Product pages for e-commerce websites are often rife with ambitions: recreate the brick-and-mortar shopping experience, provide users with every last drop of product information, build a brand persona, establish a seamless check-out process.
It Works For “You”: A User-Centric Guideline To Product Pages – Smashing Magazine
January 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The Top 100 Websites of 2011 | PCMag.com
January 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Top 100 Websites from PC Magazine
What makes a great website? There’s a lot that goes into one these days. Universal appeal, good design, and useful features are just the beginning of the list of essentials. They’re also the things we take into account first when we dive into evaluating sites for our yearly list of the Top 100 Websites.
Our list of Classic websites remains much the same as last year, though there are some sites that are making the list for the first time (hello, Quora!). The websites we’ve deemed our Classics have been chosen because they remain constantly useful while staying relevant to an ever-changing audience.
The Undiscovered portion of the list—new (or newish) sites that have never been on this list—seems to get a little smaller every year. (Yes, we’re picky and yes, there are a lot of crappy websites out there.) We narrowed the list for 2011 down to 39 sites. Another reason this list continues to shrink? It seems that, as we noted last year, the rise of mobile apps is cannibalizing the development of stand-alone websites for the desktop. There just aren’t as many sites that are as compelling as in past years. Now, we didn’t say none. Thankfully, there are still plenty out there. They, along with our picks for the 61 Classics make up our list of the Top 100 Websites of 2011. If you haven’t checked them out by now, you really should.
So read, explore, enjoy, and discuss. While you’re at it, recommend some more sites in our comments area for our 2012 list. It’s never too early.
Acer teases tablet with highest screen resolution yet | CES 2012: Tablets and E-book Readers – CNET Blogs
January 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Stop Designing Pages and Start Designing Flows – Smashing Magazine
January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.
Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, we’ll show you how spending more time up front designing user flows leads to better results for both the user and business. Then we’ll look in depth at a common flow for e-commerce websites (the customer acquisition funnel), as well as provide tips on optimizing it to create a complete customer experience.
via Smashing Magazine – For Professional Web Designers and Developers.
How to Design the Best Navigation Bar for Your Website
January 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The navigation bar is the most important design element on a website. Not only does it guide your users to pages beyond the homepage, but it’s also the singular tool to give users a sense of orientation. With this in mind, it’s important to adhere to time-tested design and usability conventions. Doing so will give your users a comfortable and easy reference point to fully engage with your content.
Despite the necessity of an accessible navigation bar, usability studies on navigation across the web aren’t positive. One study by User Interface Engineering shows that people cannot find the information they seek on a website about 60% of the time. While this failure rate might be acceptable for your average blog, a business website simply cannot afford these stats. Even worse, many users often find navigation usability extremely frustrating, citing annoying hover errors and inconsistencies. Another study by Forrester found that 40% of users do not return to a site when their first visit is negative.
So how do you ensure that your users are able to quickly and easily find the information they need?
Showcase of Beautiful (or Creative) E-commerce Websites
January 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Heartbreaker Fashion
Designers are constantly striving to create eye-catching designs without losing the usability features that add significant importance to the experience of online shopping. Today’s showcase presents a variety of websites with elegant design solutions and innovative design techniques. We have analyzed the designs and now discuss their advantages and disadvantages in this review. We also suggest improvements and further ideas that could help improve shopping experience on these sites. Hopefully, you can learn something useful from our thoughts.
Professional Photoshop Techniques And Tutorials – Smashing Magazine
January 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This overview features a hand-picked and organized selection of the most useful and popular Photoshop techniques, articles and tutorials published on Smashing Magazine over the past few years.
Quick Overview
- Unknown Tricks And Time Savers
- The Ultimate Guide To Cloning In Photoshop
- Unveiling Photoshop Masks
- Brushing Up On Photoshop’s Brush Tool
- Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development
- Designing for iPhone 4 Retina Display: Techniques and Workflow
- The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing
- Mastering Photoshop With Paths
- Mastering Photoshop: Noise, Textures, Gradients and Rounded Rectangles
- Pixel Perfection When Rotating, Pasting And Nudging In Photoshop
- Mastering Photoshop Techniques: Layer Styles
- Useful Photoshop Tips And Tricks For Photo Retouching
- Photo Retouching Tips And Tricks In Photoshop
- Top 10 Killer Photoshop Combo Moves
50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers – Smashing Coding
January 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
There are tools that make our lives much easier. However, finding those obscure time-savers which would save time in every single project isn’t easy and requires a lot of time. At Smashing Magazine, we are regularly looking for such useful tools, gather them, review them and eventually prepare for a truly smashing round-up. Such posts are quite lengthy and extensive, but they are always worth checking out.
In this post, you’ll find an overview of useful and handy tools that can help you increase your productivity and improve your workflow. Some tools are more general, the others are more technical, yet we hope that this round-up has something to offer to every one of our readers. Please feel free to leave your comments and share with us which one of the tools you’ve found most useful and interesting.
Starting iOS App Development #2012 Resolution
December 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
As I announced earlier this month, I am starting to develop apps on iOS aka iPad, iPhone and iPod mobile devices. So far, I have completed the following:
1- signed up as a iOS app developer program on Developer.Apple.Com
2- purchased MacBookPro 15″ laptop (i was overdue on my laptop upgrade; my previous was a lenovo thinkpad x60 purchased back in 2006)
3- downloaded and installed Apple Xcode 4.2 from Apple.com
4- successfully ran the iPhone Stimulator on Xcode with a basic HelloWorld app
5- now i am collecting all sorts of video and textual tutorials to learn iOS development
6- already have a copy of Mastering iPhone and iPad Development by Wrox Press and also subscription to lynda.com
I’ll be posting my learning experience as i get this underway and also post any/all useful references, tutorials, and web links. Just subscribe to the RSS link and follow me on this learning journey.
Thank you and Happy Holidays to all!
Useful links:
