What Your Font Says About You: The Serif vs. Sans Serif Debate
According to a Six Revisions article published last fall, 60% of websites use sans-serif typefaces for headlines, the most popular being Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana.
5 Characteristics to Seek When Choosing a Web Design Agency
There are tons of “5 Best Reasons…” blogposts about what to look for when hiring an agency, so I’m going to try not to do the done thing. When I think about what makes a firm worthy, I think the issue of characteris often sublimated in favor of what an agency does, what name brand clients they have, how slick their portfolio looks or maybe how embedded they are in social media. The characteristics that lead to great work and strong relationships are, in no particular order, awareness, curiosity, empathy, humor and objectivity.
The Critical Path of Website Content
As we enter our seventeenth year of designing and developing websites, there are very few clients that aren’t on at least their third generation websites.And with the average website needing a refresh after three years, our clients’ websites are accumulating lots of content. From an SEO perspective a lot of content can be good, from a user experience angle it can become a problem. To make it easier upgrading websites with a growing body of content, we engage our clients in a collaborative process we call “Website Triage.”
Avoiding a Website Marathon with Good Client Service
Next week is Marathon Monday in Boston, which got me thinking about “marathon web projects.”What the Boston Marathon and marathon web projects have in common are that both can be painful, long and tedious. Where they differ is that running in the Boston Marathon can result in a feeling of deep accomplishment. Marathon web projects are…less satisfying.
Three Keys to Better Web Site Development Client Service
You might think that after seventeen years of designing web sites so much of the process would be boilerplate. You’d be wrong. While our internal processes are rock solid and and instill confidence, every client relationship and thus every job is just enough different to keep us on our toes. That said, there are some universal principals for building successful long-term client relationships in the web business.
Unreal-time Web Design
The Shawshank Redemption is one of my favorite films. It’s about redemption of the human spirit, and takes place in a cold, sadistic, Maine prison, mid twentieth century. In a particularly poignant scene, an “old crook” named Brooks is paroled in 1955 after 50 years as a prisoner. He comes out of the prison and can’t believe the world waiting to greet him… or eat him alive. Big, fancy, finned cars are whizzing by, impatient drivers yelling at him to get the hell out of the way. He mutters to himself, “somehow in all that time, the world got itself in a big, damn hurry.”
Five Mistaken Assumptions About Web Site Development Projects: Part 3
This is the third of five posts about the mistaken assumptions, both from the client and designer perspectives, about web site development projects.
What Bad Restaurant Websites Can Teach Us
I read this very entertaining and scathing article in the Globe today about the current state of restaurant websites. It is worth a read.
Five Mistaken Assumptions about Website Development Projects: Part 2
This is the second of five posts about the mistaken assumptions, both from the client and designer perspectives, about web site development projects.
Five Mistaken Assumptions about Web Site Development Projects
I love a surprise! Only just don’t give it to me on a web site development project. I feel pretty safe assuming my clients would agree with this. For those of you who are not web development professionals and find yourself running a web project, I thought it would be useful to dispel five mistaken assumptions about the web development process. Each of the next five posts will address one of these assumptions:
