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Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

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5 changes I would like to see in 2010

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

2009 has been a somewhat interesting year for the internet; it’s become more mobile & more user friendly. However here are a few ideas I have had over the year, which I would like to see arrive in 2010.

Video Stream Caching

One of the big annoyances I have with streaming video files (normally on websites such as YouTube & Megavideo) is whenever I go to jump to another section of the video I lose what I currently have already loaded. It would be really useful if I could quickly go back to the section I’ve previously loaded.

video_stream_caching
This is a mock up I done, the video I used is from RayWilliamJohnson

I’m quite sure this would need to be implemented by the software, but I can’t see how it would be difficult to add.

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Programmers are…

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Programmers are…

Programmers Are...

Big thanks to Dan for showing me this ^^

1 Comment »

Making Zebra Stripes with CSS3

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Zebra Stripping is the technique of having different colours per each line on a list. It generally is considered to help users read large tables of information; however there is evidence suggesting the effectiveness of zebra stripes is somewhat overrated. Having said that, in CSS3 it’s very easy to implement so it’s worthwhile adding.

To add Zebra Strips to a list, all you need to do is adding the following pseudo-class to the end of the CSS element you wish to edit:

ul#example_list li:nth-child(odd) {
 background-color:#FFF;
}

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5 Tips for Starting a Website

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Here are a few quick and easy tips to remember about starting a website, which should make your website more successful.

1. Quality is better than Quantity

This tip can be put in several contexts. Content wise, if you have thousands of pages essentially saying “I’m great” in thousands of ways you have wasted your time creating them. Instead make a single easy to find page, which engages the user quickly and gets to the point.

Traffic wise, it’s better to have a small audience which engages with your content (or will pay for it) then a large audience who do not engage with your content and end up just increasing server costs. A notable example of a Company which has decided to focus on serving the 10% of their audience who will pay for content is News Corp.

2. Start Small

When you start you may want to do everything under the sun. Unfortunately in most cases this leads to websites stalling in development. For example many websites spend years “Under Construction” and when they are finally released their product or service is outdated or uncompetitive.

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CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation

Friday, June 5th, 2009

A few months ago 3 Google employees explored an innovative approach to CAPTCHA (What’s Up CAPTCHA? A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation). Essentially they suggested that having a user orientate an image into its upright position is easier for users (typing difficult to read text can be problematic) and harder for computers.

Computers find it hard to figure out what this is
A computer finds it really difficult to know if this is correctly orientated.

Here is a version I wrote which to can use on your website.

View Demo Download

This script makes use of jQuery to allow the user to rotate the images and a little PHP to check the image was rotated into the correct position.

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