particularly if you’re new to Java or Eclipse or both. Whatever your past experience, you might feel tempted to start working away without checking that you’re making the best use of the IDE. In this article, we’ll go over a few tips, tools and resources that can maximize Eclipse’s usefulness and hopefully save you a few headaches. You might of course already be familiar with some (or all) of them and even be aware of others that we haven’t covered. If so, please do feel free to mention them.

I’ve used Eclipse for Java development on and off for a few years, having recently started learning Android casually. I’m surprised at the lack of easily digestible material online about basic aspects of Android development, such as the topic of this article. I’ve found some useful information out there in disparate locations that are not particularly easy to come across. Most of the online content is still in the official Android Developer Guide, but it has to be said that it is pretty limited in practical material.

The aim here, then, is to provide a concise overview of Android development tools specifically in Eclipse. If you’ve already started developing for Android, you will almost certainly have come across some of them, but a few might be new to you, especially if you’re learning Android casually or part time. If you’re approaching Android as a Java developer and are already accustomed to Eclipse, you’ll likely grasp this material well.

Get To Know Eclipse
Going over some features of Eclipse itself that would be useful for developing Android projects would be worthwhile. If you already know your way around Eclipse, you can probably skip these first few sections, because they’re really aimed at people who are learning to use the IDE purely for Android development. Later sections include tips on using Eclipse specifically for Android, so you might find a bit or two in there that you haven’t explored yet.

The Eclipse IDE, with the “Hello Android” project open.

Eclipse has a huge amount of flexibility for creating a working environment for your development projects. Many display options, tools and shortcuts in Eclipse enable you to interact with your projects in a way that will make sense to you directly. Having been an Eclipse user for a reasonable amount of time now, I still discover features in it that I had no idea existed and that could have saved me a lot of hassle in past projects.

Explore Perspectives
The Eclipse user interface provides a variety of ways to view the elements in any project. When you open Eclipse, depending on which “perspective” is open, you will typically see the screen divided into a number of distinct sections. In addition to the code editing area, you should see various aspects of the project represented in particular “views.”

A perspective in Eclipse is a group of views arranged to present a project in a particular way. If you open the “Window” menu, then select “Open Perspective,” you will usually see at least two options: “Debug” and “Java.” The Java perspective will likely form the basis of your Android development process; but for debugging, there is an Android-specific perspective called DDMS. Once you have set a perspective, you can still make alterations to the visible views, as well as adjust the layout by dragging the view areas around to suit yourself.

In general, when developing Android projects, some variation of the Java perspective is likely to be open, with the option of a few additional views, such as “LogCat,” where you can send and read the runtime output of your app. The Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS) perspective will likely be useful when the time comes to debug your Android applications. The tools in this perspective come as part of the Android software development kit (SDK), with Eclipse integration courtesy of the Android Developer Tools (ADT) plugin. The DDMS perspective provides a wide range of debugging tools, which we’ll cover in brief later on.

Make Use Of Views
By default, the Java perspective contains the main area to edit code and a handful of views with varying levels of usefulness for Android projects:

Package Explorer
This provides a hierarchical way to explore your projects, allowing you to browse and control the various elements in them through a directory structure.
Outline
Displays an interactive representation of the file currently open in the editor, arranged as logical code units, which can be useful for quickly jumping to a particular point in a big file.
Problems
Lists errors and warnings generated at the system level during the development process.
Javadoc
Useful if you’re creating your own documentation using Javadoc or using other language resources that have this documentation.
Declaration
Particularly useful if your Android projects have a lot of classes and methods. You can click on a variable or method in your code to see its outline here, and then click within the view to jump to the point where the item is declared.

You can open new views in Eclipse by selecting “Show View” in the Window menu and clicking from there. Many of the available views won’t likely be of any use to your Android project, but it is worth experimenting with them. If you open a view and decide that you don’t want to display it after all, simply close it. Adjust or move open views to different locations in Eclipse by clicking and dragging their edges or the tabbed areas at the top.

Java Views Relevant to Android Development
The ADT plugin for Eclipse includes a variety of resources for Android development within the IDE, some of which we’ll cover in the sections below. Eclipse has additional views for general Java programming, some of which naturally have a greater potential for usefulness in Android development but don’t appear by default in the Java perspective. In my experience, views that are useful for Android development include “Call Hierarchy,” “Type Hierarchy” and “Tasks.”

The Call Hierarchy view displays an interactive list of the calls for any particular method, class or variable, so you can keep track of where your code excerpts are being called from. This is particularly useful if you’re altering existing code and need a sense of what will be affected.

The Call Hierarchy view for a method in one of my projects.

The Type Hierarchy view is relevant to Java projects that involve inheritance, which basically means that it’s relevant to all Android projects. Whenever you have a class that extends another class, this is inheritance and, thus, an instance when the Type Hierarchy view can be informative. If you’re not yet familiar with inheritance in Java, taking the time to at least read up on the basics is well worth it, because the technique is key to Android programming.

The Type Hierarchy for a user interface element in an Android project.

The Tasks view is one I personally find helpful, but it really depends on how you choose to organize your projects. Think of the Tasks view as an interactive to-do list. For example, to add a task when you haven’t quite finished a particular bit of implementation but need to address something else right away, write a code comment, then right-click in the border area just to the left of the editor section, choose “Add Task,” and set your options from there. Once tasks are in a project, you can read them in the Tasks view, jumping to an individual task in your code by selecting it here. Tasks are also highlighted in the right-hand border of the editor.

The Tasks view, with a random comment in the “Hello Android” project.

Android Debugging Views
The DDMS perspective contains several views for Android development and debugging. When you first open the perspective, you might feel a little overwhelmed, particularly because the views are all presented side by side in a rather convoluted arrangement. Chances are that once you learn the purpose of one, you’ll decide whether it’s relevant to your project; for a basic project, many of them will not be.

If you feel that closing some views would make the interface an easier environment to work in, then go ahead and close them; you can always open them again later. Starting simple is sometimes best, and then adding elements over time as they become relevant. In the early stages, your Android project is not likely to be complex anyway.

Let’s go through each DDMS view in Eclipse, with a brief note on its purpose and use. The information is tailored to each view and so is pretty varied, but includes device, memory and process management.

The Devices view provides an overview of your running AVD emulators together with processes in operation, and it is the starting point for exploring your projects for the purpose of debugging. This view presents shortcuts to some debugging operations, so you can select your app’s processes from here to see the other debugging operations in action. In most cases, you can view information in the other DDMS views by selecting a running process in the Devices view while your app is running in an emulator, then using the buttons at the top of the view to capture debugging information. When you do this, you’ll see some of the other views being populated with data.

The Devices view, with a process selected for debugging.

The Allocation Tracker view is particularly useful for apps that have significant demands on performance. This view provides insight into how the Dalvik Garbage Collector is managing memory for your app. If you’re not familiar with garbage collection in Java, you might want to read up on it, as well as familiarize yourself with basic principles of efficiency in Java programming, such as variable scope.

The Allocation Tracker view in the DDMS perspective.

Th[…]

The free and minimal HTML5 Admin template is a fluid HTML5 ready template that is basically a mix of plugins and HTML structures for developers who want to spend less time on graphics and more on code, without having a UX that sucks.

Homepage: http://www.html5admin.com/

This is a guest article contributed by Simon Goble.
–
QR or Quick Response Codes have been around since 1994 and were originally used to track parts during car manufacture. It is likely you have seen one, even if you didn’t know what it was, usually displayed as black and white squares in a grid pattern reminiscent [...]

 



 





When I took my first steps into the WordPress theme arena, I didn’t know much about it. I wandered blindly into the business, not knowing whether I was doing things correctly. Over time, through trial and error and making rookie mistakes, I learned some valuable lessons and gained important insights. To save you from going down the same winding path, I’ll share some of the important takeaways that I’ve learned so far, like how to gain a solid user base, what to include in your themes and, most importantly, what to leave out.

Gaining a Solid User Base
You could build the best WordPress theme in the world, but it won’t matter unless people know about it and use it. One of the smartest things I did when starting my theme business was to release a free theme. It took a while for it to gain traction, but things took off once it got some attention from being featured on other websites. Consumers are willing to download a free theme from the new kid on the block and try it out because hardly any financial risk is involved.

The free theme was unique and easy to use, and people liked it so much that they began requesting a premium (i.e. commercial) version, with more features (the free version had the bare essentials). To this day, the premium version is still one of my best sellers. Consumers like to download the free version to try it out, and then they typically purchase the commercial version. Value is added to the commercial version with support, updates, easier customization and a bundle of exclusive features. Releasing a free theme enabled me to gain momentum and build on a solid user base as I began creating commercial themes, and I’ll return to that strategy in the future to increase sales.

My First Mistake
The first mistake I made when getting started, and one that I still kick myself over, is that I didn’t implement a newsletter opt-in method for users who downloaded my themes. This would have given me a long list of consumers to whom I could market my premium themes, and it would have been extremely valuable when I launched the commercial version of my theme a year later. I’ve now gotten my act together and have a booming mailing list that I email every time I release a new theme, thus generating sales that would otherwise have been lost.

You’ve Got ’Em, Now Keep ’Em
Once I had a solid user base, I found that in order to keep them as returning customers, I had to add value not only to my themes but to my services. When you start a theme business, you’re not just selling themes; you’re also providing support and updates. Some of the top brands make great products and provide excellent support. Think of Apple, MediaTemple and Zappos. Say what you want about these companies, but there’s no denying that their user base is loyal because of both their products and their support and services.

One way to provide great support is simply to be timely with your responses. A customer loves nothing more than being responded to the same day. If you don’t know the answer to their question, at least let them know that you received it and are looking into it. You would think this is common practice, but you’d be amazed at how long some companies take to respond. If you can provide killer support, you’re already one step ahead of a lot of the competition.

Another way to add value is to provide educational resources that teach customers how to get the most out of your products. Some users will be more advanced than others, and they are usually the ones who purchase themes regularly. If you can provide a resource that enables those users to derive extra value from your products, then they will be more likely to stay with you and purchase more of your themes.

Streamline Your Process
Streamline and standardize your development process as much as possible. One way to do this is to use a theme framework, whether your own or a third party’s. Using a framework to quickly develop a theme is important when an eager audience is waiting on you. Most importantly, when you use the same framework, updating all of your themes after they’ve been released is easier. For example, all of my themes display a notification in the administration panel when an update becomes available.

The code that enables this notification is in a file named framework-init.php. In this file is a bunch of other important blocks of code that add features, such as the theme options panel and custom post fields, as well as common functions used throughout all of my themes. When I need to update that code, I simply make the change to my framework’s file and then that file gets replaced in all of my themes. By knowing that the file is the same throughout all of my themes, I don’t have to bother going through each theme to find that block of code to update. You can see how this becomes valuable when your inventory starts to accumulate.

Hybrid is one of the more popular theme frameworks, thanks to its extensive list of features, including translations into 20+ languages and theme hooks.

Custom vs. Third-Party Frameworks
From the beginning, I decided to build my own framework, mainly because I would know it back to front, making it easier to maintain and build on (being a control freak might have contributed to the decision as well). A custom framework also meant that I wouldn’t have to rely on someone else, and the framework would have exactly what I needed and nothing else.

This is, of course, just personal preference, and many people prefer to use a third-party framework. By using a third party’s, you save the time it takes to develop a solid framework. It also means that you’re not solely responsible for maintaining the framework, and you will usually have a support system to turn to if you run into development issues. A lot of impressive frameworks offer useful functionality, such as theme hooks, extensible layout options, styling for popular plugins and much more. Lastly, there is a growing market for child themes of such frameworks as Genesis, StartBox and Hybrid.

Other popular frameworks are:

iThemes Builder
Carrington
Starkers
WP Framework
Elemental
Sandbox
Thematic
Thesis

What To Include In Your Theme
Depending on the type of theme you’re creating, the expectations of consumers will vary. But you should consider certain features and functionality for the majority of your themes. You needn’t implement all of these, but at least consider whether they would add value to your theme.

Internationalize the Theme for Other Languages
Internationalizing your theme enables users to translate the text displayed by your theme, and implementing it is fairly straightforward. This one is a must-have. I was amazed at how many non-English-speaking users downloaded my themes. Looking back, I should have internationalized my themes from the beginning, knowing that millions of people all over the world use WordPress. You would be silly not to internationalize your theme. Look at the “Translating WordPress” section of the Codex and this helpful tutorial by AppThemes for more information.

Support WordPress’ Coding Standards and Practices
Develop your themes in a way that supports WordPress’ latest coding standards and practices. In doing so, you ensure that the theme is compatible with future versions of WordPress, and you’ll avoid a flood of emails from customers who have run into conflicts. Also, avoid deprecated functions, which are functions that are “no longer supported and may be removed in future versions of WordPress.”

