Insights

“My site is broken” is one of the worst phrases in the universe. Horrible for you, Ms. Client, because you’re faced with frazzled technology you’re unable to fix yourself. It stinks for web developers too because it’s normally not enough information to allow them to help you promptly.

We've been using Drupal 7 for all new sites for the past few months now, so we’ve put together a base site that we mirror to begin development on each new site. These are the contrib modules that we use on our base site.  The modules in the Foundational and Everysite lists are always enabled by default.

One of the biggest tips discussed in our Writing for the Web webinar was the importance of re-writing content for the web. Uploading a PDF of your book or copy-pasting a press release is tempting; but web writing has different rules, and breaking them can be bad news for your website.

My favorite type of data in the world of user interface design/user experience is Eye Tracking. An Eye Tracking study tells us where people look. It can tell us the order that information is scanned and it can display a heat map to show where a sample of web visitors looked on your web page. Eye Tracking can be used for web content, print media, product packaging and anything else where you want to measure what is being seen.

The image to the right shows the difference in search behavior from 2005 to 2008. The data shows that people have learned to scan Google and not read every item.

Within the last couple of months one of our client’s websites was hacked. This is a rarity, and we responded swiftly to restore a previous version of the site; however, we still needed to get rid of the actual problem. Through the experience there were a number of lessons learned that anyone, whether client or developer could benefit from.