The Savvy CIO

Darren Rowse over a ProBlogger has some good thoughts about website and blog content for click-happy browsers. It’s a short and funny read.

Darren experimented with a video chat site called ChatRoulette. The site randomly paired him with another person, and either person can click away to a new partner whenever they want. Darren couldn’t even get others to acknowledge him before donning a clown wig.

Applying his experience to the people browsing his blog (and your website), he offers this summary of visitor behavior:

• They don’t stay till long - they’re always clicking
• They are always looking for the next best thing
• They only pause if they see something that is interesting, intriguing or completely relevant to them
• They are ruthless
• They are impulsive
• They will judge what they see within a split second of arriving on a site
• They rely upon instinct and first impressions

He has some take home lessons for interacting with this type of person on a blog or site, but it’s important to note that not every site or blog (especially business ones) should plan their web strategy around this type of visitor. read more »

Bad website design comes in several forms.

There’s bad design. In it’s extreme form (now more rarely seen in the wild), this is garish fonts and graphics, scrolling banners, and a home page that is about 15 screens long. I’m gone from these sites in under 5 seconds.

There’s bad layout, where you can’t find what you want, get lost quickly, and can’t see how to get back. If the site looks nice, I can put up with this for 4 to 5 clicks, and then I’m gone.

These mistakes are easy to see and, with the right skills, easy to fix. But there is another type of bad design that is more difficult to recognize and much more difficult to fix.

read more »

Google has released a handy gadget for web site design last week. It’s called Browser Size, and it shows what most people see when they look at your web site. The results may surprise you.

Web sites are made by techie people (like us), and techie people spend a lot of time in front of big monitors with high resolutions. Sometimes, the result is a web site that looks great for people with big monitors but looks different for the majority of your web site visitors. Look at Google’s example: read more »

We develop, customize, build, integrate and host web applications and web sites, and we do it almost exclusively on open source software.

Why open source?

There are several reasons, but here’s a big one:

Open source saves you money.

That’s you, the client. Open source saves you money. read more »

How can you get the most from a content management system?

To start, be aware that content management can mean two very different things:

A content management system is software that allows non-technical users to update a website.

-OR-

A content management system is software that stores, organizes and controls access to company documents, files and information.

To my knowledge, no single piece of software does both of these things. At least not well. These are two different pieces of software solving different problems that (unfortunately) share the same name.

A document-focused CMS will be covered in the next post. Today we’ll focus on CMS for a company website. So to ask our question more specifically,

How can you get the most from a website content management system?

read more »

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