Design Patterns - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

This past weekend, the New York Times published an interesting article.

In it, Matt Richtel and Ashlee Vance discussed the computer industry's plans to offer PCs that boot up more quickly.

When reviewing new or redesigned websites, I've noticed a few that don't fill the whole screen, which has got me thinking about the best way for designers to approach the issue.

It's impossible to ensure that your website looks the same in every browser, mobile device, or screen resolution, but there are ways to deal with the problem.

Transactional emails can be useful for building trust and improving customer service, but many are not as user-friendly as they could be.

That's Jakob Nielsen's verdict in his latest Alertbox post, in which he details tests of a range of emails; customer service responses and order confirmations.

As ever, Grokdotcom has some useful e-commerce tips, this time on optimising site search results pages.

According to Daniel McGuigan, the search box can be the last chance to get a visitor to take action on your site, if they haven't found what they want through navigation, landing pages or your homepage.

This is certainly true, but some visitors may also use the search box as their first port of call if they have a particular product in mind when visiting a site.

Home pages for high street retailers may initially come across as similar, but their actual performance differs strongly due to the design of the navigation menus.

Choosing the right colours when designing a website is something that requires a lot of patience and experimentation, and – ideally – a minimum of guesswork.

Thankfully there are some useful rules of thumb to follow when it comes to working with colours, as well as some truly excellent sources of inspiration out there to help you make the right colour choices for your brand, website, and audience.

Let's start off by considering why colour matters, then I’ll list 20 colour recommendations for web professionals, followed by some pointers to my favourite tools at the end of this article.

Are you validating your website's HTML/XHTML and CSS? If not, you should be.

In my last post, I provided a number of useful online resources for stock photography because visitors tend to make very quick decisions as to whether they're going to stay on a site based on aesthetics.

Another important aspect to an appealing website is using the right colours. Fortunately, there are lots of great online tools and resources for discovering and choosing them.

I read an interesting article on usability and user experience posted recently on this site by Tom Stewart, the Chair of the sub-committee of the International Standards Organisation (ISO), which is responsible for the revision of ISO 13407, the international standard for Human Centred Design.

We are in the process of redesigning our site for a new platform being developed for release later this year, and the aforementioned article got me thinking about the planning for the design of a website.

The study of the relationship between people and technology has been called a variety of names over the years - from computer ergonomics, human computer interaction and usability to, more recently, human-centred design and user experience.