What Ad Sizes Should I Accept from Advertisers?
Posted by Matt | Filed under Good Business Practices, UI Design
Any you want. My advice, however, is to stick to standard sizes because when advertisers come to you, often they’ll already have a standard size ready to go. That means you can just start running the ad and not worry about having a graphic artist/web dev squeeze stuff into your non-standard sizes, then have that approved by both parties. This has happened to me, and it’s a drag.
When potential advertisers say “what sizes can I run on your site?” I say “any of the industry-standard sizes Google themselves run.”
Tags: Ad Sizes
What Fonts Can I Use on my Website?
Posted by Matt | Filed under UI Design, Web Sites 101
Play it Strict!
This is the very strict set, compliance is almost guaranteed if you choose one from this list. Choose and forget.
OR
I bend that rule a little and use Century Gothic (all caps, in green) on my Volvo Forum http://www.matthewsvolvosite.com.
According to CodeStyle.org, Century Gothic is available to 86% of Windows web users (probably higher on Macs). To me that’s fine, if I go for every last user on Earth at 100% compliance not only is it a chore, but the fun gets sucked out of it.
Whatever the case, all browsers have a “fall-back” font (“Times”, etc.), and in between any font you pick and that font you can define your own fall-back fonts. Personally I think Georgia can look fantastic in designs. Arial Black and Trebuchet also can look better than they look “on paper”.
More ->
http://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/fonts.html
http://modernl.com/article/working-with-limited-web-font-set
Tags: web safe fonts
Display Much Information in a Small Space
Posted by Matt | Filed under UI Design, Wordpress
So I’ve got this popular Volvo web site with about 11,000 registered users. Super. The heart of it is the Volvo Forum, a roiling, boiling mass of Volvo owners trading information, advice and tears at the rate of 75-100 posts per day. The problem is that from the Home page, it doesn’t look so roiling-boiling. Fix: show the activity on the Home page. Get it out in front of people.
Ok, not a hard task. The phpBB forum (outstanding, free software by the way) is on interior pages, and is run entirely by the site’s database. All I needed to do was query a table in the database for the ten or 15 or whatever number of latest posts and voila, the roiling-boiling is then shown to the browsing hoi polloi.
But a) I wanted it up near the top to lure users deeper into my site and b) I didn’t want it to take up much space.
Ingredient #1
After scouting around for some possibilities I found Latest Posts, a script that pulls latest posts from a phpBB forum and displays them in a scrolling marquis.
Not bad. So I used it at the bottom of the Home page. Read the rest of this entry » »»»»» »
Tags: Cycle plugin, JQuery, phpBB3, phpBB3 latest posts, relative dates, UI, Wordpress