These $10 website things aren't all beer and skittles mind you. In fact you'd actually be better off spending your $10 on beer and skittles. Drinking beer isn't too tricky for "nontechies". There are some downsides to these free hosting services. Each offers several dozen design templates, but you could still end up with a site that looks pretty generic, unless you have Web-design skills or hire someone ... Read full entry

On the remote off-chance you hold any doubts as to your gender, this little script, after analysing your website browsing history, will make the call for you. One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user's browsing history to estimate age and gender. Of course the idea is definitely not new, in fact Xerox (of all companies??) ... Read full entry

If your website attracts 10,000 unique visits daily, but only 10 return visitors, then you are not doing as well as the site that attracts 250 unique visitors, but of those, sees 125 return visitors each day. The money, as it were, is in those return visitors. That's according to usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Given growing bounce rates, we must stop using "unique visitors" as a metric for site ... Read full entry

This has to be the longest running debate on the Interweb. Should, or should not, links open in a new window, or tab? Despite the fact I can have up to a dozen browser windows open at any one time, I still believe that website users should make the choice as to whether they view a link in a new browser instance. I realise I am someone who is considered "tech-savvy" and ... Read full entry

shamurai, David Shamma's personal website and portfolio, harks back to the days of mainframe computing, monochrome monitors, and the good old DOS operating system. Interface of the week :)

As Aaron Cannon points out, it's not perfect, but it's a great starting point, and as a bonus, many of the items on the list are commonsense, especially for standards minded web designers, making it even easier to adopt. When I wrote the ... checklist, I attempted to answer the question, "What concise pieces of advice can I give to designers that will have the greatest impact on accessibility in ... Read full entry

The pen is mightier than the web design world's favourite image creation and manipulation application, Photoshop, when it comes to preparing website mockups, according to Jason Fried. Photoshop is repeating yourself. Ok, so you've spent 3 days on a mockup in Photoshop. Now what? Now I have to make it all over again in HTML/CSS. Wasted time. Just build it in HTML/CSS and spend ... Read full entry

Though still in pre-release IETester sounds like a promising application that tests websites in a number of versions of Internet Explorer from IE 5.5 through to beta 1 of IE8. I've been playing around with it, and my god, disassociated looks terrible in IE 5.5 and 6, but I already knew that. While there's still work to do this is certainly looking promising. The "holy grail" of website testing per chance?

Designing a good website has become too easy since the demise of the Geocities homepages of the late 1990's. Accordingly Alec Rios has prepared a great primer on designing really bad websites. From the time a visitor enters your site to the time they exit, there are plenty of effective techniques to annoy them. So in this article, I will identify 28 points to remember during a website development ... Read full entry

Web users "getting more selfish" Website users are more interested in cutting to the chase, that is seeking whatever information they are looking for, and then moving on. This means they don't particularly appreciate efforts by a website owner to encourage them to stay and look around, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen. Bloggers will also be interested to learn that many website visitors loathe widgets, and other third party ... Read full entry