Design & User Experience
The $300,000,000 Button
If you think that usability, information architecture, and user experience design are made-up disciplines for lily-gilding aesthetes, with little practical bearing on your Web site, think again.
Jared Spool explains how changing one button in a site's checkout process increased sales by $300 million per year. (He doesn't name the retailer in the article, but it starts with "A" and ends with "mazon.com".)
Ellipses and interrobangs and em-dashes, oh my!
Typography is one of the most overlooked aspects of Web design—and I'm not talking about fonts, kerning, and x-heights. I'm talking about proper use of glyphs—the individual letters, numerals, and (especially) punctuation marks that make up all written text. There are proper and improper ways to use each glyph—and even large, well-funded websites often get it wrong.
This isn't surprising—even if a site's designer is trained in the specialized discipline of typography (which is unlikely), the person who actually marks up the content (or pastes it into the content management system) probably isn't. But the fact remains that poor typography is one of the most common and most easily avoided blemishes on the web.