I’m seeing a very ugly trend on the web today.  Lots of people having taken a liking to “Helvetica Neue” font.  Why is that?  It renders terribly.

This image shows what Helvetica Neue looks like on my home PC, my work computer, and my laptop. About 60% of the time I click through to a site using this font, I’ll close it right away. It’s just that hard to read.

Good news, as w3counter shows that Firefox has reached 25% market share.
Breakdown:

IE6 – 59%
Firefox 1.5 – 17%
IE7 – 6%
Firefox 2.0 – 6%
Firefox 1.0 – 2%

So combined versions of Firefox come to 25%, and combined IE6 and IE7 come to 65%. Not bad!

I find it interesting that IE6 vs IE7 has such a large difference still, given that Microsoft is pushing IE7 out to customers via Windows XP automatic updates. I would have expected an overnight explosion of adoption, something like 50% of IE users having IE7 by now. I guess not!

Wonder why that is – too many people with pirated XP copies (You have to run the ‘genuine’ tool to install IE7), or just people not updating windows?

This is a blog, and its got an RSS feed. It feels like RSS feeds are becoming more and more common every day. Part of this is due to the growing popularity of blogs, and partly because web users are becoming a little more savvy.

Once upon a time there was a web user. We’ll call her Betty. Betty found a blog she liked to read, and she checked back daily for new posts. Then Betty found out about some more blogs she liked, so she started checking those daily too. It wasn’t look before Betty was checking 30 blogs every day – and wow, it was starting to take a while!

This is where RSS feeds come in. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way for a blog to make its content available in an easily transportable format. So Betty signed up to Google Reader (or any of a million other aggregators (RSS Readers), where she could read all 30 of her blogs in one place, without wasting time visiting all of these other sites. And she lived happily ever after.

Its very common now to visit a blog and see a button linking to the RSS feed for that blog. But in most cases, when you click the icon, you saw raw code.

You see, RSS feeds are constructed from XML code. Its kind of ugly to the untrained eye! But have you ever heard of XLST? It is to XML what CSS is to HTML – only a little cooler. Take a look at the fergusweb RSS feed. Thats not unstyled content! (Its not all that pretty either, but hey – thats feedburner for you!)

Its got an info-box at the top showing ways to subscribe, and it lays out the raw data in an acceptable manner. This is done with the help of XLST. Because XLST doesn’t just dictate style rules but it also allows you to add other content in – content only visible to the web browser, not shown by the reader. Which is great for that “here’s an RSS feed, and here’s what you can do with it” message that should be at the top of an RSS feed.

You see, me – I find an RSS feed, I copy/paste the url into Google Reader. But someone who hasn’t experienced RSS before really needs an introductory note.

So, if you publish an RSS feed, visit it in your web-browser to see what your visitors will see. Does yours look as pretty as mine?

I’m going to be modifying some scripts I wrote for other projects to publish RSS feeds, and I’m going to be integrating XLST in there. Now, I’ve never done this before, so I have a bit of research/learning to do first. I’ll post again with a tutorial on the basics of XLST when I’ve done this.

Jonathon Mendez has put up a great article titled “Choice Kills Conversion“.

Too often websites, landing pages and even ads decrease the odds of conversion by presenting considerations to users when they are already past the consideration stage and ready to buy.

Much like Columbus showing how to stand an egg on its end, this seems blindingly obvious now that its been pointed out.

Practical example: If you run an Adwords campaign for Ugg Boots then conventional wisdom suggests you create special landing pages for various keywords and phrases. So if I click an add for Jumbo sized Ugg Boots, then you’ve got a better chance of me buying your product if you don’t show me options to Mid-sized boots too – thats just going to confuse me!

So, around the time I started working at Tailored, we launched this skin-care website for eczema and psoriasis.

Since this new site was launched, its been terrible. We’ve had hardly any sales, etc etc. Not a good result. I want to improve on this. So here’s an open-call for feedback and comments. have a look at the site, just the landing page, and tell me the top 3 things that you don’t like about it.

Then actually use the site for a bit (try and look at a few articles, then try and buy some skin cream or shampoo), and comment here to tell me about your experience. C’mon, I’d do the same for you! This is a great chance to show me how crappy my design skills are!

I’m thinking this.

1. It’s too busy.
   There is simply too much stuff on the front page. Not enough white space. Having those boxes down the sides is a distraction, so people are overwhelmed as soon as they get in.
2. There is a huge amount of articles, studies, etc on that web-site, but it is not organised at all well! Its too hard to find previous articles etc.
3. The shopping cart looks horrible. Perhaps its the colours, I don’t know.

I’d like to re-do the design, and restructure the content. Of course, with decent planning, this will probably take me 2 weeks. So yeah, not likely to happen really.

What are your thoughts??