“Beyond the IA Guy: Defining information architecture” in Digital Web Magazine.
Category: Internet (Page 37 of 40)
Making Mistakes Well in New Architect. Smart, sensible, obvious, and essential. Even simple solutions, like the standard 404 error page I developed for Economist.com, reduces confusion and aggravation, making the user experience more pleasant (and likely more successful). The more a site can customize and fix a user’s mistakes, the better the user will respond.
“Web standards? You can’t afford to ignore them anymore,” writes Paul Boutin in Webmonkey (via bBlog, as I didn’t know Webmonkey was still breathing).
I agree, but essays like this ignore mitigating factors: Man-hours, revenue-generating issues, time allotments, legacy code, browser stats. I’m knee-deep in a push for standards at Economist.com, but I am required to advocate a long-term solution, which will take a year or more to fully implement.
Last I saw, too, the 4.x browser usage on my employer’s site was still a lofty 15%, which complicates things. Every “compliant” markup I see has all sorts of level-4 browser contingency workarounds which, while “clean” in the purest sense, are no more useful than the old table-and-font model.
In short: Baby steps. I want standard code as much as the next plastic-bespectacled usability expert, but I want it without sacrifice.
Added this site to BlogTree today—I was curious to see who my “sibling blogs” were.
Feels nice to give credit to the sites that inspired me to start this site (although it was more of a journal than a weblog, as it often is today). Humbling to admit today, but I used Jason Kottke’s “steal this website” iniative to get mine started.
If you’re wondering, I got online in December 1987 (yes, ’87), began my Internet career in October 1995, started Web design full-time in August 1996, launched the Ideapad in November 1998, and bought netwert.com in July 2000.
Wanted to say hello to my new readers this week who have arrived through Jason’s Cheat Sheet Creator. And congrats to Jason on his television debut. Next thing you know I’ll be featured on Blogger…!
Note to readers: I update this page just about every business day. The engagement notice last week was a (happy and fun) anomaly. I’ve been saving up bookmarks in the interim. Click away.
News: iVillage To Eliminate Pop-Up Advertising. “This move was based on an iVillage/Vividence survey showing that 92.5% of iVillage women found pop-up advertising to be the most frustrating feature of the Web.”
Exposition: I Remember Patty in The Morning News. “Pattyâs mother was an abrasive woman, the kind of person who jingled into a room with too much jewelry and not enough taste.”
Trivia: Origins of band names. “According to Paul Stanley, Kiss was a momentary inspiration that sounded dangerous and sexy at the same time. Kiss denies the silly fundamentalist rumor that the name stands for ‘Knights In Satan’s Service’.”
Fun: How to swear in German. “Hau ab, Du Pfeife!”
More tomorrow.
At Economist.com, compliance is in the works. Adrian Holovathy discusses proper code use and makes me look good in the process. (No promises yet on Economist.com’s HTML, but we’re working on it.)
Yahoo is now going to integrate ever-more-intrusive (read annoying) ads in an attempt to increase ad revenue and effectiveness.
Note to Yahoo: I use your Weather service because weather.com is too full of intrusive ads. As your services get more obnoxious, I may well migrate away from them as well. (And I sincerely hope I don’t.)
[See also: A quiet, and sad, realignment, July 3, 2002]
David Strom reports that an increasing percentage of email is being filtered—often without the recipient’s knowledge. More and more frequently, harmless email is being branded as spam due to the inclusion of words that the filters brand as inappropriate. Quoted in the article: “In short, we’re starting to see signs that email, often hailed as the Internet’s ‘killer app,’ is in danger of becoming an unreliable, arbitrarily censored medium – and there’s very little we can do about it.”
Yahoo’s new home page design represents a fundamental shift in focus: The Web directory is no longer the main reason to visit. And this is troublesome.
To me, the most striking component of Yahoo’s new home page design is the relegation of the Web Site Directory to the lower left-hand quadrant of the page.
The change is a logical progression, but the home page is clearly restating Yahoo’s purpose. Now it’s somewhere to “shop, find, connect, organize, [and have] fun.” Note that “find” is second in this subtle mission statement, and Find’s options are all sales-oriented: careers, maps, people, personals, yellow pages.
Yahoo came to prominence as the pre-eminent Web directory. You wanted to find something, you found its link through Yahoo. The site then began to grow horizontally: You wanted to find something, you began to find it on Yahoo. As of today, the directory that defined the site is a secondary consideration.
I have used Yahoo since 1994 and I remain a fan of its services. As a long-time visitor, I can only wonder: How far can Yahoo stray from its initial mission before it begins to lose its usefulness? After all, I got to Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Weather because I used Yahoo’s listings.
I hope CEO Terry Semel’s long-term plan includes maintaining and updating the seminal Web directory. Without it, Yahoo may turn itself into just another bloated portal. And we know how the rest of the “portals” have fared.