Recent Posts

This post is not intended for distribution, so STOP LOOKING AT IT.

Go ahead. Go to this site: Senior Healthcare Consultants. Notice the line at the bottom of every page. “This site is not intended for distribution to any client.” Snicker. Laugh out loud, if you want; let loose with a rolling guffaw, friends, because that line may be the funniest thing you’ll read all week. Then, […]

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Make the web personal

Twitter is not an RSS feed. Facebook is not a list of promotions. Your Web site isn’t a board-driven portal for internal documents and buzz words. Content isn’t simply the conduit with which you disseminate press releases. Yet, some of you continue to treat it that way. Oh. No. I get it. You’re trying hard. […]

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This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat

This is Abraham Lincoln’s hat. It’s unadorned. “It’s just a hat,” you’d think, if you saw it in the wild. If you saw it in a museum, surrounded by other items, you might think it was just another dead person’s hat. You’d be okay in thinking that. It’s no different from that Monopoly guy’s hat. […]

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Spoiler alert: collateral editing

Spoiler alert, you guys. So New York Magazine’s Vulture blog posted a little ditty about whether or not Don Draper chose the right woman on Mad Men’s season finale, complete with an episode spoiler right in the headline: “Is Megan Really Right for Don?” Spoilers in the headline? One comment summed it all up: “It’d […]

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Your mission? Keep it to yourself.

“…And we’d like to put our mission statement on the home page.” No. No, you wouldn’t. Your mission statement is for you. It’s for your board of directors, your senior vice presidents, your employees, your partners, your backers. It’s for your company, and your company alone. Your mission is not for your customers. Your mission […]

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Every page is your start page (so write that way)

Your home page is no longer your start page. It’s a home base, for sure – a quick escape to the front, an ejector seat for a lost user – but it’s no longer first contact. And it hasn’t been for a while, actually. The fact is, your start page is different for every user. […]

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Book Review: HTML5 for Web Designers

There’s an underlying belief throughout the non-tech-savvy that computer and Web programmers are a secluded, arrogant group; fiercely loyal to their language, looking out for themselves, unable to share their findings lest they make themselves obsolete. It’s this belief that leads us to stop trusting our company’s IT department and automatically mistrust the kid Web […]

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The Priority of Constituencies

I have been reading Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers for all of 10 pages and I’ve already found awesomeness: namely, the term “The Priority of Constituencies.” Sounds fancy. It’s not – it’s painfully simple, actually. It’s a design term, stating that, “in case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over […]

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Familiarity testing: planning for pet peeves and the possibility of follow-up

When we become familiar with our surroundings, two seemingly contrary things begin to happen: we start ignoring certain annoyances – and we uncover new ones. It happens in our everyday lives – we ignore the creaky floorboards of our house, but suddenly find fault in the loose cupboard doors; we become accustomed to one co-worker’s […]

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Autocomplete and a loss of confidence

While dorking out and reading Morville & Callender’s Search Patterns, I came across this sentence: “A few years ago, results were the only reply. Our goal was a subsecond response. Now, with autocomplete and autosuggest, the results may precede the query.” From Search Patterns – Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender This is space-aged, mind reading […]

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