An easy way to check all of this is to install the Theme-Check plugin. This great little plugin runs the same tests as those that WordPress.org runs on submitted themes.

The Theme-Check plugin has saved me many times from leaving out important details and using deprecated functions.

Documentation and Readable Code
Write thorough and helpful documentation for your themes. This will not only help users, but also cut down on the number of support requests you get from aggravated users. And trust me: the less support requests you get, the happier you will be. Document everything that’s unique about your theme that WordPress users might be unfamiliar with, as well as any built-in features such as custom backgrounds and headers, menus, and post formats. Also provide instructions on how to update the theme and on the proper way to customize the code (in case a user wants to create a child theme).

The Twenty Eleven theme is a good example of a theme with well-documented code.

Another important aspect of documentation is to make the code easy to read and understand. Some advanced users will want to customize the code, so it should be commented in a way that helps them understand what you’ve done under the hood. For a good example of well-documented code, check out the functions.php file in the default Twenty Eleven theme.

Child Themeable
As noted, many users will want to customize the code. The trick is that, when you release an update, the developer has to avoid overwriting the files that they’ve customized. The solution is for them to make their customizations in a child theme. So, make sure to support this functionality by allowing child themes to be easily created.

If you don’t want users to have to worry about including a particular script when creating a child theme, then use the get_template_directory_uri(); function to reference the parent theme’s folder. To allow the developer to overwrite this file, use get_stylesheet_directory_uri(); instead, which references the folder in the child theme, if one is being used.

Page Templates
Your theme should support the various page templates that a WordPress website can have. Because you don’t know how each developer will use the theme, you have to prepare for all possibilities. This is where testing comes in. For a typical WordPress theme[…]

There are probably a good amount of Noupe readers who would think little to nothing of paying money for a high quality WordPress theme if it was exactly what they were looking for. When compared to spending thousands of [...]

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Using slideshows or sliders within a web design is an effective method of highlighting your portfolio, projects, ecommerce products or even key site related messages and information. As the current slider trend dictates, they are typically found above the fold on the homepage.
For this article, we have found some high quality, beautifully designed and inspirational examples of sliders. Enjoy :)
You might also like… Showcase Of Effective and Creative Pricing Page Designs → 30 Login Forms with Creative Design → Showcase of Beautifully Designed Charts & Graphs → 20 Effective Examples of Web and Mobile Wireframe Sketches →Backyard BurgersFeeling hungry? Take a look at this website and choose the menu you would like to satisfy your appetite with.

ConverseA very attractive and dynamic website with loads of creatively designed and interactive slides.

Hm AndreiFour beautiful and visually appealing slides that change automatically or you can also change the slide by clicking the small button to view the individual slides.

Marcs DesignThe slides have been incorporated well in this design, giving the impression that they are being browsed with a laptop.

Marco Rotoli
Boerdam
Tea Round App
These Are Things
Studio XLA vertically moving slide show with a very catchy and appealing effect. You can click the number or the arrow to view the next slide.

Themefuse
Josh Smith DesignThis websites main page consists of full size slides with the navigation options presented at the bottom of the page.

Utah travelLovely slideshow that is presented as a stack of photographs.

Doopsuiker PoppiesTwo simple yet beautifully designed sliders at the front of this webpage.

VisitphillyHere you will see that a realistic view is presented by each individual slide that look simply amazing and attention grabbing.

Sven PrimA horizontal website with 42 slides that you can browse from left to right. The slide quality is truly first class.

TravelBuzzFive different and classic slides of some of the World’s most beautiful places. Click on a small thumbnail to view its enlarged view.

WearesignalsA dark themed website with four different and unique slides that highlights the key points about this website.

Espressoa PartmentsThe slides of the apartments change dynamically and gives a great overview of how each apartment looks.

Malcolm ReadingHere the slides change vertically one by one. They specialize in the arts, museums and public realm.

RottefellaA very interactive website that presents the slides in a totally different manner and allows you to browse further.

Jax Vineyards
Relogik
Full Fat Studios
NealiteA French website showcasing the key points through different well designed slides.

SlidedeckNew to the website? Simply check out the slides and you will get the idea what the website is all about and what it offers.

Design Royale
Purple Rock Scissors
La Masa MimattaVery colorful and beautifully designed slides that integrate with the website very well.

Fox ClassicsThe things that set this website apart are its high quality graphics and collection of images for the slides.

Charlie GentleHere the slides are divided in two section with arrows placed at the centre to navigate. When you click the arrow, both the slides move simultaneously.

Team Viget
Galan Design
Yozenn
Studio Break FastAn extremely interactive website that demonstrates the slides in a completely different mode and allow you to browse further.

Household Design
Print MornycThe website of Print Mor NYC highlights their printing excellence in their slides. Simply click the arrow to move to the next slide.

Hwo ArchitectsThe slides move vertically giving you an idea of what you can expect from the website.

Grunnarbeid
Glitz PhotographyExceptionally colorful slides that incorporate with the website incredibly well.

DFANYThis is what the slide show of a mobile development website should be.

Style and Conscience
Bohemia Design
Edit Studios
Threadless
Dconvulsions
You might also like…50 Examples of Large Photography Backgrounds within Web Design → 50 Examples of Creative 404 – Page Not Found Pages → A Showcase of 50 Amazing Personal Blog Web Designs → 50 Creative Examples of Illustrations in Web Design → 50 Professional Web Design Agency Web Sites → 50 Bright and Vibrant Web Designs – Color Inspiration → 50 Impressive Magazine and Newspaper Styled Web Designs → 50 Inspirational and Fresh Minimally Designed Web Sites → 50 Creative and Inspirational Personal Portfolio Websites → 50 Inspiring Web Application and Service Web Site Designs →

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Most businesses now recognize Facebook as an excellent platform for connecting and communicating with their customers and/or users. As businesses have become more active on Facebook the number of resources available for fan pages has increased as well.
Setting up an effective Facebook fan page isn’t always that easy, but there are plenty of resources out [...]

We see it all the time. Your business is picking up steam, you’ve got traffic and customers, but your website search engine optimization (SEO) stinks. You never even gave it a college try — higher priorities always trumped optimizing for organic search and hiring a pricy agency to perform wizardry didn’t appeal to you.

In this post, I want to:

Take some of the confusion out of SEO.
Provide a C-level recap of the basic building blocks of SEO.
Give you, Mr. CEO, a basic framework you can use to mobilize your team to get your site optimized at a basic level, using minimal resources.
Publish a scripted email template business owners can use to break down basic SEO into bite-size tasks.

This post is a kind of “SEO starter kit.” Use the tools and template herein to delegate the important tasks to your team. All you need to do is plug in the names of your team members and hit “send.” Empower each team member to project manage their assigned chunk of the SEO effort.

Invest If You Can
Look: I’m not saying you can compete with the big dogs of SEO by sending a templatized email to your non-SEO-expert team members, nor am I saying this is a comprehensive SEO task list.

There are components I’ve chosen not to address. My goal is to help business owners prioritize basic SEO initiatives.

If you have the bandwidth and budget to hire an expert, you absolutely should.

But if you’re one of the many business owners whose page titles are your brand name and nothing more, this framework will give you a decent and necessary start.

Building Blocks of SEO

Do your homework. You’re going to enlist the help of your team to do some basic research and make an educated guess at the best keyword phrase(s) around which to focus your SEO effort. You’ll choose keywords that have the best balance of strong search volume and relatively low competition.
Write tags & content. You’re going to have someone write content centered around the keywords that follow from your research.
Implement HTML changes. You’ll have a developer make changes to your site, starting with the most critical pages.
Start building links. Finally, you’ll put infrastructure in place to begin your link building campaign. This campaign will never really end.

High-Level SEO Lesson: What Matters Most
1. Your site content & the HTML behind it
Think of this as the groundwork for a healthy SEO footprint. On its own, it’s usually ineffectual, but as part of your SEO strategy, it’s indispensible.

Here’s how search engines see your site.

Note: The content of the TripAdvisor sample page above has been sliced up to fit this format.

On the most basic level, you need these components:

Title. The <title> of your pages is critical. It’s read from left to right in terms of importance, so once you’ve carefully chosen the keyword phrase(s) you’re trying to rank for, a good, simple formula for page titles can look like this:

Primary keyword phrase | Secondary keyword phrase (optional) | Company name

Meta description. This is the little blurb search engines will show when a page on your site shows up in search results. Make it short and unique, including your top keyword phrase if it fits naturally.

Copy. Each page on your site should contain, at the very least, a few sentences with organized headers describing what the page is about. On your homepage, that means spelling out what you do in simple language that both humans and machines can understand.

2. Getting relevant, good quality sites to link to yours
Link building is like bridge building. It takes time and sweat. But without strong inbound links, your on-page HTML changes will hardly help you rank.

Even one or two powerful links from good sites can funnel “SEO authority” to your site. When negotiating a link, be sure to get specific about the anchor text.

3. Some technical stuff that sounds pretty complicated but isn’t
SEO best practices dictate that you submit a sitemap, use proper redirects and descriptive image alt tags, develop a structured system of internal links to indicate the relative importance of your site’s respective pages to the search engines, and execute on a slew of other minutia in order to achieve organic search nirvana.

I’m going to recommend focusing on #1 and #2 above as a top priority. Once that’s in motion, you can attack these tasks, but don’t let them overwhelm your team into paralysis.

Choose your Cast of Characters to get the Job Done
1. Excel Nerd / Research Ninja. You want a super smart, analytical team player for this role. This person crosses their t’s and dots their i’s. Maybe they once won a spelling bee.

2. Writer Person. You’re not looking for Dostoevsky here, but someone who can write short, punchy marketing copy based on findings curated by your Research Ninja. You also want someone who’s well-liked by your team and great at collaborating with them on different types of projects.

3. Developer. Yup. You’ll need a web developer, too.

Mobilize your Cast of Characters
Here’s a simple email template you can use to rally your team and spell out the tasks that’ll get your SEO gears a grindin’.

From: Mr. CEO guy

To: Research Ninja, Writer Person, Developer

Subject: Let’s SEO our site in 30 days

Hey team,

We’ve never had many resources to devote to SEO, but I see big reward for us if we can start to plant the seeds for greater organic search traffic in the future.

I’d like to enlist your help with this project, whose objective is to get us to a basic level of SEO proficiency so we have a chance to rank on some desirable search terms.

(Research Ninja), I’d like you to:

1. Use the AdWords Keyword Tool to research the types of phrases our prospective customers are using to find sites like ours. The default results will reflect broad match estimates, so be sure to look at exact match, too.

2. Download the search volume and competition data to Excel. This will transform the competition “meter” into a quantitative measure of each keyword phrase’s competitiveness.

3. Strategically whittle down the options to a maximum of 2 or 3 keyword phrases we should try to rank for. Your key criteria are relatively low competition and significant global search volume.

4. Validate your research against search volume and competition estimates shown by other SEO tools like Raventools, SEOmoz, KeywordSpy, etc. You might need to start a free trial or two. See if your recommendation holds water using data from several tools.

5. Whatever you determine our top priority keyword phrase should be, please communicate to the team that this is our preferred anchor text for inbound links. Hand off your final recommendations to Writer Person.

(Writer Person), I’d like you to…

1. Take a stab at identifying the 5 or 10 most important pages on our website.

2. Based around Research Ninja’s conclusions, write a page title and meta description for each of the pages you identified. Use the following format for page titles:

Primary keyword phrase | Secondary keyword phrase (optional) | Company name

Meta description format: One or two very short sentences describing what the page is about, in the context of what our company does. Be sure to use the highest priority keyword phrase Research Ninja identified.

Next, write a short paragraph or two describing each page. Don’t stuff keywords into the copy — work them in naturally. Write for humans.

Each paragraph should have a header or two, as appropriate, related to the keyword phrase(s) from Research Ninja’s research. You’ll hand these over to Developer, who will wrap them in <h1> and <h2> tags.

3. Coordinate with our other properties, if we have any, to get links pointing to our site.

4. Develop a plan to incentivize customers/partners/vendors/affiliates to link to our site.

5. Work with sales / business development to ensure we start requiring a backlink in every contract we sign, if it’s realistic to ask for one.

6. Identify 5 bloggers and/or companies related to our space and reach out to them to explore guest blogging opportunities. Beyond your obvious outreach tools — LinkedIn, Jigsaw, your colleagues’ contacts.

– you can also scope out myblogguest.com for guest blogging opportunities. Once you have some leads lined up, let’s talk about who on our team can help write good content.

7. Are we listed in basic business directories? Please create a standard business profile and submit our site to DMOZ, CrunchBase, LinkedIn, HotFrog, Google Places and Bing.

