Here’s the first clue: it’s not creating a pixel-perfect replication of your ideal version of a site in all browsers. In fact, cross-browser compatibility ultimately has very little to do with what a web site looks like, and a lot more to do with how it functions. It also has relatively little to do with browsers, and perhaps could better be explained as multiple user-agent compatibility. “Compatibility” (in this context) is not a term which means “looks and behaves identically” […]
Continue reading “What is “Cross-browser compatibility?”” »Category: Usability
Usability and Trust
Without both, it’s very difficult to have a successful online business. Unusable web sites have an incredible ability to generate a lack of trust in the business — as soon as one feature fails to work correctly, or doesn’t behave as you expect, there’s an immediate connection made: “If they can’t get this right, what else might they have problems with?” Will they lose your financial data? Will they ship you the right product? Will they bill you the right […]
Continue reading “Usability and Trust” »Usability Issues with Domain Management
Working as a web developer, I find myself dealing with a lot of different domain registrars, hosting services, etc. It’s inevitable. It’s also not the slightest bit uncommon to run across one very specific usability inconvenience with how these services manage their services. (Not all of them — but enough that it’s irritating.) This specific problem is that when you’re managing domains, some of these services handle multiple-domain management in the following manner: Select the action you wish to perform. […]
Continue reading “Usability Issues with Domain Management” »Following User Navigation Paths
An interesting thread at Cre8asiteforums, titled “When lots of your visitors go straight to search? discusses a member’s curiosity about navigation patterns after noticing that a significant percentage of his visitors — 25% — go directly to search after arriving at his site. It’s an interesting element of site navigation to investigate, and the thread raises a pretty significant number of additional questions worth analyzing. The navigation path of any given user will be fundamentally unique. However, when taken in […]
Continue reading “Following User Navigation Paths” »Thoughts about Content Labeling and Data
Interestingly, it appears that some of the ideas discussed in this article are actually being actively tested by Google. As of September 2009, it appears that Google is actually putting this concept into practice. An interesting thought in indexing and handling page structure is the concept that different areas of a single page can be identified and considered independently from surrounding bodies of content. This particularly applies to specific and readily identifiable data-types, such as phone numbers, postal codes, or […]
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