Users want the message to be clear
Users want context to see if they fit
Users want consistency
Users want to be heard without having to shout
Users don’t want the shiny (unless it’s in context)
Users want to be guided (without being guided)

This is all about giving the user what they want expect and not what you the designer or developer think is a cool feature or the way you think it should be done. I’ve had the privilege of taking part in a good amount of real user studies on website’s i’ve worked on in the past, every time it is an eye opening experience and I learn something new about how people use the things I design. I couldn’t recommend more doing a simple usability test on something you are working on. Do it right now, go grab a friend put them behind the site you’re working on ask them to complete a task that is one of the main things the website is supposed to do and watch. Simple as that!

My absolute favorite part of Patrick’s post is this:

What does work are sites are are intuitive enough and forward thinking enough to provide a path for the user to go. The elements of user experience should be defined enough so the site acts the way the user thinks it should act i.e. the user shouldn’t have to learn it, especially for consumer facing sites. It’s about predictive user experience.

I know i’ve posted a few Ted talks, you’re probably like “dude, enough with the Ted posts”. Seriously listen to what J.J. Abrams has to say, he’s quite possibly this decade’s master storyteller.

In the name of Web 2.0 we at WebHostingSearch.com are now handing out an award to one site each month that stands out from its competitors. The award is for Best Web Design with particular focus on great usability and accessibility. 21st century web design is so much more than color schemes, flashy banners and glossy buttons. Few understand the importance of usability and accessibility in web design so what better reason than to reward the ones who do.

Thank you Eva and all the rest of the team at WebHostingSearch.com we do truly appreciate it!

BTW: WebHostingSearch.com is really a great resource for web hosting service information, the site has reviews on all the major hosting providers as well as articles and video tutorials on hosting applications.

Tumblr is possibly one of the easiest ways you can run your own blog on the internet, and it’s FREE. In their own words:

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML. Even use your own domain name.

Tumblr really is a blogging engine at heart, but it’s more like a purist cross between a blog and Twitter. It really shines if you are looking to make short/quick posts, post pictures or video files. The thing is it’s not as intimidating as a full featured blog, the system gets out of the way because it’s so simple and you don’t have to worry about all the moving parts. You can just focus on what you’re posting and get on with your life.

Recently Tumblr has rolled out some basic analytics and social tracking features. The activity dashboard is insightful if you use Tumblr a lot, but doesn’t really get very deep, though you can setup Google Analytics to run on your Tumblog. They’ve also rolled out a directory of top users/posters, likely to fuel more usage as much as just show off the top users, much in the same vein as wefollow.com for Twitter users.

The real beauty for me is that Tumblr treats different media with respect. It’s not just about different posts, it’s about what media type you are delivering them in. It handles quotes and dialogs differently on posting as it gives video and images special treatments as well. The other really special part is the ability to follow and favorite other posts and Tumblrs. You can amass followers as with Twitter and they can re-blog your posts and mark them as favorites which in the world of social networking is a beautiful thing. One final thing that is super sweet is Tumblr’s native ability to suck in an RSS feed and let it roll in line with your posts. This is a really nice feature and they really take out any ambiguity about it and make it really easy.

Tumblr is really growing quite rapidly in user share, they’ve rolled out a slew of new features and updates to the core system over the past year that is really bringing it up to a level of maturity that makes it an option to no longer be ignored. However, in the end an experienced blogger is likely to feel that Tumblr falls short of their needs, and it may. With its lack of built in commenting or trackbacks or Wordpress like plugin architecture it just isn’t a full featured blogging engine. Hence it’s not an apples to apples comparison. There’s a lot of argument amongst Tumblr users about the lack of commenting on Tumblr. Almost half seem to want it (and if you do you can add a commenting system for free) and the other half really like the fact that it doesn’t out of the box. The point being, Tumblr is just a different flavor of blogging than something like Wordpress, but I think it’s going to fit most needs for us in the future.

If you’re looking to get going quickly, Webmonkey has a most excellent write up on getting started with Tumblr. Of course the only way to experience it is to go get an account for yourself.

What are DNS blacklists and blocklists? According to blacklistmonitor.com:

A dns blacklist or blocklist is a database containing known internet addresses (or IPs) used by individuals or companies sending spam. Various ISP’s and bandwidth providers subscribe to these DNS blacklist databases to filter out spam sent across their network or to their subscribers.

I won’t go into what you should do to keep off of a blacklist or maybe even how you got on one, that’s for another post, but for now let’s assume you just want to check.