8. Do we have a blog? Let’s talk about how we can get one going.

In all your link building efforts, remember to request the preferred link anchor text recommended by Research Ninja wherever possible. Of course, if you’re building links to pages other than our homepage, it might make sense to tweak this anchor text. As a rule of thumb, you can use the keyword phrase in the title of the page you’re linking to as the anchor text.

Developer, can you please work with Writer Person to change our site HTML as follows:

Change the <title> of each page per Writer Person’s recommendation
Change the <meta description> of each page per Writer Person’s recommendation
Add the copy per Writer Person’s recommendation, with a single <h1> and 1 or 2 <h2> tags as headers. Please make sure these are the only header tags on the page.

Finally, extra credit to whoever can:

Create Google Webmaster Tools account.
Submit a sitemap.
Check for any indexing errors or site slowness and report back.

Let’s get’r done!

Thanks,
Mr. CEO guy

And there you have it. Define a timeline and get it done. Many months down the road, your shot at free traffic will be much greater for your efforts here.

Get strategic about the HTML on your site, have your developer make the quick tweaks, and suddenly you’re “keeping up with the Joneses” in terms of on-page SEO. Then, get aggressive about your l[…]

What is the first step of getting your most desired job? Surely it is the resume that a candidate submits to the organization he wants to work with. Impressive resume always increase the chances of getting the formal interview call. Well-crafted and well-presented resumes not only stand you out as an ideal candidate but also demonstrate your professional level. Here we are featuring few resume cum infographics that can stand out in a crowd to give a better understanding of what goes in to show off your design chops. Take a look at this collection.

You are welcome if you want to share more creative resume designs that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at  SmashingApps.com, just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.

An Infographic Resume

Curriculum Vitae di Lissi Mattia

Ester Liquori Design Visual Resume

Siddhesh Kabe Resume

Francesco Mugnai’s resume

Infographics Resume

Infographics Resume: Randall Knapp

Resume

Kumar Kolaganti Visual Resume

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Good call to action pages (including landing pages and sales pages) are an important part of any website that either sells or asks visitors to sign up for something.An effective call to action page can increase conversions and signups by a hundred percent or more (sometimes much more). As designers, we [...]

Everybody is talking mobile. Smart phones and tablets are changing the way that your users interact with content and online services. 45% of people interact with online content while out and about. That rises to 70% for 16-25s. (UK Sept. 2011). As an online provider you must engage with this emerging market or face losing [...]

There seems to be a new crop of special-purpose JavaScript libraries every week. Gone, it seems, are the days of using only one library per project. Today I’ll introduce you to a very cool component library, AmplifyJS, that offers just a few very specialized components.

Devs, Meet AmplifyJS
According to the website:

AmplifyJS is a set of components designed to solve common web application problems.

Sounds prestigious, but what’s actually in this library?

AmplifyJS has three main pieces:

An AJAX API
A PubSub Event System
A Client-side Storage API

Join me now for a tour of the incredible AmplifyJS library! We’re going to build a super-simple employee tracker; really, it’s just a table with a few app-like features, courtesy (partly) of AmplifyJS.

We don’t really need to concern ourselves with styling and layout issues today so I’m going to use the Twitter Bootstrap library. It’s incredibly simple: just include the link to the CSS file—which they let you hotlink from Github—and you’re in business.

Step 1: Setting it Up
So, make yourself a project directory. Start with the index.html file, and a js folder. Now, head over to the AmplifyJS website and click that huge, red “download” button. Once, you’ve got the library zip, extract it, and move it into the js folder. We’re going to need a few other things as well:

jQuery: Amplify’s AJAX component uses jQuery’s AJAX feature underneath it’s API, at least by default. But we’ll be using jQuery for other stuff, so bring it on in.
bootstrap-modal.js: The Twitter Bootstrap library includes a few scripts for getting all interactive. And we’re going to use one: the modal window jQuery plugin. Download it, and add it to that js folder.
There are two other scripts that I’ll mention along the way, but these we’ll write ourselves.

Then, start off our index.html file like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>AmplifyJS</title>
<link rel='stylesheet' href='http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/1.3.0/bootstrap.min.css' />
</head>
<body>
<div class='container'>
<div class='row'>
<div class='span16' id='alert-area'>
</div>
</div>
<div class='row'>
<div class='span4'>
<h2>Commands</h2>
</div>
<div class='span12'>
<h1>Employees</h1>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<script src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js'></script>
<script src='js/amplify/amplify.min.js'></script>
<script src='js/bootstrap-modal.js'></script>
</body>
</html>
If you aren’t familiar with using Twitter Bootstrap, you’ll see it’s no sweat to use. We’ve got a container that is 940px wide. Then, we have two rows. The first has one column, that covers all 16 columns. The other has two columns: one is 4 columns wide, and one is 12 columns wide.

One more thing, before we get to some real coding: we’re going to pop up a modal window that allows up to input employees. Under the <div class='container'>, add this modal window HTML. Yes, it seems like a lot code, but it’s mainly Bootstrap stuff:

<div id='add-employee-modal' class='modal fade'>
<div class='modal-header'>
<a href='#' class='close'>x</a>
<h3>Add an Employee</h3>
</div>
<div class='modal-body'>
<form id='employee-form'>
<div class='clearfix'>
<label for='firstName'>First Name:</label>
<div class='input'><input type='text' name='firstName' placeholder='John' /></div>
</div>
<div class='clearfix'>
<label for='lastName'>Last Name:</label>
<div class='input'><input type='text' name='lastName' placeholder='Doe' /></div>
</div>
<div class='clearfix'>
<label for='role'>First Name:</label>
<div class='input'><input type='text' name='role' placeholder='Designer' /></div>
</div>
</form>
</div>
<div class='modal-footer'>
<button id='create-employee' class='btn primary'>Add</button>
</div>
</div>
All right, we’re ready to go! Let’s code.

Step 2: Wiring the Modal Window
Open up a script tag at the bottom of index.html (I’m just doing this inline, but feel to put it in a new JS file). start this way:

(function () {
var employeeModal = $('#add-employee-modal').modal({ backdrop: 'static' });

}());
We’re using the Bootstrap modal plugin here; this just “instantiates” the modal window. Now, we want the window to appear when we click the “Add Employee” button. Of course, we’ll have to add the button first: put this in the <div class='span4'>, right under the <h2>.

<p><button id='add-employee' data-controls-modal='add-employee-modal' class='btn'>Add Employee</button></p>
That data-controls-modal='add-employee-modal' attribute will display the modal with said ID when the button is clicked.

So, the user will need to fill in the form, click the “Add” button which has an id of create-employee. So, let’s wire up a click event handler for the button:

$('#create-employee').click(function () {
var form = $('#employee-form');
employeeModal.modal('hide');
EMPLOYEE.create(
form.find('[name=firstName]').val(),
form.find('[name=lastName]').val(),
form.find('[name=role]').val()
);
form.find('input').val('');
});
We get the form, and then hide the modal window. Then, we’re going to call an EMPLOYEE.create method, passing the first name, last name, and role as the three parameters. Finally, we clear the form.

amplify.publish
But wait, you say, what’s EMPLOYEE.create? Well, it’s a micro-“class” that I’ve put in js/employee.js. Check it out:

var EMPLOYEE = {
create : function (firstName, lastName, role) {
var employee = {
firstName: firstName,
lastName: lastName,
role: role,
dateEmployed: new Date()
};
amplify.publish('employee-created', employee );
return employee;
}
};
You’ll want to throw a script tag for it up with the others.

Pretty simple, right? We just create an object literal with our parameters, and add a dateEmployed property. But, then—and finally!—we have the first entrance of the AmplifyJS framework. Here, we’re using the pub/sub events component. This is great for doing loose coupling between parts of your app.

This method doesn’t have to know if another part of our code wants to do something with each new employee we create; Our “Add” button event handler doesn’t have to worry about it. We’ll just publish it as an “employee-created” event for any part that is interested to take. We pass our new employee object as data for anyone interested. Then, we return the employee object (even though we don’t keep track of it in our event handler).

Step 3: Reacting with amplify.subscribe
So, is any other part of our app interested in the “employee-created”? Yes, in fact. We want to do two things. First, add this employee to a table on our page. Second, we want to store the employee in localStorage. Here’s the first part of that:

amplify.subscribe('employee-created', function (employee) {
employeeTable.add([employee.firstName, employee.lastName, employee.role, employee.dateEmployed]);
newAlert('success', 'New Employee Added');
});
To subscribe to an event, we call amplify.subscribe. We want subscribe to the “employee-created”; when that events occurs, we want to add it to the employeeTable; notice that instead of just passing it the employee object, we “convert” it to an array; this is because we need to be sure the elements will be in the right order. Then, we want to display an message, letting our user know that the employee was added successfully.

What’s up with this employeeTable variable? Well, first, we have to add the <table> to our document. So, underneath our “Employees” <h1>, add this:

<table id='employee-table' class='zebra-striped'>
<thead>
<tr>
<th> First Name </th>
<th> Last Name </th>
<th> Role </th>
<th> Date Employed </th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
</tbody>
</table>
Now, we have to capture this table as a variable up in our var statement at the top:

employeeTable = TABLE.create($('#employee-table')),
And TABLE? That’s the last piece of JS for this puzzle. Put this in js/table.js and don’t forget the script tag:

var TABLE = {
proto : {
init : function (el) {
this.element = $(el).find('tbody');
},
add: function (arr) {
var row = $('<tr>').html(function () {
return $.map(arr, function (value) {
return '<td>' + value + '</td>';
}).join('');
});
this.element.append(row);
},
load: function (rows, order) {
for (var i = 0; rows[i]; i++ ) {
this.add(rows[i]);
}
var fields = [];
for (var j = 0; order[j]; j++) {
fields.push(rows[i][order[j]]);
}
this.add(fields);
},
clear: function () {
this.element.empty();
}
},
create : function (el) {
var table = Object.create(this.proto);
table.init(el);
return table;
}
};
It’s a bit complicated, but you should have no problem grokking it. We’ve got a proto property that is the prototype for our table instances. Then, when we call create, we use Object.create to create an object that inherits from this.proto. After that, we call the init method to set any properties. Finally, we return the table instance.

This micro-API makes it easy for us to work with our table. You should be able to see how passing an array to the add method will add a row to our table. Notice also that we can pass an array of rows to load and fill the table up; we’ll use this soon.

Oh, then there’s[…]

List.js is a 7 KB cross-browser native JavaScript that makes your plain HTML lists super flexible, searchable, sortable and filterable.
You can add, edit and remove items by dead simple templating. You can also write your own filter functions easily. List.js is free for download and released under MIT License.

Requirements: Javascript enabled Demo: http://listjs.com/ License: MIT License
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Sumo is an elegant and useful cable management tool designed to be placed on a desk, tabletop or workstation to prevent cables from dropping off the edge. Sumo acts like a paperweight for your cables and features high-tech Japanese micro-suction pads underneath for even further grip. Cables are now easily weighed down and remain in place yet they can still be repositioned.

Looks like a nice solution. 

Sean Cummings:

People will not adopt a technical solution that serves to
replace a manual task, if that solution is less efficient than
the manual task it replaces. How could we think that QR codes
for marketing would work any better than CueCat? Did we not learn
the first time?

QR codes are built for machines, not humans. And they’re ugly.

Update: Mikey-san nails it:

Robot barf looks like QR codes.

 ★ 

In my review of the iPhone 4S, I talked a bit about location-based reminders. Particularly, I brought up some use cases that I think could come in very handy for a family.

In Anna’s and my near-seven years of marriage, I don’t know how many times one of us has swung by the store without the other knowing it and then, upon returning home with some groceries in hand, the other says: “Oh! I wish I had known you were going to the store. We’re just out of [some item].”

And so, one thing that would be useful for setting a location-based reminder is if it could be shared. I wrote:

An example of that in real life could look like this: I’m at home and realize we need batteries. I create the reminder and it syncs to my iPhone and Anna’s. Then, suppose Anna realizes she needs to swing by the store on her way home from work to get an ingredient for dinner. When she gets there a reminder pops up notifying her that we also need batteries.

Come to find out, as Brad McCarty pointed out at The Next Web, shared lists in Reminders app are doable using iCloud. They can only be shared via the iCloud website.

To share a Reminder list, log in to your account on icloud.com, go to the Calendars app, click the round satellite/wi-fi radio beams-looking button that is next to the name of the Reminders list which you want to share (or create a new one for sharing), and then enter the email address of the person (or persons) you wish to share that list with.

The new list will then show up in your Reminders app, and once the person you’re sharing it with accepts the invitation, it will show up in their Reminders app as well. I created a list called “Shared”, that is synced on my iPhone as well as my wife’s. Any reminder I or she creates or checks off on that list will be synced on both of our iPhones.

Now we can share any type of Reminder that the iPhone supports: regular, time-based, and location based.

