Ryan Singer of 37 Signals gave a talk on ways to improve a sign-up forms for websites. It is a good refresher for web professionals to remember to think about the user experience first and foremost. It’s easy for developers to get into their projects’ technical goals and forget that their users are going to come with varying levels of expertise and experience. Its vitally important to put the user experience first, and “building momentum” as Ryan refers to it, is very important. Your website conversion or your web apps adoption rates depend on it.

I love using the “don’t make me think” rule of thumb, heck, it’s a core principal as far as I’m concerned. Your websites and web apps need to be designed to minimize the amount of “thinking” your users have to do when interacting with them. Especially with sign-up forms, if it’s complicated, if it’s long, if it has ambiguous language, this is going to work against you by increasing the likelihood of a frustrated user experience.

Tips, helpful advice, embedded reminders, are now more easily applied with AJAX technologies than ever before, so there’s even less of an excuse not use them. More on this topic soon.

By the way, yes, apparently the camera man was distracted by Ryan’s stage pacing, so unfortunately some of the presentation slides were not included, sigh… yes, that’s another topic for another day as well.

LogoLounge.com

This is probably one of the best sites I know to keep up with the world of logo design. Bill Gardner of LogoLounge puts together an annual Logo Trends report is just fantastic.

Logo Design
Creating new websites or blogs from scratch can be an overwhelming process, particularly for new businesses or clients whereby this is their first foray into the online world as content providers. There are just so many possibilities and decisions to make.

Let The Pros Do It
Occasionally, a client asks me to get involved with a logo creation and selection process. You should always hire a professional or a agency to develop the creative materials. My professional web consulting background stems from years of web programming and development. While I can definitely tell you how the aesthetics of your website/logo are impacting your business, I am not going to be the guy to design your logo. And unless you are a graphic design, you need to hire a professional. Creating art and discerning the quality of art in a market, are entirely separate skills.

Function And Form, Always!
I have long since learned (as well as the entire web industry) that function and form must go hand in hand. Consider it an absolute.

The example, is this blog I have started. We have all the sophisticated functionality of a WordPress blog in place, what are we missing? We’re missing a compelling ‘look’. Something that signals to visitors that this is a substantive site with valuable information.

“But I like this template, what’s wrong with just using the WordPress basic template?”

A visitor coming to this site is less likely to come back. It has a “template” like feel to it. The message a template site delivers is that the author doesn’t care enough or isn’t capable to provided a unique site design that represents itself as ready to serious business. And the more experienced the visitor is with the web, more likely they have been exposed to default templates that come built in.

I do care, by the way.

The Making of WCDC

One of the goals of WCDC is to implement many of the techniques and concepts of developing websites by not just talking about it, but by developing this blog and reflecting on it. So trust that, a logo and design template are on my list of To-Do’s for WCDC.

It should not go unnoticed the order I recommend when creating a website from scratch is how I am writing these posts. Its my hopes that I can chronicle its growth and share with you the many things that go into developing a great website.

Step 1
Find an available and suitable domain name by stopping BustAName.com.

Step 2
Get creative and put together a logo. Stop by LoungeLogo.com for ideas concepts.

Step 3
Develop your site design (I’ll come back to this).

Of course this a grand over simplification, but it is the initial first steps.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

PHP is one of the web’s most popular programming languages and it’s one I am most comfortable with in general. It was created at a time when the available conventional programming languages like C or Java were too powerful (low level) or too bulky and unwieldy. Somewhere in between the jack-of-all trades Perl and the so-simple-our-sales-guy can code it Cold Fusion, PHP was incarnated.

It was the first web developer programming language written by developers for developers and it continues to be a force of nature, even in the face hundreds of new languages that have since been created.

Well, PHP4 (version) has recently been officially declared dead, to focus energies on the vastly improved PHP5 and make room for the soon to arrive state-of-the-art PHP6. Thanks to killer innovations like WordPress (consequently, what we use for WCDC), PHP is here to stay and the latest innovations can only continue to solidify as the leading scripting language for the web.

Younger Workers Demanding Web 2.0 Tech On The Job — Enterprise 2.0 — InformationWeek

Moore then put up some IDC research numbers showing that 45% of companies have workers blogging, 43% use RSS feeds, and 35% of companies have employees using wikis.

That’s a significant numbers using RSS and and wikis such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint that we offer at IGT. It’s quiet astounding to see the rate of adoption of these technologies, particularly RSS feeds. Google, Microsoft, Apple have brough RSS into the mainstream fold. My Outlook 2007, which comes included with IGT’s email service, allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of your favorite weblogs and websites.

Its an option located between your Outbox and your Sent Items. Look for the orange RSS logo. From here you can some of the blogs I subscribe to. Any ones in bold means there are new published entries for me to read.

This also synches with my Moto Q, through our new wireless synching service. What’s so great about RSS is that I do not have to remember to go visit some of the weblogs to see if there’s anything new, this system keeps track and notifies of new enteries.

Most of the time I don’t even go to the website to view the entry, I can read it right in my Outlook (or PDA).

Once you click on article it, unbolds it to marking it as having read it. Just like an email message only it’s syndicated feed and the best part, you don’t have to subscribe by giving email address. You just need to come a webpage that has the RSS logo on it.

This URL (page) has an RSS feed attached to it. To subscribe to our weblog, it’s really simple.

All you need to do is copy the URL, right click on “RSS Feeds” folder your Outlook 2007.

Copy and Paste and your done! You’re a new subscriber.

Its that easy and that’s why RSS is fast become mainstream and why every business must get into the business of publishing news.