Blog
Over the years, I’ve written a lot of blogs on several sites. Some of my favorites are here, mixed in with my original content. Enjoy.
More Calls to Action = Lower Conversion
When more is less: A case study in three screenshots.
How to make an accessible carousel
“A good indication that a carousel is a poor choice of interface is that the term derives from a kind of spinning disk festooned with impaled horses.”
If you absolutely must use a content carousel, here’s how to do it well. You can have good accessibility and usability, and avoid some pitfalls. Includes a complete working demo with full markup, styles and script.
Quick Stats, CRO edition: Form Conversion
Need to talk a client out of making a really bad decision on a web form? Here are some quick stats you can use to try to talk them off the ledge.
Accessibility Checklists
Ever see a project requirement "Must be accessible to WCAG 2.0 Level A" and wonder what the heck that means? We're here to rescue you with this quick and easy checklist!
If you're a TL;DR type, click the link, remember that your work should meet Level A guidelines, and move on with your life. But for the curious…
Experience Rot affects full-site redesigns, too
So often as designers, we try to out-do the previous site – adding on design elements and movement and "surprise and delight" and bells and whistles and new content and and and AND—
What California's CCPA and CPRA consumer privacy laws mean for your website (2023 Update)
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 established a number of consumer privacy rights. The California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 extended it. CPRA’s new requirements go into effect in January.
Are you ready for CPRA? Here’s the executive summary of what you need to know. Updated for 2023.
Can you iterate your way to great UX?
Agencies do a lot of big-bang website redesigns – projects where everything changes all at once. For marketing sites, this usually isn’t a problem. But it can be a problem when used for intranets, asset management systems, member service portals – applications, in other words.
Here’s how to deal with it.
When "improvement" becomes experience rot
Better doesn’t mean more, and it may not even mean adding at all. When you undertake a re-design, think long and hard about what you add. Because often— more is less.
Image Optimization for Non-Engineers
Big images can make a page slow. But how big is too big? What kind of image do I use? WTF is a jay-peg anyway? What’s wrong with my ping file, it looks great?
I get these questions often enough that it’s worth writing up the answer for posterity. Here are some rules of thumb for the best image formats by use type, and a quick primer on the 6 most common image formats used on the web.
How is a CMS like a coffee maker?
When your CMS – Coffee Making System – makes a great product 90% of the time, but the other 10% of the time it’s a disaster, do you really have a good CMS?
Best URL structures for global websites
When working on a multi-lingual or regionalized website, one of the first and most important decisions is how to handle URLs. Do you use ccTDLs? Country-codes subfolders? Subdomains? Do you want mysite.co.uk or mysite.com/uk or uk.mysite.com?
These decisions have a tremendous impact on your SEO, how people perceive your brand as a whole, how local search engines view your brand, as well as the internal politics of each region or division within your brand…
Do Homepage Carousels Work?
Whether you call them slideshows, rotating banners, multiple offers, or carousels, you’ve seen them. You visit a new website, see a big banner or hero graphic, and a couple of seconds later, it changes, then changes again. They’re really popular. But do they work?
Here’s the data from the research. Spoiler: It’s pretty damning.