A really, really simple contact form I'm not a developer, I spend most of my time experimenting and testing different aspect of web design to find out what works and what doesn't. But I was frustrated by the poor usability of the more popular wordpess contact forms so decided to have a go a writing [...]

Posted in March 2012

Keeping it simple There are some excellent contact form plugins for wordpress that have all sorts of clever features. Sometimes though you just need something very simple for newsletter signups, callbacks so on. This plugin creates a basic two field callback form with inclusive labels that disappear on click and looks like this: The plugin [...]

Posted in February 2012

There are all sorts of website that will run SEO, accessibility and other tests on your website. But none of them actual report back what people really think about your site. One service I’ve been using for a while is the fivescondtest from usabilityhub. There are two ways to get the tests: Pay for them. [...]

Posted in July 2011

A short post this one because all that needs to be said is embraced by a truly awful website. One would have hoped that a large multinational company would know better. But they don’t. So three cheers for the xerox real business website (if you can be bother for the thing to load). If you [...]

Posted in July 2011

Many small business (and large come to that) outsource. Instead of employing staff they contract out cleaning, bookkeeping, marketing , delivery and so on. Outsourcing is also very common for websites. Very few companies can afford to employ full time developers so they happily pay someone to do it for them.  But buyer beware, just [...]

Posted in October 2010

Do you worry if your site is performing as well as is could? Do you know how well it converts, why visitors leave or which pages just don’t work? All too often you can’t see the problems because you know your site too well. You miss the obvious mistakes and just can’t understand why people [...]

Posted in May 2010

Do you own your website? Are you sure? Have you checked your registration details? Have you got a back up of the website on CD? Do you have access to the server? Do you know who your registrar and host are? Do you know what to do when your host goes out of business and [...]

Posted in July 2008

I don’t really like paying for things. Actually, that’s not quite true, I’ll pay for things if I need to but I’d rather get it for free (or at least at a discount price). Some of the best free stuff comes off the internet so rather than pay for some expensive software, why not do [...]

Posted in June 2008

I like being outside in the fresh air. In fact most of my holidays are spend wandering various countries around the world. But there are occasions when I need to communicate with the rest of the world. And a mobile phone or a PDA helps. The problem is, many websites don’t work too well on [...]

Posted in June 2008

There are certain topics and concepts that keep cropping up during discussions about search engine optimisation (SEO). One of these is the use of metatags. Let’s get one thing clear, there is no SEO advantage in the use of metatags – the search engines may index their contents but they won’t help to improve your [...]

Posted in May 2008