HTNet - A Notepad of Tech, Business, Science and Self Improvement

ColourLovers published a very interesting post called Colorful Beauty in Nature: Birds.

If you’re not familiar with ColourLovers, let me provide a quick brief to what they do. Simply put, they’re a colour aggregator of sorts. People can submit and vote on colour schemes. Each colour scheme consists of five individual colours.

Now the post I linked earlier is unique because it shows how we can be inspired by everyday beautiful things. I also find it fascinating because of the beautiful birds showcased in the post.

I hope ST read that post; he’s a very gifted photographer and maybe he’ll get some inspiration for future photography projects

Remember my minor redesign a few days ago? Let me be honest with you. It was a primarily selfish move. One of the main reason for the changes is that I wanted to see how the skyscraper AdSense unit would perform if I shamelessly label it as Sponsored Links.

Let me be straight with you, when I did that, I was expecting this to be a nothing more than an experiment to prove to myself that people are just negative towards advertisements. I’m very sure that eventhough the ad is placed marginally higher than before (due to the combination of slimming down my masthead and removal of the underperforming Advertlets ads), it won’t get more clicks.

Well, I’m happy to announce that I was wrong! Instead of the poor performance that I expected, the skyscraper ad actually performed 800% better than the previous three days in the old location!

So here are some lessons I learned from this exercise:

• Position is very important. Even minor tweaks can turbocharge your underperforming inventories
• Do not be afraid to clearly label your ads; if people are interested in the links, they’ll click them anyway. Just make sure you follow Google’s guideline on this
• Don’t get too attached to your web site design. You should be brave to shift things around a bit. Remember; nothing ventured nothing gained!

Let’s see if I’ll hire him back, or just change the contract term for this replacement CSS from temporary to permanent

OK, seriously now; nothing is wrong with HTNet actually. I’m just testing out a few minor tweaks on the site design. Changes that have been made are as follows:

• Reduced the height of the masthead a bit
• Shifted a couple of sidebar items around (thanks to WordPress widgets for making this extremely easy)
• Reoriented the sidebars from right to left

I backed up my previous stylesheet so restoring the old layout could be done in a heartbeat. This new layout is conjured up in roughly 15 seconds via SSH and good old vi.

Why the change? Well, let’s just say I’m experimenting with something

As the Internet move irrevocably from a geeky experiment in TCP/IP to a global communications medium, the largest group of users is becoming overwhelmingly non-technical. Web pages are undeniably the main form of information transfer on the Internet.

Read the rest of Is Your Web Site Designed For Humans? »

I’ve been handed the responsibility of redesigning my company’s web site. I’m not really into web design because I’m not really a visual person. I’d rather go through tons of texts rather than spending the exact same amount of time looking at eyecandies.

However, seeing that I’m now netted into “whatever that has anything to do with computers go to the MIS department” trap, I just have to make the best of it.

Basically, I’ve summed up the process to be something along the following lines:

1. Grab all data to be presented
2. Organise the data into useful information
3. Identify grouping criteria for the information
4. Categorising gathered information into the identified groups
5. Presenting the information on a web based media

I have no problems with the first four processes. It’s the presentation portion I’m worried about. Sure, I can probably engage a web contractor for that part… but reading between the lines of what management has communicated to me; I get the feeling that they wanted me to do this as well.

A quick google later, I found the following good resources regarding web design… at least I think they’re good. If I’m such a web design expert, I wouldn’t need to look up such information now, ain’t it?

• Current Style In Web Design: A nice visual tour of “hot” web sites with elaborations on the key design elements that highlights them
• Web Design Practices: Showcases popular web page elements as well as its adoption rate in percentages; recommended for stats buffs
• ontoinfo’s Current Trends in Web Design: I remember digging this post. Eventhough it’s posted in September 2006, most of what it highlights remain relevant today

Do you have any other web design resources to recommend?