usability

Recently I have noticed a trend on a number of blogs. It goes something like this... There are 0 comments on this post. Please register or login to place a comment. Hmmm. Asking random visitors to register an account when they only want to leave a one-off comment is a huge ask. Especially when there is a good chance registration requires email based activation, which takes even more time...
> articles/please-login-to-comment/

The local PHP users group has been having an interesting discussion on the use of www vs non-www in a domain name. The discussion has raised some interesting points. * Everybody agrees that both should work - it's immensely frustrating when you type in "domain.com" and you get an error message. There are still a number of big websites that get this wrong. * The preferred method of...
> articles/www-or-non-www/

I have been reading an article by Lisa Barone (bruceclay.com[1]) on nice 404 pages[2]. This interested me as I have only just got around to improving my own 404 page[3]. I agree with the concept of the article - a nice 404 page is your last chance to save a lost visitor. Nothing is less...
> articles/89/does-a-spider-follow-links-on-a-404-page/

I love CAPTCHAs. The amount of comment spam and contact form spam I have been getting has all but dropped to zero since adding a simple 3 letter CAPTCHA to my site. However, some CAPTCHAs can be a little tough to crack. Here's the best example of this I have seen yet, found on...
> articles/88/the-captcha-to-end-all-captchas/

Many people have opinions on how files should be named on the web, and specifically how words should be seperated. Do you use a space, an underscore or a dash? Here's another opinion, with some rationale behind it. SPACES Spaces are generally a bad idea with anything website related. Often...
> articles/50/spaces-underscores-and-dashes-how-to-name-files/

It's been a long time coming, but I have finally launched my first implementation of my AJAX CMS. This site. This is a little more than just a few funky AJAX calls here and there - I have tweaked my CMS to replace almost all page requests with AJAX requests. Because this is now part of the CMS,...
> articles/45/ajax-is-here/

Successful navigation design is a key part of your website. Navigation is arguably the most important part of website usability, and is often not done correctly. If your site is to be successful, navigation design should be considered at the start of the development process. This article covers...
> articles/30/successful-navigation-design/