Back to the top: navigation and design failure.
November 22, 2009 at 12:03 pm Filed in:Design | Technology No Comments
One of my pet peeves that I consistently see with businesses who traditionally relied on the sunday advertisement insert is a reluctance (or perhaps overt refusal) to format their weekly ad in a manner more appropriate for the web.
Case in point: I was looking for a new backup hard drive today, and after becoming frustrated with the lack of usability on the ShopLocal.com, I reverted to switching back to viewing the weekly ads of individual retailers, where I happened to stumble across this perfect example – a weekly ad from Best Buy.
We’ll leave aside the fact that this opened in a pop-up, cosmetic issues and the use of flash for the time being…. What’s key here is that the majority of advertisement content that is of interest to the consumer is below the fold, requiring that the user scrolls down the page to see the content that is of interest to them. And if you look at the next image, you’ll see why.
The layout of the ad is intended to reflects the dimensions of a page in those the traditional weekly newspaper advertisments… the ones that were so unwieldy, where you had to either clear a 3′x5′ space to read on, or make a real effort to keep the paper from flopping over on itself… the ones that have been largely replaced in print by a more manageable tabloid format.
Perhaps the old-style ad layout was selected by the designer to reinforce metaphor of a print ad by as a way to make users comfortable with the notion of viewing an ad online. Or perhaps they are simply unwilling to put their ads in a more usable format in order to force more user interaction with their content in hopes of increasing conversions.
Regardless, this format, utilized by grocery stores and other big-box retailers on their sites might be palatable, were it not for one key problem that always appears to be found in near proximity:
Don’t cry over almost spoilt milk…
October 29, 2009 at 1:22 pm Filed in:Cooking No Comments
Have some milk that hasn’t quite turned yet?
Milk that has started to spoil may no longer be drinkable, but you can still use it up in cooking and baking without much to-do.
You might want to note, however, that milk tends to become more acidic as it ages. This normally isn’t too much of a concern to our stomachs, but if you’re using it for baking, you might want to fight off the acid using a pinch of baking soda.
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So many websites with nothing original to say…
September 5, 2009 at 9:54 am Filed in:Technology | geek No Comments
I’ve had many discussions with others lately about websites that focus on providing user-contributed content… and in those conversations, one of the topics that invariably comes up is how to come up with the initial content required to attract users to a new web site.
While some sites continue to grow organically, attracting users by word-of-mouth and link-of-google for the limited content they already have, a new practice has been spreading like the plague for sites that seek to obtain user-contributed content (UCC): ‘data’ scraping.
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Dreamweaver CS4 Hanging at “Initializing Files?”
September 2, 2009 at 12:40 pm Filed in:geek 2 Comments
After launching Dreamweaver, does it look like it hangs at the “Initializing files” stage? If you’re linked up with a subversion repository, that might be to blame.
According to Pablo Livardo’s blog, Dreamweaver will always try connecting to the svn repository when booting up before allowing you to do anything… and it might hang for 10 minutes or so before it gives up and completes loading.
While you could try to figure out what the problem is, sometimes you just don’t care. In my case, I hadn’t made any changes to my svn repository, and I discovered my svn host was simply down.
Easy solution: disconnect from the network, then launch dreamweaver again. If, like me, you only rely on subversion for checking in major changes, you should be on the road again in a couple of minutes.