The Raven Archive

Archive for the ‘ Usability ’ Category

Cross Browser Testing

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

I recently started using a new service called CrossBrowserTesting, and it’s so incredibly awesome I felt compelled to write a review.  First some background… Browser compatibility is a difficult challenge for all web designers and developers.  The process of debugging HTML, CSS, or Javascript problems that only occur on specific ...

Bounce rates affecting rankings? Or SEO for SEO’s sake?

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Over at SEO Black Hat, QuadsZilla demonstrates correlation between traffic, specifically Google traffic, and bounce rate, claiming that bounce rate is being used to determine quality and factoring into rankings. Except his or her graphs show direct, rather than inverse, relationships between traffic and bounce rate. In other words, in ...

Conversion Tracking Made Easy

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

One of my favorite new features of Raven is Conversion Tracking, located in the Analytics section. Similar to how Google AdWords conversion tracking works, Raven is able to easily track conversions, like signups and purchases. We recently used this for TweetStalk and were able to track where all of our ...

Google introduces SearchWiki; SEO heads explode

Friday, November 21st, 2008

If you’re signed in to Google this morning and have performed a search, you’ve no doubt noticed that they’ve introduced interaction elements that allow you to move results up or down or suppress them from your display. Google is calling this feature SearchWiki. According to the Google Help Center article ...

Create 404 Pages That Market Your Website, Not Turn Them Away

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

From a user experience point of view, 404 pages are not something you want to see. If you reach one, it means the content is gone or has been moved. Also, the average Internet user has no idea what the “404″ actually means, even though that’s usually the message they ...

sIFR 3 Beta is Getting Closer to its Final Release

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

Mark Wubben announced on Wednesday (December 26, 2007) that sIFR was getting closer to its final release. In a message to all of the developers and beta testers, he said: Good news, I’m running out of bugs to fix. Pretty much the only thing left to do is support page ...

Implementing Contextual Feedback and Help to Improve the Usability of Web Applications

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Traditionally, communication between developers and users has been sparse. Developers have always provided limited help through a single help window and users rarely get the chance to offer feedback and bug reports. However, those limitations have been changing in recent years. Many software developers have created help forums where users ...

Safari 3 Now Supports Textarea Resizing

Monday, June 11th, 2007

The new Safari 3 Beta supports the ability to resize any textarea box. This feature is supported on both the Mac and Windows version of Safari 3. The video below shows it in action.

Breadcrumb Navigation: Hierarchy or History?

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Breadcrumbs are a form of secondary navigation for websites. They’re useful, because they: show the user where they are provide one-click access for section hierarchy are small and take up very little space are potential SEO keyword targets I try to use breadcrumbs whenever I can and I find they’re ...

punBB 1.3 to Support Microformats151

Monday, September 25th, 2006

Rickard Andersson recently added Microformat support to punBB, a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board (forum). In particular, he just added support for the MicroID, a small decentralized verifiable identity. The MicroID allows… …any content owner or web site to publish a simple portable identity token associated with entire pages, ...