Category: Uncategorized

When a potential customer fills out a form and submits it, they might make a mistake. Hey, it happens, but that’s why your web developers wrote code that will send the form back to the potential customer with a message kindly telling the user what field was missing or filled out incorrectly. When we say kindly, what we mean is that an average human, not a web geek, can understand the language. Good: “The username you selected is too long, please choose a shorter one.” Bad: “ERROR: user_id too long!!!” Which message would you rather see?

I’m also sure your developers took the time to make sure they pre-populated the fields the potential customer filled in correctly so they are not forced to fill them in again. Not just the text fields, but the radio buttons, checkboxes, drop-down lists, textareas, etc. You’d be surprised how many developers don’t do this. Yes it’s extra work, but who would you rather to do the extra work, your developers, or your potential customers? (Hint: The developers should only have to do it once.)

Make things easier for your potential customers. Hopefully this will change them into satisfied customers.

As we mentioned in Business Website Tip #253, when potential customers come to your site, there is a good chance they are looking for information. There is a chance they do not want to watch a video or Flash animation before they are even brought to a page on the site with navigation or actual copy they can read. If you really need to show some sort of video or animation on your site, at least provide a skip button, so the majority of users who want information can bypass the theatrics and get to the information.

The people of the web thank you…

In case it wasn’t clear, the Jargon File’s definition of hacker:

A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users’ Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

If still in doubt, get the full definition of hacker.

Daryl Hannah has a videoblog. Sort of… See dhlovelife.com

There aren’t really comments, or permalinks, or descriptions, or much metadata, and the feed is currently invalid. (The length attribute should be the file size of the video, not the length of playing time, confusing, I know…)

Still, I’m a big fan of Daryl (more for her green & organic living than for her movies) so I’ll cut her some slack for all the little issues, and it does say “full site this summer” so, maybe things will change.

I had been hoping that under the hood would be Movable Type, or better yet, WordPress, which would probably make some of the issues I mentioned go away, but no such luck.

So besides seeing valid XHTML served up as utf-8 rather than iso-8859-1, and proper archives, comments, and all the other little things, the content itself is great. Daryl, if you need help with your site, let me know… (P.S. Feel free to use embedthevideo.com)

(Update: The feed should be valid now. Thanks Daryl!)

When potential customers come to your web site, there is a chance they are doing so for information. I know, you think that people just want to be entertained, but occasionally, we want something from you, like a phone number or address. Make it easy on your potential customers, and don’t put your phone number or address in an image, or in a Flash movie, put it in text. Text can be easily copied from your website and pasted into an email, or address book, or calendar.

People appreciate being able to copy and paste text. They do not appreciate having to retype it. You will get the added bonus of having search engines index the text as well, which can help bring more of those potential customers to your web site.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say put it on all the pages of your site. Put it down at the bottom, in the footer. Trust me, people will appreciate this. I know I do…