Step 1 Find out what your IP address is:
You can do this by going to network-tools.com or dnsstuff.com and running a “Ping” look up by copying and pasting in your domain name.

Step 2 check the blacklists:
Now head on over to a couple of the blacklist services and check to see if you’re on there.

SpamCop
SpamHaus
Delivery Watch
MXToolBox
DNS Stuff
EmailReach
RepCheck
Blacklistedip
Blacklist.ie
Blacklist Check

If you see your IP show up in any of these lists, chances are you’ve been sending emails to honeypot email addresses. That is email addresses that are setup specifically for the purpose of catching you sending unsolicited emails. It’s a trap…

You then will need to petition the blacklist organization to get off of said list, if that fails we can then get involved to start tracking down specific ISPs that are blocking your email delivery and try to negotiate a way to get your messaging through. All in all, it’s a hard road to travel down. If you even suspect your list isn’t 100% quality you need to talk to us about it before you use it, I promise we won’t yell at you. We can help keep you out of trouble and it’s much easier to do that before you send, once you’ve sent to a suspect list you can’t take it back.

I’ve been asked about the SEO presentation I gave at May’s RefreshColumbia meeting, the post is available on that site as well, there’s some other cool stuff to learn from there as well, so make sure and check it out when you have time. So in the video above at about 45:20 in you can catch me on there. Jay kicks off the meeting with some really neat design pointers and there’s two other talks as a bonus that are truly informational and worth the time if you have it. I’ve linked up my slides after the jump as well. Enjoy…

Gary Vaynerchuck gives us a sneak peek at some Facebook functionality that they are testing that big users like him get to preview before the rest of us. By the way, if you don’t know who Gary is yet, check him out, a lot of what he says is simple stuff but it’s really good to hear.

Looks like Facebook is going to make the social timeline more public, allowing you to interact with other users who you may not be friends with. Not sure how that’ll work, most likely it’ll get released for groups and pages first - where it makes the most sense. The ability to look at other people (who you don’t follow) and review their posts and comments then choose to follow/engage with them has long been Twitter’s advantage over Facebook. It’ll be really interesting to see how all this actually comes out.

Designing an HTML email that renders consistently across the major email clients can be very time consuming. Support for even simple CSS varies considerably between clients, and even different versions of the same client.

Make sure and check out the web guide, you can also download the full spreadsheet for all the known email client support info.

Thank you Campaign Monitor!

I learned this from a post on problogger.net a while back. There is no overnight route to creating credibility, and you have to build upon your audience (client base) and grow it. What are the benefits of creating credibility for your website? Those would be two fold:

1) Gives you the ability to change user attitudes toward you:
Keeps you in a positive light, they feel comfortable interacting with you, they embrace your point of view.

2) Give you the ability to change user behavior.
They give you their personal information, they complete a transaction, they return to your site often.

Trustworthiness and Expertise are two pretty huge things to work on with every news release and blog post you make, it takes time and planning but it can be worth it in a huge way when you achieve it.

Keep in mind this formula is talking about creating the perception of credibility, you can easily reverse all your hard work in an instant if you don’t actually live up to what you’ve created.

This post and Joshua’s post are all based on idea by Bradley Horowitz when he’s talking about the communities surrounding Yahoo’s many services like Flickr, Yahoo Groups, Upcoming & del.icio.us. The idea is that there are phases a non-interacting visitor (lurker) goes through before he/she becomes a content creator or conversion:
.

1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)

10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress

100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

So, most of your users (even the contributors) are going to be passive most of the time.

This is permission marketing at it’s basic core. Real permission marketing is when people opt-in, not the legalistic definition not the CAN-SPAM law, but real people wanting to read your stuff and then choosing to participate when they feel passionate about a subject…

As Joshua Porter reminds us about what Seth Godin says:

“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.” - Seth Godin

Here’s an example: On colamovies.com, we want more movie reviewers, but it makes logical sense that in order to get more reviewers we need to continue to focus on cultivating the visitor base that simply uses the website for movie times, then make it easy for those visitors to make reviews. The same is just as in the analogy Porter makes from Fred Wilson:

Just like bookstores use cafes to bring potential purchasers in the store, online retailers should intentionally cultivate an active non-transactor user base.

In other words, the big book stores use fluffy comfortable chairs and coffee to get you into the store to read the books in order to entice you into making a purchase…

So they key to transforming lurkers into active participants is to think of how to engage based on their current activity. Don’t just look at the current conversions and the paths those visitors took to convert. Look at the traffic patterns below the conversion, what are they searching for? What lead them to you? How are they using your website in ways you don’t intend?