RasterWeb!

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…

Lucas Gonze had the following to say:

EmbedTheVideo.com is an entire web site which does nothing but generate a single block of HTML.

Yup, that’s about all it does, and it is insane that it’s so complex. To set the record straight, the site is just over 3 months, and this is how it started: I replied to a message from Josh Kinberg explaining (once again) how to embed video using the Video Popup Linkmaker he put online, and he replied that my semi-serious suggestion (registering embedthevideo.com) was a good idea. Domains are cheap, and I’ve got server space, so it happened.

So if you look at embedthevideo.com today, you’ll see the names of the folks who contributed to make it exist. I mainly fixed a few minor bugs, and supplied a nice URL.

I went to Taco Bell today, and I must say, the place is in need of a usability expert.

I walked in the door, and was able to determine which way it was to get in line, but not everyone could do this. I’ve been to some Taco Bells where you queue up from the left, and some from the right. Why not a standard! I got in line, placed my order, and then was given a ticket with my order number, which I could sort-of read. The number I saw on the ticket did not look like the number the cashier told me. I decided to go with what I thought the ticket said.

While I stood near the pickup area, with about 5 or 6 other people, I managed to block either the soda dispensing area, the entrance to queue up, and the exit (or entry) door. So as more people came in, they did not realize many of us were waiting for our orders and queued up behind us. Once they figured it out, they got in line, and all I could do was keep shifting around to block something else.

Now, it’s a small place, and it’s 1:00 PM, so perhaps this isn’t always how it goes down, but today Taco Bell got a 2 points out of 10 for it’s usability.

Taco Bell Usability Engineer signing off…

(Maybe next time I’ll actually get into the usability problems of tacobell.com)

Over at tinkernet, on the post titled The Sledding, we got the following comment:

I’m very, very impressed that this sort of work is being done; Web Design is getting stagnant with people using just styled block-level elements to produce artwork. The incorporation of SVG into sites excites me a lot. How long do you expect it will take for this sort of technology to be widespread? Obviously you can only speak about WebKit realistically, but if it’s going to take ten years for IE Win to gain (full) support, we can’t design with it. I’m amused by the “Becoming more important” line in the first paragraph. This has been a HUGE problem for years – ever since HTML-2.0 was introduced to be more of a layout language and less of a markup language. For an example, you just have to look at this site. sex partners Why is all the text crammed over on the left side of the page with a big blank space on the right side? Why is the default font tiny and unreadable? Fortunately most browsers now let you override the latter problem.

I didn’t approve the comment. I removed the link, which pointed to what I’m sure was some sort of adult site, but besides that and the ‘sex partners’ text, everything else appears semi-legit. Of course there is the fact that it has nothing at all do to with the post it was attached to. So close… This could have been left on another site, on another post, and it would have been relevant, which makes the future of comment spamming just a little more scary.

Well, it’s been over a year since I attended a meetup. I’m overdue. So I’ll (most likely) be attending The Milwaukee Web Design Meetup Thursday, May 11, at 7:00 PM. I think I’ve convinced Jeremy from Design414 to go as well. See ya there…

(Hooray for Meetup.com supporting Microformats…)