For shared location-based reminders, it’s important that both people have the same contact names and addresses for certain locations such as Walmart, work, home, the grocery store, etc. Also worth noting is that if I set a shared reminder to check the mail when one of us gets home, the alert will go off on both of our phones as soon as either one of us triggers the reminder, even if the other is still out and about.

So now I have two reminder lists on my iPhone: Reminders (which is my main list), and Shared (the one that Anna and I have synced). By default, Siri creates new reminders in your iPhone’s default list. You can change what the default list is in Settings → Mail, Contacts, Calendar → Default List.

I am keeping my own Reminders list as my default list because that’s the one I use most often with Siri. However, I still want to use Siri to add shared reminders on the synced list that Anna and I both have.

Unfortunately, getting Siri to add a reminder to a specific list other than the default list can be tricky. I for one have had quite a difficult time with it.

For example, the following Siri commands in which I am trying to create a reminder on my shared list (which is called “Shared”) all create a task on my default “Reminders” list:

“Create a shared reminder to take out the trash when I get home.”
“Create a reminder on the shared list to take out the trash.”
“Remind me to take out the trash when I get home on the shared list.”

If I ask Siri to “Create a shared list reminder to take out the trash”, Siri will tell me that it cannot create lists.

But, I have found one path of syntax that works. And you have to be pretty specific with it too:

Me: Remind me to take out the trash when I get home.


Siri: Here’s your reminder. Shall I create it?


Me: Move it to the Shared list.


Siri: Okay. I can add this to your Shared List in Reminders. Shall I go ahead?


Me: Yes.


Siri: Okay. I’ll remind you.

Moreover, it seems that only the phrase “Move it to the [name of other list] list.” will work. If I say “Put it on the shared list” or “change it to the shared list” Siri will not move it. In fact, Siri will change the content of the reminder to “On the Shared List”. Oy.

So, in short, adding reminders to shared lists with Siri does work, but it could use a bit of polish.

Properly written e-commerce copy can make a HUGE difference on your website. It’s not uncommon to see proper copywriting increase search traffic by 50% and conversion rates by 30%.

Quality e-commerce copywriting is vital to the success of any online business. Remember, if you’re selling something online, potential customers can’t see or touch your product — they can only read about it. Keep this in mind when crafting product descriptions and writing copy in general.

Below, we’ve presented 6 steps to selling more through e-commerce copywriting. Courtesy of @smashingmag.

Click on the image below to view an larger version of this infographic:

View an enlarged version of this Infographic »
Click here to download a .pdf version of this infographic.

Want to display this infographic on your site?
Simply copy and paste the code below into the html of your website to display the infographic presented above:

++ Click Image to Enlarge ++Source: 6 Steps to Selling More Infographic

Facts and Stats to Tweet:

It’s not uncommon to see copywriting increase search traffic by 50% and conversion rates by 30%. »tweet«
79% of people scan webpages instead of reading every word. »tweet«
A Forrester study showed that 20% of people had abandoned a purchase because shipping costs were unclear. »tweet«

Interesting analysis of iOS App Store popularity by category, by Casey Fleser. (Via Jamin Guy.)

 ★ 

 



 





Usability and user experience testing is vital to creating a successful website, and only more so if it’s an e-commerce website, a complex app or another website for which there’s a definite ROI. And running your own user tests to find out how users are interacting with your website and where problems might arise is completely possible.

But using one of the many existing tools and services for user testing is a lot easier than creating your own. Free, freemium and premium tools are out there, with options for most budgets. The important thing is to find a tool or service that works for your website and then use it to gather real-world data on what works and what doesn’t, rather than relying purely on instinct or abstract theories.

Free And Freemium Tools
A ton of free and freemium tools are out there to test your website’s usability and user experience. Many of them get you to use your existing visitors as a testing base, which can give you a very accurate picture of what users are experiencing when they use you website.

Ethnio
Ethnio enables you to intercept visitors on your website and recruit them to help you with research (you can offer incentives to make participation more enticing). Ethnio acts as a hub for your various UX tools, including Usabilla, Optimal Workshop and UserTesting.com. It even works with GoToMeeting for screen-sharing. You’ll get detailed reports on the people who respond to your recruitment efforts. Ethnio has a free plan that allows for up to 10,000 page views per month and up to 250 responses. Paid packages start at $49 per month (for up to 100,000 page views and 500 responses) and go up to $299 per month (for over 1 million page views per month and unlimited responses plus other features).

Simple Mouse Tracking
Mouse tracking is a great way to see how visitors are actually interacting with your website. This plugin lets you record mouse activity on your Web pages and then replay that activity in real time. It works in virtually all modern and not-so-modern browsers, it works with static and liquid layouts, and it is customizable by the end user.

xSort
xSort is a card-sorting application for Mac OS X. It gives you full control over the exercise, supports sub-groups, gives statistical results in real time, and lets you create, read, print and export reports easily. The visual environment of the app resembles a table with cards (and you also get an outline view).

KISSinsights
KISSinsights lets you embed surveys directly on your website. The free plan offers an unlimited number of surveys, with up to 30 responses for each one. The premium plan, at $29 per month, allows you to customize the surveys and thank-you messages, removes KISSinsights’ branding, and allows for unlimited responses.

FiveSecondTest
FiveSecondTest helps you better design your landing pages and calls to action by analyzing which elements of your design are most prominent. Just upload a screenshot or mockup, set the questions that you want answered, and then wait for users to complete the test. FiveSecondTest collects the responses for you and analyzes them for common keywords, which it then represents visually. The free community plan lets you earn tests by participating in tests run by others. Paid plans start at $20 per month with more features, including private tests.

AddUse
AddUse enables you to conduct user surveys and user tests. You get one of each for free, and then can purchase additional surveys and tests from there. Signing up is quick and easy and doesn’t require a credit card. AddUse offers real-time results and analysis, and also includes ready-to-use usability questions that you can incorporate in your surveys for faster set-up.

UserEcho
UserEcho is a simple widget for collecting customer responses and ideas. Just copy and paste a few lines of code onto your website and then wait for visitors to respond. The free plan offers one forum and one official representative, as well as simple moderation, admin control, rich-content editing and YouTube embedding. Paid plans start at $15 per month and include more forums, more representatives and more features.

Usabilla
Usabilla lets you run micro-usability tests to get a better picture of how well your website performs with visitors. You can collect feedback, discover usability issues, measure how various tasks perform, and then get visual results. The free plan lets you run one public, active test at a time with up to 10 participants. Paid plans start at $49 per month, allowing you to create private tests with up to 50 participants, and go up to $199 a month (allowing up to 10 active tests at a time and up to 250 participants).

Google Website Optimizer
Google’s free Website Optimizer lets you run A/B and multivariate tests on your website. Just sign up with your Google account and create an experiment. You can specify which page you’d like to test and which sections of the page, and then identify your conversion and success targets. Setting up experiments is a straightforward process.

Userfly
Userfly lets you watch videos of users interacting with your website. Just install a single line of code, and it will record every mouse movement and click that users make. The free plan allows up to 10 captures per month and stores recordings for 30 days, while premium plans (ranging in price from $10 to $200 per month) allow for more captures and downloadable recordings.

Clickdensity
Clickdensity is a heat-map analytics tool that installs in under five minutes. It provides heat maps, click maps and hover maps and gives you real-time results. The trial version can be installed on a single page and stores up to 5,000 clicks. Premium plans start at £2.50 per month, and all include an unlimited number of pages.

Navflow
Navflow is a tool for analyzing the conversion paths for your mockups and wireframes. Just upload the designs that you would like to test, run a private or public test, and then view the results. The free plan allows you to earn public tests by participating in tests run by others. Paid plans start at $20 a month and allow you to run unlimited private and public tests.

User Plus
User Plus offers two tools for testing your website’s usability: Tester and Advisor. Tester lets you test the important tasks on your website with real people. Just create a test, invite users and then measure and see what they do. Advisor evaluates your website’s usability based on ISO standards and gives you a usability score. Tester is currently in private beta, and for a limited time you can try it for free. Advisor offers both free and paid plans.

Chalkmark
Chalkmark is for first-click testing, to see what visitors click on first on your website. It’s a simple concept, but vital to ensuring that your website is converting well. A free plan is available for running short surveys on a trial basis before you buy. The free plan lets you survey 10 people, with 3 tasks each. Paid plans include unlimited studies, unlimited tasks, unlimited questionnaires and unlimited participant responses.

4Q
4Q is an online survey tool for evaluating user experience and customer satisfaction. Setting it up takes less than five minutes, and the intuitive suite of online tools gives you valuable insight into how visitors are interacting with your website with only a few mouse clicks. A free plan is available that lets you collect responses from up to 100 participants. Paid plans start at $19 per month and include more features and more responses.

WebSort.net
WebSort.net is a remote card-sorting application. Just create a study, send the link to participants, and wait for the results. You can create a free study with up to 10 participants. Then upgrade whenever you want to include 100 participants or more (starting at $149 per test). You can also buy a three-pack of studies for $299; or buy an enterprise license, with unlimited tests in a 12-month period for $2,499.

Concept Feedback
Concept Feedback lets you get feedback on your website so that you can increase conversion rates. Just post your website, get expert feedback from experienced design, usability and strategy pros, and then share the evaluation with your team or client. You can pay to have experts review your website ($99 per expert), or just get feedback from the community for free.

Premium Tools
Vendors of premium testing tools generally recruit users specifically to offer feedback on your website. Many of the tools come with videos of users interacting with your website, and some offer both remote and local testing.

WhatUsersDo
WhatUsersDo lets you test the user experience of virtually any part of your website. Just set tasks for users to carry out on your website, and then watch and listen to recordings of everything they do and say. Setting up a test takes less than five minutes, and results are available within 48 hours. Pricing is a flat fee of £30 per user, and five users are recommended for each test.

TryMyUI
TryMyUI lets you test your website with real users and watch videos of them using your website. You get to see all of their mouse movements and keystrokes and hear everything they say about your website. Users also provide written answers to your questions. A free trial is available, and the regular price is $35 per test.

Userlytics
Userlytics is a full-featured testing service that guides you through the entire testing process, from designing the study to scheduling tests, managing logistics and incentivizing participation. Pricing starts as low as $59 per participant but goes lower with volume discounts. You’ll also get videos of participants interacting with your website for accurate results.

OpenHallway
With OpenHallway, you create test scenarios, record users either remotely or locally, and then watch video results from your browser. You can share videos[…]

There are flashlights and then there are flashlights. This is the latter. A dual LED output with the low beam clocking in at 15-lumens and the high beam hitting a blinding 200-lumens. If you have never seen a Surefire flashlight before, then you are really missing out.
This thing is rock solid and sturdy — I just bought mine a month ago to replace another incandescent Surefire I had purchased over 5 years ago. This flashlight is really, really amazing. If you are a camper, photo light painter, gadget hound, or other — this is the flashlight you want. 1
Seriously, I love this thing.
∞
I was not paid to say any of this.

 



 





Very frequently in Web development (and programming in general), you need to store a long list of boolean values (yes/no, true/false, checked/unchecked… you get the idea) into something that accepts only strings. Maybe it’s because you want to store them in localStorage or in a cookie, or send them through the body of an HTTP request. I’ve needed to do this countless times.

The last time I stumbled on such a case wasn’t with my own code. It was when Christian Heilmann showed me his then new slide deck, with a cool feature where you could toggle the visibility of individual slides in and out of the presentation. On seeing it, I was impressed. Looking more closely, though, I realized that the checkbox states did not persist after the page reloaded. So, someone could spend a long time carefully tweaking their slides, only to accidentally hit F5 or crash their browser, and then — boom! — all their work would be lost. Christian told me that he was already working on storing the checkbox states in localStorage. Then, naturally, we endlessly debated the storage format. That debate inspired me to write this article, to explore the various approaches in depth.

Using An Array
We have two (reasonable) ways to model our data in an array. One is to store true/false values, like so:

[false, true, true, false, false, true, true]

The other is to store an array of 0s and 1s, like so:

[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1]

Whichever solution we go with, we will ultimately have to convert it to a string, and then convert it back to an array when it is read. We have two ways to proceed: either with the old Array#join() (or Array#toString()) and String#split(), or with the fancier JSON.stringify() and JSON.parse().

With the JSON way, the code will be somewhat shorter, although it is the JavaScript equivalent of slicing bread with a chainsaw. Not only there is a performance impact in most browsers, but you’re also cutting down browser support quite a bit.

The main drawback of using array-based strings is their size in bytes. If you go with the number method, you would use almost 2 characters per number (or, more precisely, 2N − 1, since you’d need one delimiter per number, except for the last one):

[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1].toString().length // 13, for 7 values

So, for 512 numbers, that would be 1023 characters or 2 KB, since JavaScript uses UTF-16. If you go with the boolean method, it’s even worse:

[false, true, true, false, false, true, true].toString().length // 37, also for 7 values

That’s around 5 to 6 characters per value, so 2560 to 3072 characters for 512 numbers (which is 5 to 6 KB). JSON.stringify() even wastes 2 more characters in each case, for the opening and closing brackets, but its advantage is that you get your original value types back with JSON.parse() instead of strings.

