Some recent links for geneal inspiration when staring at a blank Photoshop browser chrome…
Your homepage’s primary real estate (the top left corner, middle section above the fold and the primary navigation) must answer the following questions for your visitors: Who are you? What do you have to offer me? How do I learn more?
via Focus on UEO–’User Experience Optimization’ – Website User Experience – Entrepreneur.com.
AIDA is a well-known strategy in sales and stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is relatively simple and describes the sequence of events you should aim for to get a sale. So, first of all, you must capture the attention of your potential customer. Once you have it, you should win their interest by explaining how your product or service can help them.
via Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – Smashing Magazine.
5 Reasons to Kill the Splash Page
plash screens and intro pages are a remnant left over from the early days of the web. It’s typically a flash animation or an introduction graphic that users need to skip past in order to view the actual content of the site. They’re becoming extinct because of SEO reasons, but I’d say at least 50% of my clients still request one.
Google Maps: Biking directions
This is exciting news for us bikers here in San Francisco…
A quick check shows they seem to have good data.
Today we’e added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.
via Official Google Blog: Biking directions added to Google Maps.