Highlighting Hard Coded Active Links with jQuery
Posted: Tue 07/03/2007 by ramiroWhen using Drupal's menu system for linking pages on your site the corresponding menu link gets the CSS class active when the referred page is being displayed. To make use of this to improve a site's usability you can highlight this link by assigning a different color, background color, etc. Drupal's l() function also takes care to add the active class to currently displayed links.
On this site I have to blocks in the sidebar (Recommended Articles, Drupal Modules) with hard-coded links to internal pages using plain HTML. My main reason not to use menu items is because I am too lazy and I don't use the l() function to not increase the number of database queries more than necessary.
Google Analytics Showing off Nice Curves
Posted: Sat 05/12/2007 by ramiroGoogle launched a new version of their free web statistics and tracking service Google Analytics last Tuesday. The first thing you notice is the completely revised dashbord that displays statistics on visits, pageviews, traffic sources and other data for the past month instead of the past 7 days.
Search Engine for Males
Posted: Sat 11/11/2006 by ramiromsdewey.com is a search service powered by Microsoft's Live Search. A nice looking woman is distracting the user. Moreover the presentation of the search results is not really user friendly.
The idea is not too bad but the implementation is a usability horror. If you really want to search for something this is probably not the site you will visit.
Google TechTalk: How to Design for Branding
Posted: Thu 07/27/2006 by ramiroIn this Google TechTalk video Jared M. Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering, a usability research organization talks about effective methods to strengthen a brand on the internet and discusses how recent usability research has uncovered some fascinating truths about how people perceive brands on the internet.