Using A String
Using a string saves some space, because no delimiters are involved. For example, if you go with the number approach and store strings like '01001101010111', you are essentially storing one character per value, which is 100% better than the better of the two previous approaches. You can then get the values into an array by using String#split:

'01001101010111'.split(''); // ['0','1','0','0','1','1','0','1','0','1','0','1','1','1']

Or you could just loop over the string using string.charAt(i) — or even the string indexes (string[i]), if you don’t care about older browsers.

Using Bitfields
Did the previous method make you think of binary numbers? It’s not just you. The concept of bitfields is quite popular in other programming languages, but not so much in JavaScript. In a nutshell, bitfields are used to pack a lot of boolean values into the bits of the boolean representation of a number. For example, if you have eight values (true, false, false, true, false, true, true, false), the number would be 10010110 in binary; so, 150 in decimal and 96 in hex. That’s 2 characters instead of 8, so 75% saved. In general, 1 digit in the hex representation corresponds to exactly 4 bits. (That’s because 16 = 24. In general, in a base2n system, you can pack n bits into every base2n digit.) So, we weren’t lucky with that 75%; it’s always that much.

Thus, instead of storing that string as a string and using 1 character per value, we can be smarter and convert it to a (hex) number first. How do we do that? It’s no more than a line of code:

parseInt('10010110', 2).toString(16); // returns '96'

And how do we read it back? That’s just as simple:

parseInt('96', 16).toString(2); // returns '10010110'

From this point on, we can follow the same process as the previous method to loop over the values and do something useful with them.

Can We Do Better?
In fact, we can! Why convert it to a hex (base 16) number, which uses only 6 of the 26 alphabet letters? The Number#toString() method allows us to go up to base 36 (throwing a RangeError for >= 37), which effectively uses all letters in the alphabet, all the way up to z! This way, we can have a compression of up to 6 characters for 32 values, which means saving up to 81.25% compared to the plain string method! And the code is just as simple:

parseInt( '1001011000', 2).toString(36); // returns 'go' (instead of '258', which would be the hex version)
parseInt('go', 36).toString(2); // returns '1001011000'

For some of you, this will be enough. But I can almost hear the more inquisitive minds out there shouting, “But we have capital letters, we have other symbols, we are still not using strings to their full potential!” And you’d be right. There is a reason why every time you open a binary file in a text editor, you get weird symbols mixed with numbers, uppercase letters, lowercase letters and whatnot. Every character in an UTF-16 string is a 2 bytes (16 bits), which means that if we use the right compression algorithm, we should be able to store 16 yes/no values in it (saving 93.75% from the string method).

The problem is that JavaScript doesn’t offer a built-in way to do that, so the code becomes a bit more complicated.

Packing 8 Values Into One Character
You can use String.fromCharCode to get the individual characters. It accepts a numerical value of up to 65,535 and returns a character (and for values greater than that, it returns an empty string).

So, we have to split our string into chunks of 16 characters in size. We can do that through .match(/.{1,16}/g). To sum up, the full solution would look like this:

function pack(/* string */ values) {
var chunks = values.match(/.{1,16}/g), packed = '';
for (var i=0; i < chunks.length; i++) {
packed += String.fromCharCode(parseInt(chunks[i], 2));
}
return packed;
}

function unpack(/* string */ packed) {
var values = '';
for (var i=0; i < packed.length; i++) {
values += packed.charCodeAt(i).toString(2);
}
return values;
}

It wasn’t that hard, was it?

With these few lines of code, you can pack the aforementioned 512 values into — drum roll, please — 32 characters (64 bytes)!

Quite an improvement over our original 2 KB (with the array method), isn’t it?

Limitations
Numbers in JavaScript have limits. For the methods discussed here that involve an intermediate state of converting to a number, the limit appears to be 1023 yes/no values, because parseInt('1111…1111', 2) returns Infinity when the number of aces is bigger than 1023. This limit does not apply to the last method, because we’re only converting blocks of bits instead of the whole thing. And, of course, it doesn’t apply to the first two methods (array and string) because they don’t involve packing the values into an integer.

“I Think You Took It A Bit Too Far”
This might be overkill for some cases. But it will definitely come in handy when you want to store a lot of boolean values in any limited space that can only store strings. And no optimization is overkill for things that go through the wire frequently. For example, cookies are sent on every single request, so they should be as tiny as possible. Another use case would be online multiplayer games, for which response times should be lightning-fast, otherwise the games wouldn’t be fun.

And even if this kind of optimization isn’t your thing, I hope you’ve found the thought process and the code involved educational.

(al)

Thanks to Eli Grey and Jonas Wagner for their advice and corrections

Image on front page created by Ruiwen Chua.

© Lea Verou for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

The WordPress Widget Boilerplate ships with both JavaScript sources and stylesheets for both the administrator and the client-side views. It provides a basic localization file to make it easy to localize the plugin. It also includes a stubbed out README that follows WordPress conventions.
Each file of the plugin and each method of the core code is clearly documented for its purpose in the overall plugin. Additionally, the core code includes various TODO’s to make it easy for your IDE to locate everything you need to populate when working on your plugin.
It is based on the WordPress API in order to enforce best practices when building on top of the WordPress platform.

Homepage: http://moreco.de/wordpress-widget-boilerplate/
GitHub: https://github.com/tommcfarlin/WordPress-Widget-Boilerplate

Neil Klopfenstein offers us another visualization of Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan based on the Tax Policy Center’s analysis:

Here instead of looking at dollar amounts, we look relative to income and the picture gets clearer. I should reiterate again that there’s some dispute over the TPC’s methodology for calculating the distributive impact of consumption taxes. Their view, as I understand it, is that in the infinite horizon, all income is consumed, so a consumption tax is equivalent to a flat payroll tax. With the methodology my colleagues on the CAP econ team prefer, which looks more literally at the incidence as the new system phases in, the Cain plan is even more regressive.

 



 





In this post we release yet another freebie: the Balita WordPress theme, a theme dedicated to shops that sell products for children. The theme was designed by Tokokoo and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use for both private and commerical projects.

Not many theme providers have produced e-commerce themes for baby and toddler products. For you who have been working in this particular market niche for some time or are about to start, this Balita e-commerce theme is a great opportunity for you. Using such bright and cheerful pantone colors that suit this clothes department (baby/toddler products), this Balita e-commerce theme will surely attract more and more customers to your online store.

Download the Theme for Free!
The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

Large Preview

Live Demo
Large Preview (.jpg, 0,17 Mb)
Download the .zip-package (zip, 16 Mb, including instructions)

Balita Theme: Features

WordPress E-Commerce Plugin: It will help you generate your e-commerce store on a WordPress platform. The Balita WordPress theme uses a powerful plugin to encourage the functionality of WordPress used.
jQuery Slider: It helps potential customers to generate general information about your online store and its products at a quick glance.
Custom Shopping Cart: The custom shopping cart notifies customers about the total amount of items and pricing within their shopping carts.
Product List With Grid View: Customers can easily compare the general overview and price of the products.
HTML5 + CSS3 Optimized: Latest tech weapons for the prime look of your online store.
Ads Banner: Show off, promote, sell ads… anything! Each inch on your website is worth the attention.
Product Slider: Our aim is to make e-Commerce as interesting and as profitable for you as possible. If you wish to have a vivid description for your product showcases, product slider will be a good match.
Zoomable Product Images: Allow your customers to get a closer look at your product. Your customers want to see high-detailed pictures of your product when making purchase decisions.
Search Products: It helps shoppers to find and buy products on your site without having to browse each and every page. You can place an input text form on the sidebar that allows shoppers to quickly and easily find your site.
Blog Integration: This is a powerful tool on the Web to help build trust and provide updates for people who could be your potential clients. The theme already provides you with this feature — all you have to so is prepare the contents.
Related Products: The idea of cross-selling basically means offering alternatives and additions to the current product which are considered. The most common way of doing this is by presenting within the site’s product details page, which is usually manually assigned. This may be known as the “Related Products” or “Similar Products” page, but might also be a manually assigned “Accessories” page or even more generic recommendations using the titles “May We Suggest” or “You May Also Like”.
Multiple Product Images: Do you happen to have a lot images for particular products which you sell on your online store? No problem. This theme and its functions will help and let you upload multiple images at once for the products you sell.
Multiple Widget Areas: You can place widgets on any suggested area. Otherwise, all of our themes support widget allocation almost anywhere, but not limited to the sidebar.
Facebook Page Integration: This feature enables you to market your products through one of the biggest social networks around the world. Reach the highest sales potential with this Facebook integration feature.

Large Preview

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Capture Left Side (Large Preview)

Footer Left (Large Preview)

Footer Widget (Large Preview)

Logo Nav (Large Preview)

Right Nav Cart (Large Preview)

Single Add to Cart (Large Preview)

Single Full (Large Preview)

Single Preview (Large Preview)

Single Sidebar (Large Preview)

Slider Nav (Large Preview)

Visible Area (Large Preview)

Behind the Design
As always, here are some insights from the designers:

“We designed the brand logo section as well as the navigation below to be very clear so that this theme looks neat and attractive. We made the single product page to look clean so users would concentrate more on products and thus is free of distractions. Contents are on the left side, while the add-to-cart button are on the right side, beside the contents.

Don’t miss the opportunity to get this free Balita Theme because there are not many ways you can get a free premium theme everyday. Last but not least, once again, thank you Smashing Magazine for the opportunity.”

Thank you, Tokokoo. We appreciate your work and your good intentions!

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Webmasters are often wise to consider running a small e-mail newsletter. There are tons of free systems such as MailChimp which automatically collect subscribers and send out messages for you. But one aspect which does require some work is the design and layout.
Most e-mail messages are written in basic HTML code. Campaign [...]

Considering the growth of the mobile web, not having a mobile accessible version of your website is akin to ignoring a huge segment of the internet population.

QR code has become more and more popular since it enables us to grab information instantly using a smart phone. It saves us time from typing a long reluctant URL to a small phone browser; Smart phones will auto dial a number by scanning a QR code using a QR code scanner.

Image credit: Spiralshannon

As a developer, have you ever wonder how to build your own QR code generator? With the power of Google Chart API, building a QR code generator might be much easier than you thought.
Let us get started!

Before We Start
At the end of this tutorial, you will build your own QR code generator similar to below:

Demo Download
Preparation
Create two php files called index.php and gen.php.

index.php: this will be the front page where users select size, encoding and error correction of the generated QR code image. And it is also the place to enter data for QR code.
gen.php: this page will request data from Google Charts API. And it is called from index.php above using an iframe.

File: index.php

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<div id="container">
<h1>QR code generator</h1>
<div id="generator">
<form target="qrcode-frame" action="gen.php" method="post">
<fieldset>
<legend>Size:</legend>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="150x150" checked>150x150<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="200x200">200x200<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="250x250">250x250<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="300x300">300x300<br>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Encoding:</legend>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="UTF-8" checked>UTF-8<br>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="Shift_JIS">Shift_JIS<br>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="ISO-8859-1">ISO-8859-1<br>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Content:</legend>
<textarea name="content"></textarea>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Error correction:</legend>
<select name="correction">
<option value="L" selected>L</option>
<option value="M">M</option>
<option value="Q">Q</option>
<option value="H">H</option>
</select>
</fieldset>
<input type="submit" value="Generate"></input>
</form>
</div>
<div id="result">
<iframe name="qrcode-frame" frameborder="0" id="qrcode" src="gen.php" height="315px;" width="350px"></iframe>
</div>
</div>

</body>
</html>

First part of the code above is an HTML form with available options which will be passed to create the QR code image. Take note the form's target attribute's value is qrcode-frame. This tells the form to submit through an iframe.

<div id="generator">
<form target="qrcode-frame" action="gen.php" method="post">
<fieldset>
<legend>Size:</legend>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="150x150" checked>150x150<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="200x200">200x200<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="250x250">250x250<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="300x300">300x300<br>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Encoding:</legend>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="UTF-8" checked>UTF-8<br>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="Shift_JIS">Shift_JIS<br>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="ISO-8859-1">ISO-8859-1<br>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Content:</legend>
<textarea name="content"></textarea>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Error correction:</legend>
<select name="correction">
<option value="L" selected>L</option>
<option value="M">M</option>
<option value="Q">Q</option>
<option value="H">H</option>
</select>
</fieldset>
<input type="submit" value="Generate"></input>
</form>
</div>

Second part of the code above is an iframe which will be used to submit the form. The reason we are using iframe here is to let users constantly generate QR code without refreshing the page.

