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.
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.
Why is Google's encrypted dns controversial?
There are concerns over Google’s plan to adopt encrypted DNS, a user privacy feature, in its Chrome web browser. Given the widespread privacy violations across Silicon Valley in the past few years, it’s a little weird to hear that a privacy feature could be anti-competitive. What’s really going on?
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?
Design isn’t something you “like”
We can’t talk about how good it is unless we know what design is.
SEO lessons learned: There are no “days off” in content development
You already know that SEO benefits from frequent content updates. We discovered the hard way the inverse is true, too. Inconsistent updates can be a major contributor to losing rank.
Lessons from Hollywood: How to get the best solutions from your team
My brother-in-law is a screenwriter. One of the things he says he’s learned about Hollywood is “When there is a problem, it feels really good to be the one to ‘save’ the project. Everyone wants to be the person that saved it.”
Man, is that familiar or what! Something isn’t working. You think of a fix. You tell the team to make it so, and they do. Boom! Done. It’s so satisfying.
But… was that the best solution? Often, the answer is no. Great artists aren’t great in isolation — they have colleagues who influence them, who question their work, who challenge them to do better. Greatness is a group achievement.
Here are five guidelines to help your team solve your problem, whether it’s a flawed script or a flawed website design.
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…
Random Numbers
There’s an old cryptography joke: Random numbers are too important to be left to chance.
It is extremely difficult to create a truly random number, but on a practical level we can. A good enough random number is one which cannot be predicted by another tool with a rate of success more than chance. That’s a much lower bar to hit than the unachievable ideal of random…
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.