<div id="result">
<iframe name="qrcode-frame" frameborder="0" id="qrcode" src="gen.php" height="315px;" width="350px"></iframe>
</div>

Now view index.php from your browser. It should look like something below.

It does not look very good with the current plain CSS style; let us add some CSS style to the page. We will not discuss details of CSS styles here, since this tutorial is more focus on the PHP part.

<html>
<head>
<style>
body{
width:100%;
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
}
#container{
font-family: Arial, serif;
font-size:12px;
padding-top:20px;
width:700px;
margin: auto;
}
form{
width:300px;
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
}
form textarea{
font-family: Arial, serif;
font-size:12px;
width:270px;
margin:5px;
height:40px;
overflow: hidden;
}
iframe{
border:1px solid #DDD;
}
#generator{
width: 300px;
float:left;
}
#generator fieldset{
border:1px solid #DDD;
}
#result{
padding-top:7px;
margin-left:340px;
width: 350px;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>
<div id="container">
<h1>QR code generator</h1>
<div id="generator">
<form target="qrcode-frame" action="gen.php" method="post">
<fieldset>
<legend>Size:</legend>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="150x150" checked>150x150<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="200x200">200x200<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="250x250">250x250<br>
<input type="radio" name="size" value="300x300">300x300<br>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Encoding:</legend>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="UTF-8" checked>UTF-8<br>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="Shift_JIS">Shift_JIS<br>
<input type="radio" name="encoding" value="ISO-8859-1">ISO-8859-1<br>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Content:</legend>
<textarea name="content"></textarea>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend>Error correction:</legend>
<select name="correction">
<option value="L" selected>L</option>
<option value="M">M</option>
<option value="Q">Q</option>
<option value="H">H</option>
</select>
</fieldset>
<input type="submit" value="Generate"></input>
</form>
</div>
<div id="result">
<iframe name="qrcode-frame" frameborder="0" id="qrcode" src="gen.php" height="315px;" width="350px"></iframe>
</div>
</div>

</body>
</html>

Now view index.php again from your browser, now it should look better as below:

File: gen.php
Copy and paste following code into gen.php.

<?php
//1
if(isset($_REQUEST['content'])){
//2
$size = $_REQUEST['size'];
$content = $_REQUEST['content'];
$correction = strtoupper($_REQUEST['correction']);
$encoding = $_REQUEST['encoding'];

//3
$rootUrl = "https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=$size&chl=$content&choe=$encoding&chld=$correction";

//4
echo '<img src="'.$rootUrl.'">';
}
?>

Do request only if there is a data posted to the page.
Capture data using $_REQUEST and store them in different variables.
Construct a Goolge Charts API URL, and append captured data above to the URL.
Print out a img tag with src equals to the Google Charts API created previously.

Generate Your Own QR Code Now!
That is all, now your own QR code generator should be fully working. Navigate index.php from your browser and enter some data in content filed, select your desired options and click "generate" button.
You should be able to see a QR code being created instantly.

50 Handy CSS Tools And Generators for Developers10 Web Apps For A More Seamless Workflow Online10 Tools To Make The Most Of Twitter25 Handy Freelance Web Designer Tools
Written by: Xu Ding for Onextrapixel - Showcasing Web Treats Without A Hitch | 10 comments

Post Topic(s): Development

Ethan Marcotte, the father of responsive web design, has compiled a whole folder of responsive sites, each as flexible and foxy as the last. Here he rounds up 20 of his favourites

Repeating background images are safest method of styling up your website background other than a plain old CSS background color. Websites are viewed in all types and sizes of browser these days, so a repeating background ensures the whole of the user’s screen will be filled with your design, unlike a static image that can often end up being cropped off or lost in a sea of flat colour. Let’s take a look at how seamless or repeating textures and patterns can be created in Photoshop.

Creating seamless textures

Anyone who’s followed any of my tutorials or seen my work before will know how much I love using textures in my design work. Textures really help add a tactile feel to an otherwise flat and digital design. Open up a texture file and crop it in Photoshop to exclude any marks that would stand out when repeated.

Go to Filter > Other > Offset then enter a figure in the Horizontal and Vertical fields that’s half the dimensions of your image. My texture file is 800x800px, so I enter 400px in the fields.

The offset filter will show obvious lines where the file is repeated, but these can be blended in using the Healing Brush. Hold ALT while selecting a sample area, then draw over the lines with a soft brush. Photoshop will disguise the hard lines to blend the four corners together.

Give the new file a test in a new document by duplicating and butting up the copies against each other. You should be left with a seamless file that doesn’t leave any obvious gaps.

Creating repeating patterns

Repeating pattern files are also a popular choice for website backgrounds. Patterns come in all shapes and designs, from vintage wallpaper to simple stripes like these. Whatever pattern you’re creating the same simple steps apply.

Zoom in and pick a focal point on the design, in this case it’s a point in the design where the pink line changes to yellow. Drag out a marquee until you reach the same point elsewhere on the design.

Crop the image to size then make duplicates to check whether the file tessellates and creates a seamless pattern.

Creating pixel patterns

Pixel patterns have been popular in web design since the early days of Photoshop designed table layouts. They really help add subtle detail to your website background or page elements. Create a new document at 3x3px.

Zoom as far into the document as possible, then use the Pencil tool to fill three pixels to create a diagonal line.

When this pattern file is applied to an element at normal zoom it creates an intricate diagonal line pattern. Check out my pack of free pixel patterns, containing similar diagonal lines amongst other pattern swatches.

Today we want to create a template with a fullscreen grid of images and content areas. The idea is to have a draggable grid that shows boxes of thumbnails and menu like items. Once clicked, the thumbnail will expand to the full size image and the menu item box will expand [...]

In this day and age, if you are not selling your product online or at least making it available online, you are missing out on a ton of money. Unfortunately, the makers of these sites are most interested in making a dollar rather than making sense (did you catch the pun?).At any rate, some folks [...]

 



 





In your pocket right now is the most powerful “remote control” (as Drew Diskin put it) that has ever existed. It is no ordinary remote control. It can harness everything that all of the previous mass media (television, radio, Internet, etc.) can do. People aren’t using them just for simple entertainment or for phone calls. They have become the hub of our personal lives.

Smartphones are what younger generations know as just phones. The iPad (aka the tablet) is giving your grandma’s PC a run for its money. You certainly are holding some amazing futuristic technology in your hands. It will be even better tomorrow, though, so why does it matter to us or to users? Moore’s Law tells us, in effect, that these things will continue to become capable of more than anything our minds can think up.

(Image: Denis Dervisevic)

It’s no longer just about the evolving power and capabilities of these devices. It’s about us and how we, too, are changing. The user’s expectation of a great experience is the new standard. It falls to us as UX professionals to apply our skills to make this happen on the vast array of devices out there. It’s not always easy, though. The mobile realm has some unique constraints and offers some interesting opportunities. While covering all of the nuances of mobile UX in one article would be impossible, we’ll cover some fundamentals and concepts that should move you in the right direction with your projects.

Mobile Constraints
The mobile realm has many constraints. Here are several of them, along with thoughts on what to keep in mind as you come upon them.

Form Factor
The most obvious constraint going from desktop to mobile is screen size. Mobile screens are smaller. A lot smaller. You need to seriously consider this when designing and developing your application. Antony Ribot makes a good point in his presentation, “Mobile UX: The Intricacies of Designing For Mobile Devices,” when he says, “Mobile is not about making things smaller.” It’s much more than that. We need to consolidate what’s on the screen. Boil the application down to the most critical functions and content, and then lay them out strategically in the available screen space. For example, action buttons should go in the lower third of the screen, where they are most easily tappable.

Input Methods
Another obvious constraint is the absence of or difference in certain input mechanisms, and the addition of others. First, there’s no mouse. No mouse means no hover states. It also means that there must be some other means of clicking and navigating content. In most cases, this other means is the user’s finger. This difference in input method can be quite exciting because it opens the door to new possibilities with various gestures. Many standards are forming around these new gesture capabilities: pinch to zoom, swipe to scroll, etc. Take the time to include support for these gestures in your application. In addition, think of new gestures that you could add to enhance interactivity.

Discovering new gestures can be a powerful experience for users. It adds a sense of excitement, mystery and achievement — “Hey, I just figured out something new!” Take care, though, not to change the function of standard gestures unless you have a very good reason to do so, or else you will cause unnecessary confusion and frustration in users.

(Touch Gesture Cards (PDF): Luke Wroblewski)

One other caveat: consider the type of application you’re developing before getting too fancy with gestures. If it will be highly utilitarian in nature, then keeping things simple and straightforward would be best. If the application is for a specific task, then users will want to complete it as quickly and easily as possible. They don’t have the time or desire to discover new interactions.

Technical Constraints
While the capabilities of these devices improve with each new release it, keep in mind their limitations. Things like battery life and processing power are important to consider. Draining the battery or bringing the device to its knees with memory leaks or processor-intensive operations is a surefire way to destroy the user experience. This is why testing on the device early and often is imperative. Simulators cannot be trusted.

Data Transfer and Pricing
This will not be an issue for users who have unlimited data plans or who work on Wi-Fi networks. Unfortunately, unlimited plans are becoming increasingly rare. So, be sensitive to the amount of data you are transferring to and from your application. Keep the sizes of assets to a minimum, while maintaining quality. Don’t transfer data unnecessarily. For example, implement delta updates whenever possible (i.e. update only the data that has changed since the last transfer).

(Images: Mediaqueri.es and Food Sense)

Much has been said recently about Responsive Web Design. This approach does create some challenges with minimizing data transfer. Jason Grigsby has a very good write-up on the specifics. To summarize, CSS media queries — part of the magic sauce of responsive design — do almost nothing to lessen the overhead of data transfer to mobile devices. Resizing or hiding unwanted images still requires the full images to be downloaded to the browser. In addition, resources such as JavaScript libraries might be downloaded to mobile devices without even being enabled for users.

Good General Practices
What follows are some good general principles to keep in mind when designing and developing mobile applications.

Mobile First
Luke Wroblewski has a great post on the “Mobile First” methodology. In a nutshell, focusing on mobile first puts your mind in the right place. It forces you to focus on and prioritize the most important features and content in your application. It also extends your abilities by offering new tools and services that are not available in a traditional desktop environment. By approaching your project with the mobile-first mentality, you will start off on the right foot.

Behaviors and Archetypes
Build on the behaviors and archetypes that your users are already accustomed to. This will go a long way to reducing the learning curve of your application. If your application responds predictably to a user’s interaction, then the user will immediately become more comfortable.

This applies to more than general behaviors and archetypes. You will want to use design patterns that are specific to your target devices. This means building multiple interfaces for various devices and platforms, which is extra work; but it will pay off in the long run because users will appreciate that your application behaves in the manner they’ve come to expect from their device. For example, iOS design patterns dictate that tabbed navigation be located at the bottom of the screen, whereas Android devices have it along the top.

As with most good UX principles, if done properly, the user won’t even notice, while their increased comfort level will encourage them to continue exploring the application. Which brings us to our next practice.

Encourage Exploration
The more that users feel comfortable with and enjoy your application, the more likely they will explore it. You may want to lead them down certain paths or provide a few cues or coach marks on how certain things work, but still allow your users to “discover.” I’m not suggesting that you make the application complicated or ambiguous; rather, for example, if there are multiple ways to perform an action, one more obvious and traditional and the other a quick and easy gesture, then the user might come to prefer the second option once they discover it. Such solutions improve the overall experience if they prove to be quicker and more efficient than traditional interactions.

Provide Immediate Feedback
We’ve all witnessed our less computer-savvy peers clicking violently and repeatedly on a button trying to force it to do whatever they so desperately want to achieve. Touchscreens only add to this anxiety because they don’t provide that tactile response that we’ve been conditioned to expect from tapping on a keyboard or clicking with a mouse. Providing some indication that the application has registered the user’s interaction is critical, whether it’s a small bounce at the end of a scrollable region or a subtle color change at the tap of a button. This not only compensates for the lack of tactile response, but assures users that something is happening even if the screen isn’t updating immediately due to slow network traffic or some processor-intensive operation.

Context

(Image: S. Diddy)

Another glaring difference between mobile and desktop applications is context. With a desktop application, you can be relatively certain that it is being used in a particular environment. With mobile, all bets are off. This gives us some exciting opportunities: location-based services, on-the-spot social networking, the opportunities are vast.

It also raises some unique problems. Do your research to determine the context in which the majority of people will be using your application.

If you’re targeting on-the-go users, then you’ll want to build the application for speed: bold, obvious, stripped-down selectors and a streamlined workflow. If your application is more akin to a breakfast-table browser, then content will probably be more important to the user, but they may have only one hand free to navigate, while the other cradles their morning coffee. These are just two examples; the point is that your mobile application could be used in any number of contexts, and you will need to take the time to figure out how to provide the best experience to the user in their context.

One other thing to consider is the device(s) that you are targeting. Research suggests that a majority of tablet owners use their device mostly at h[…]

Remember the good ol’ days when you would walk into a store and ask the store clerk for a recommendation? The clerk would give you their honest feedback and you would make a purchase based on what they said because you considered them an expert. Things aren’t as easy on an ecommerce website because you lose that face-to-face recommendation.

Creating an honest and trustworthy ecommerce site isn’t easy. The media, your friends, and the general public are always talking about getting scammed on the Internet. Amazon, Google, and PayPal have spent years and millions of dollars building their reputation to be a trusted place to input your credit card. So, how do you start a new ecommerce business and get people to trust you? The best way to do this is to teach them first, and sell them second. Here are some examples of companies that do it well.

Blue Nile

When I needed to buy a diamond, the first person I turned to was my brother-in-law. He told me the only place he trusts is BlueNile.com. He told me the first thing to do is go through their Education Section. I was happy to find videos and easy to understand guides on how to pick out a diamond that looks good and that was within my budget. The guide was up front and honest, which was refreshing. I soon formed a sense of trust in BlueNile.

Teaching Tactics Used at BlueNile:

“Education” tab displayed in their main navigation.
Two minute videos that teach you everything you need to know when it comes to buying a diamond.They teach you the basics on what characteristics to save your money on and where to splurge. For example spend more on cut and hold back on clarity.
Detailed charts and guides on what you should look for in a diamond and how to get the best diamond in your budget.

MailChimp

Understanding how email newsletters work and how to avoid your recipients SPAM folder is a dark art. When I started my research on sending newsletters, MailChimp was the first link that popped up on Google when I typed in “How to Avoid Spam Filters”. MailChimp provides a large amount of free literature to teach novices like me how to dominate newsletters. They were my obvious choice because I was confident that they wouldn’t screw my newsletters up.

Teaching Tactics Used at MailChimp:

“Resources” tab displayed prominently in their main navigation.
Free Downloadable White Papers that tell you everything you need to know about email marketing.
Research section that shows you exactly what to expect when it comes to open/click rates.
Series of “Academy Videos” so you can learn by viewing a series of videos.

SEOMoz

I consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) one of the most important aspects of any online business. It is the #1 way my business gets new customers. After the basic SEO stuff, I wanted to learn advanced techniques and stumbled upon SEOMoz’s Daily Blog. Their blog is updated daily and teaches you how to get your website ranked. It shows you things to avoid and ways to juice things up. Their daily blog isn’t for novices; it’s for the people that are serious about SEO. Not only does SEOmoz have a daily blog but they have an entire community and forum section where people like me can ask questions! When it came time to buy serious software to help track our link juice, the $99/mo package seemed like a total deal!

Teaching Tactics Used at SEOmoz:

Daily Blog with SEO tips (updated daily!).
Free eBooks and videos to help beginners get started in SEO.
Strong community of SEO experts that are regularly contributing content and answering questions (the best content gets promoted to the Daily Blog).
Top navigation displays a “Resource” section prominently. The resource section holds and incredible amount of free tools to help boost your search rankings.
Monthly in person talks around the world about SEO.

Conversion Voodoo

With the thousands of online web consulting companies, Conversion Voodoo has done an amazing job staying focused on helping companies optimized their website to increase sales.

Conversion Voodoo has an awesome blog that talks about one of the most important elements of web marketing: Great Copy! Their team gives in depth marketing tips on how to tweak your words wisely to drive more sales.

When my business gets big enough, guess who I’m going to hire to optimize my site and copy?

Teaching Tactics Used at Conversion Voodoo:

Detailed articles of how to increase conversions.
Blog posts that go over popular landing pages and what they are doing right.

Ritual Coffee Roaster

One of my favorite coffee shops is Ritual. Every few weeks they hold free coffee tasting sessions. Their barista brews up a bunch of different coffee and teaches you what you need to know about coffee to truly enjoy it. Ritual isn’t your normal coffee shop – they fly around the world and get the best coffee beans. By teaching me how good coffee is supposed to taste, their $5 high-end coffee seems more reasonable.

When out of town friends come into town. I like to treat them to the best coffee in the world, Ritual.

There is nothing like trust when it comes to business, and it is possible to gain trust when you teach your potential customers. Lucky for you the internet will like you more when you do this.

Teaching Tactics Used at Ritual Coffee Roaster:

Brew guide on their website that teaches you how to prepare the perfect cup of coffee based on the coffee maker you own.
Short and fun to watch video guides that teach you everything about coffee.

Want to start teaching to get customers? Follow this step-by-step action plan:

#1 Consistency Is King
Get serious about this! You simply will not get customers through teaching if you don’t stay consistent. People will expect you to teach them on an ongoing basis. You will only gain trust with people after several articles. This is something you will need to do on a regular monthly basis.

#2 Brainstorm 15-100 Topics Your Customers Are Dying To Know.
Here are some suggestions:

Burning questions your customers have
Behind the scenes look at how you work
Best practices of using your product
Case studies of successful customers
Facts about your products

You can always use KISSinsights to ask your online visitors what they want to learn about ;)

#3 Create An Editorial Calendar
Add a different topic to teach about every week.

If it isn’t scheduled it probably won’t get done. I totally understand that you are busy … you have a business to run after all! If you really are serious about dominating your competitors, getting lots of organic traffic, and building a trust worthy brand create some time on your weekly schedule to teach your customers.

#4 Make It Easy For You To Execute
Make it easy for you to write and post new teaching lessons. I recommend using blogger.com (this is what I started with) to quickly post new teaching lessons. You can also easily make video tutorials using Screenr, if writing is not your thing. However, at some point it will be more valuable to host the content you create on your own website for SEO purposes.

#5 Collect Email Address
The best incentive to keep you writing is to actually see engagement and improvement. The best way to do this is email your customers whenever you have a new article. I suggest starting with MailChimp’s free plan and leveraging their sign up forms to collect email addresses on your website or blog.

#6 Do Guest Blog Posts
The quickest way to grab trust and credibility is by writing one of your teaching lessons on a bigger blog than yours (like the KISSmetrics Blog!). Research top blogs in your field using Google Blog Search and reach out to the main editor to see if you can contribute to their wonderful blog.

#7 Stay Active And Consistent!
Understand your customers’ problems and then teach them how to resolve them.

#8 Enjoy Your Trustworthy Brand
….and smarter customers.

About the Author: Rishi is the CEO of DigiOh where he helps businesses sell downloads. He is also the author of “10 Paying Customers in 10 Days”; you can download it for free here.

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Writing website proposals is boring. There are no two ways about it, but they’re a necessary evil. The proposal is the final push before our client signs on the dotted line. We need to make sure we have all our bases covered and that we project, as always, an image of professionalism.
Photo Credit: Stacey Shintani
Whether you intend to create your website proposals in Word, Indesign, or use an online service to help you out, its important that you know what you’re doing.
Company InformationThis refers as much to your company as to theirs. Include your contact information in a concise, unobtrusive manner. This can be placed in the footer if you like, but I also recommend that you include it in full on the front page. Make sure your proposal is made out to a specific person, with a name. A proposal to “The Marketing Department” is more of a long shot than a proposal.
Project Overview: Research your clientPhoto Credit: Rafael Anderson Gonzales Mendoza
The hopes and dreams of your client. What does your client expect to get from this website, what are their objectives and goals? Here is where we let the client know that we understand what they need, and where they want to go with this project. This can be a brief paragraph setting the scene.
The Client’s ProblemUsually a client comes to you with a problem. Whether that problem is the lack of a website, or that their landing page has a bounce rate of 90%. We need to identify their problem and address it. Here we make a list of all the problems our client is facing. Explain to them that they can find your killer solutions below the list. Short and sweet.
Site design is outdated.Contact form no longer works.Gallery is impractical both to use and update.Site was designed using tables and has no CMS.Home page has a bounce rate of 90%Etc.Project Solutions: Research your solutionsAll the above negativity has to be counter balanced with blinding positivity and clear solutions. For example our client has a very old website that is in desperate need of an overhaul…so instead of saying:
Macintosh Clothing needs their website redesigned. It’s 6 years old, looks very old school, and not in a good way. It needs something funky for todays youthful market…
Try a different approach. The fact that the site is 6 years old makes for many problems, that should be addressed individually. What will a redesign do for Macintosh Clothing? Apart form aesthetics, why should they update their site? Try something along the lines of:
Macintosh Clothing is finding that technology has passed them by, and with it the search engines. The website was built using technologies no longer relevant to today’s modern broswers. The Macintosh Clothing site was built using tables. This creates problems with search engines, while also making updates a laborious task. Any updates to such an antiquated system can be a long, costly affair. Google reads web sites in the order in which the HTML is written, therefore tables can result in…
You could, and probably should, spend a good few paragraphs outlining your solutions. It’s a pain but we can’t afford to be wishy washy. This is where our previous client research pays off. Let’s not forget, all that information we got from our project planner wasn’t just to make us appear conscientious.
Other ConsiderationsSometimes there are items that are not necessarily requested but are good to mention anyway. You may even make an extra sale! For example if you offer hosting, now is the time to mention it. If you offer logo design, now is the time to mention it. It’s up to you if you want to discuss pricing here, or save it until the final costing estimate.
I offer maintenance plans to all my customers, some take it, some don’t. I let them know what the package includes, and inform them that they can find prices at the end of my proposal.
Development TimelinePhoto Credit: Grufnik
How long will everything take? There’s a lot to take into account:
Research, Wireframes, Sitemap design, Initial Designs, Design Revision, Design Approval, Final PSD’s, XHTML/CSS, CMS and configuration, Testing & Debugging, Cross-browser fixes, Client Testing, Setup, We’re live!
How you lay this out is up to you. Some use graphs, some text, but make it easy to read and don’t forget to inform the client that all times are approximate. It takes two to tango, if your client isn’t fulfilling their side of the deal then it’s impossible for you to deliver on time. Make sure you have this stipulated in your agreement/contract.
Costing EstimateIdeally this should be laid out in table format, making it easy to scan. The client can see what each item costs without the need to dig. Let them know why they’re paying 3.000€, tell them what’s involved etc. It’s also handy to add any common items that haven’t been requested…just incase. The client should know, that if further down the road they decide to ask for extras then it will cost them X. Again, we need to be clear with our pricing structure. There can be no room for misunderstandings.
It’s also a good thing to include your pricing schedule. Most designers use a milestone system. I usually request 30% upon the signing of our agreement, another 30% upon approval of the initial designs, and the remaining 40% before handing the site over to the client. Some people ask for 50% up front. Go with what feels comfortable. Make sure you do get a deposit. Any client who refuses to pay upfront for your services is not worth working with. You can almost guarantee problems.
Again you can use a graph, illustration or simple plain text to let your client know your payment schedule. Make sure they are aware of how you work. After all it’s not like going to a shop where you pay for the product at the till. We as designers invest a lot of time in our projects, and there is always a risk that some people will decide not to pay on time. Get it up front and get it in writing.
Conditions & ContractsPhoto Credit: Frank McMains
Here’s where you lay down the law. State what you expect from your client and what they can expect from you. Only recently I began including my work agreement (contract) within the proposal. If the client is happy with everything, they can sign off that very day, get your transfer done and you can begin. Before, I would send the proposal, wait for the OK and then send the work agreement. This way I save time and kill two birds with one stone.
Writing a contract is for another article and can be a bit of a pain, but it’s your only back up, so make sure it’s air tight.
What’s Next?Be sure to let your client know what comes next. If they agree to the proposal, what should they do? Do they need to sign a print off and email it back to you, or simply respond by way of email? Let them know. Don’t make them guess.
Once last thing I would suggest, even after spell checking your proposal. Get someone to read it through. It’s very rare if something hasn’t slipped through the net.
Online OptionsIf you would like to take a look at some of the online options available for creating proposals, then check out the links below.
Bid SketchWP Bids (self hosted)Quote RollerQuote RobotProposableProposal PadSocket AppHow do you create your proposals, what do you include? Everyone has their preferred method. If you have any ideas or comments, jump right in.
Good luck!
You may also like…Technostress – The Freelancers Disease? → Repeat Work and the Search For The Holy Grail → Thoughts and Considerations for Freelancing on a Part-Time Basis → Is Working Freelance Really Worth It? Pros and Cons → Promoting Your Freelance Design Business with Social Media → Tips for Converting Your Freelance Operation into a Business → Thoughts on why Spec Work is Bad and Why You Shouldn’t Do It → 3 Simple Ways to Attract Higher-Quality Clients → Tips for Landing your first Freelance Design Job → Browse all of our Freelance Articles →

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Here is an easy to implement framework of Google+ styled buttons and icons (designed by WebDesignShock) that would look and work great with any web application. The dropdown menu buttons use jQuery to toggle the sub menu, all of the rest is all CSS and an image sprites for the icons.

Homepage: http://shrapp.nl/post/google-plus-ui-buttons
Demo: http://shrapp.nl/post/google-plus-ui-buttons

You should already know that clarity trumps persuasion for making sales. In fact, to borrow a metaphor from direct-response expert Dean Rieck, your copy should be like a shop window—completely invisible, affording a perfect view of the thing you’re selling.

But as with most important things in life, that’s easier said than done.

Fortunately—as with most things in life—much of the mystery can be removed by adopting a system that takes care of the basics. So let me introduce you to my Four Keys for writing clear, shiny copy that affords prospects the perfect view of whatever it is you’re selling.

Key #1: Conversational style
I’m sure you’ve heard it said that people don’t buy from websites—they buy from people.

And I’m sure you’ve also heard that people seldom buy from people they don’t like and trust.

Which is why hyped highlighter copy doesn’t tend to work. There’s no real personal connection, because it doesn’t read like anything a person would say—certainly not a person you’d be inclined to like or trust.

The same goes for verbose, puffed-up “corporatese”. No one talks like that—and if they did we’d assume there was something ludicrously wrong with them.

The solution is to write like you would talk.

Simple, right? So simple you probably reckon there’s no need to read the rest of this section—but you’d be wrong.

Because actually, writing like you talk is hard, and you’ll likely fail at it to start with. That’s because you have to make a shift in your thinking before it will click for you.

You have to get out of “Writing Mode”
The more self-conscious you are about communicating, the worse you tend to do it.

So you have to stop thinking about writing, and instead focus on just telling. You have to stop thinking about how your sentences look, and instead focus on how they sound. You have to get out of the mindset that you are performing a task which is difficult, technical, complex, or in any way different to the task you’d have if you simply sat down with your prospect and talked to him about what it is you’d like him to buy.

This is actually surprisingly hard.

From a very young age, talking comes completely naturally to us. It’s so basic that even thinking about teaching it in school seems absurd. The only people who need lessons in talking are people with disabilities.

Yet from a very young age, writing is something we struggle with. We are conditioned to think of it as something hard—something requiring strict rules and methods if we’re ever to achieve some rudimentary level of ability. Even though we’re taught to write all the way through school, most adults are incapable of competently stringing two words together on paper.

Well, let me tell you a little secret: You started out a great writer. But as you went through school, and were conditioned to think of writing as writing rather than as simply communicating, you got progressively more self-conscious about it—and progressively worse at it.

The best writers—at least in terms of sales copy—are the ones who are able to completely ignore everything they’ve been taught about writing, and instead get on with the job of just telling.

How to write conversationally
Don’t write—tell. The best way to get started is not to write at all—but to speak.

Ideally, record yourself talking about your topic with a friend you know and trust. That way, you’ll avoid most of the self-consciousness that comes when you get out a voice recorder and try to record yourself talking to the air.

Then play back your recording and just listen to what you say. Take notes. How do your sentences sound? How often do you break the rules of formal grammar? I bet it’s all the time. So forget formal grammar. How often do you say something that in retrospect sounds totally gitty? Pretty often too, probably. So figure out what you wish you’d said, and use that instead. Write like you talk, but with the benefit of lots of time to choose your words. It’ll be a lot easier to read—because people read with an internal monologue. When you write conversationally, they can hear your words flow.

Key #2: Narrative Structure
The second key to clarity is to put your copy together in the way your prospect finds easiest to process and understand.

Let me give you a clue. How do you teach kids complex ideas?

The answer, of course, is stories. Indeed, as soon as we can talk, we want to hear and tell stories. And that is simply because our brains are wired to process information most easily in narrative form. We’re very, very good at processing specific actions that involved concrete things in a timed sequence.

We’re really, really bad at processing vague ideas, abstract concepts or relationships, and unordered sets of things.

We need stories to give things structure.

In fact, if you’ve studied any philosophy, you’ll know that it can be almost impossible to grasp some ideas without real-world examples of them. But as soon as we have such an example, we find it fairly easy to generalize it to other situations.

Because we most easily process information in a narrative structure, it only makes sense use that structure in your sales copy.

Now, this does not mean you have to tell stories. I highly recommend that you do tell stories—case studies are an obvious and very powerful example of why. And most of the best, most successful sales letters have used stories to get their point across (the “two young men” story for The Wall Street Journal, for example, or the chicken salad story penned by Lillian Eichler). Stories bypass the ol’ frontal lobe and get the limbic system champing at the bit. And the limbic system is what gets us to buy things.

But that’s another article—or three. Here, I’m simply talking about using a narrative structure for your copy. Like this: remember studying plots in school? Your 3-act, beginning-middle-end structure? A series of rising action leading to a climax? Well, here’s how that looks when applied to copy:

How copy can be placed into a narrative structure (action peaks are suggestions, not hard rules)

The headline has to start the exposition strong, or the rest won’t get read.

The lede has to bring an immediate peak of action to keep your prospect interested.

But don’t make the mistake of starting off so strong that there’s nowhere to go but down. You can’t sustain climax-level action for long—and you can’t keep getting more extreme indefinitely.

To give a concrete example: people often complain that the final raptors-versus-T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park feels flat. And it does—because after the shocking T-Rex-eating-a-car scene, and the nerve-wracking raptors-in-the-kitchen scene, the final climax doesn’t add enough extra danger. Even if it did, we’re burned out on danger by the time it arrives.

In sales copy, “flat” means your prospect loses his sense of excitement. Keep him strung too high for too long and he’ll get burned out and lose interest. So start gentle and raise the action gradually. Screaming headlines and hyped ledes might pull people in, but they won’t keep them to the end.

To use a bike racing analogy, it’s better to enter the corner slow and come out fast, than to enter fast and not come out at all.

Key #3: Benefits, then features
Copy that seems clear as glass to you can be muddied in a very simple way for your prospect. Here’s what happens:

You write a conversational narrative that goes through all the benefits of your product. But you don’t give any reasons for these benefits.

Or you write a conversational narrative that goes through all the features of your product. But you don’t give any reasons for those features.

To you, with your knowledge of the product, the how of the benefits or the why of the features are entirely obvious. But to your prospect they are opaque. There’s a murkiness about your product that prevents him from buying.

Here’s an example: Imagine you’re talking about how your home study course will teach your prospect to hack his neighbor’s wireless network in 2 hours. For example! The reason this is possible is that the course just teaches some simple principles for operating a bundled automated software utility. This does the actual grunt work of breaking into the network.

Simply talking about how your prospect will be wirelessly checking Facebook in 2 hours won’t give him the kind of clarity he needs. Even though he wants this benefit, and even though you may furnish plenty of proof—testimonials or case studies or whatever—it’s not clear how it’s possible.

Alternatively, just talking about the automated utility in detail, relating each feature back to a corresponding element of wireless network security, will show him that hacking is possible—but it won’t help him understand how it is possible for him, since he doesn’t understand it.

To achieve clarity, both the benefit and the feature must be explained—and then their relationship.

Talk about benefits first
It’s easy to talk about features before drawing out the benefits. If you know your product better than your prospect, which you probably do, then that’s the natural order to take.

But your prospect is only interested in the features inasmuch as they create benefits for him. Which means you should talk about the benefits first, then clarify them with reference to features.

Obviously there are exceptions to this rule. A lot of technical B2B prospects know exactly what features they’re looking for, and want to see them tabulated nicely. But that’s because they already know the benefits. So you must know your prospect to know how much you need to explain for him.

When in doubt, here’s a simple rule: use bullets to describe both features and benefits succinctly. For example (benefits are in bold):

Peace of mind that your data won’t disappear if your connection drops, […]

Huge strides are being made in professional web design in the mobile arena. More than ever, the web is a place that’s quite friendly to devices of all shapes, sizes and operating systems. If you’re not a professional designer, this news can be unwelcome and even overwhelming as you wonder how you’re going to afford [...]

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Web design does not have to be limited to a typical grid structured layout. It sometimes feels like we are locked in an endless cycle of header, content, sidebar and footer. That is it. It would be great if we could to tear away from convention sometimes and also force ourselves to break some usability rules. Just imagine what we could create.
In today’s post we have for you a selection of sites that do exactly as described above: They break convention and the result is that they have built some amazingly creative layouts which, in most cases anyway, are a little unusual as well.
You may also like… 50 Examples of Large Photography Backgrounds within Web Design → 50 Examples of Creative 404 – Page Not Found Pages → A Showcase of 50 Amazing Personal Blog Web Designs → 50 Creative Examples of Illustrations in Web Design → 50 Professional Web Design Agency Web Sites → 50 Bright and Vibrant Web Designs – Color Inspiration →The Secret LocationThe Secret Location presents their work by creating the story of a character who follows a strange path to the secret location. Extremely synergistic approach with an extraordinary site layout.

Marshall HaberThis Flash site uses a subway map as a preloader and once it has loaded you’ll be amazed at the detail and creativity of its design and highly original navigation.

Grzegorz KozakVery intriguing and interactive layout that presents a beautiful background image of a tower. Clicking on the top menu will take you to the relevant section on the page.

Accept JoelThis horizontal scrolling portfolio website has a unique navigation that asks you to choose from one of five steps that will then scroll to the relevant page.

ThibaudI love this website. The carefully placed navigation elements have a beautiful mouse over effect and sound. You can drag and drop the elements and can click on each to further explore the site.

Get London ReadingThis layout has been designed as though you’re reading a book while sitting in a park.

Basil glooThe center part of this website is what that make it stand out from the rest. The eye-catching green carpet looks terrific.

ColourpixelFull of beautiful and vivid colors that grab the attention and develop your interest in the website to browse further.

Dave WernerThis portfolio site make use of a ‘scrap-book styled’ content area that allows you to explore the portfolio in a unique way.

Pretty ProductionA very unusual, colorful and creative layout with horizontal scrolling.

Rich BrownThis website is equally divided into two parts. One is completely static with a very nice background image while the other part is scrollable with different tiles where you can click on to browse further.

Matthias DittrichYou will love browsing through this truly interactive design portfolio site. Simply drag in to scroll.

Real VisualsWith this site, you will discover lots of interactive design elements that add beauty and originality.

Play JambalayaAn iOS word game app website with bizarre color contrast and some unique interactive elements.

SitotisThis website has been designed to give you the impression that you are flipping through a personal diary.

Gavin CastletonThis site has been designed to highlight the split personality of each of the musicians albums. Simply choose the album or personality you would like to explore.

Samsung MobileThis impressive website is easy to use, although it can at times be confusing as new elements are brought in.

AlexbugaThis is a fantastic site with creativity brimming from all angles. The navigation is hidden behind the glass panels of the entertainment center.

Level2
McDonaldsThis site has been designed to give you the impression you are walking into a generic McDonalds outlet.

Loysels Toy
FelixngThis dark site, on first load, presents itself with an almost blank layout. But when you move your mouse over the red blocks the attractive navigation appears and brings the site to life.

Nofrks
Tri WinThe background image of this site completely fits the company, which offers mailing services.

ClassicwflTypically the navigation is positioned in either the sidebar or at the top of a site. Classicwfl takes a different route. The non-linear layout breaks past a typical boxy structure and offers something completely original.

Team VigetViget Labs uses a sliding navigation and a horizontal scrolling effect to make the user interaction more vibrant and interesting. However, even more outstandingly, the layout itself stands out: the layout is indistinguishable and resembles interactive Flash-interfaces.

Kamil GottwaldIn his layout Kamil Gottwald allows users to determine the width of the sites columns. To navigate vertically users require scrolling horizontally. Consequently no vertical scrollbar is needed. Multiple site views are possible.

Jeremy Levine Design
PieoneersThis website presents the different components of web application development as different ingredients of a recipe. Nice touch.

SeymourPowell
Self TitledSelf Titled presents a single big circle at the center of the page. Clicking anywhere on the ring will reveal the actual component and clicking on the plus sign will further reveal content.

Agency NetA very interesting site to browse. Simply click on the section you want to browse.

Elite WebmasterA somewhat similar approach to that of Agency Net above. You can scroll up and down and click on each section for further information.

LeoburnettHere you will come to see a very different style of navigation. The mouse over effect is as though you are moving a pencil on a paper. Simply click on the sub-menu to explore further.

You might also like…50 Examples of Large Photography Backgrounds within Web Design → 50 Examples of Creative 404 – Page Not Found Pages → A Showcase of 50 Amazing Personal Blog Web Designs → 50 Creative Examples of Illustrations in Web Design → 50 Professional Web Design Agency Web Sites → 50 Bright and Vibrant Web Designs – Color Inspiration →

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