Finding Information: Factors that improve online experiences

As this site grows, my concerns about the findability of information grows. I feel like the navigation is fairly clear (although sub navigation is lacking). I have browseable archives and search, yet still, am I doing all I can do make the information on this site easy to find? I wish WordPress offered more advanced search for one thing, I might look into adding this via plugin somehow. Another idea I have is to offer some “guide” pages (e.g. “Just learning CSS? Start here.”).

The Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA) has just released a report on Finding Information (July 2008). They kind of debunk my guide page theory in their conclution:

“…do not believe that visitor experience could be improved with the presences of
a “personal navigation aid.”

Oh well, I’ve learned to trust my instincts on these kinds of things and they are telling me it might be a good idea.

Why we delete comments

The AV Club has a funny story about them transitioning into allowing comments on their stories.

Unacceptable: “You’re a dick!” Acceptable: “Only a dick would watch Con Air six times in a row!” Better: “You watched Con Air six times?! You should’ve taken IQ tests before and after to see how it affected you.”

Around here, in addition to deleting insulting comments, I delete comments that add nothing to the article discussion itself. Comments that consist of “Thanks!!!!” (and that’s it) I delete. You’re welcome, but this doesn’t add a heck of a lot to the conversation makes it harder to follow.

Linkification

Cameron Moll on which words should be linked in a sentence. An enjoyable debate. Obviously this comes up for me many times every week as I prefer to link relevant text within these “Links of Interest” posts rather than a VISIT LINK button or some such. I’m a “D” man, myself.

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You guys are probably already aware of the Eden and their family of kick ass tutorial sites (e.g. NETTUTS, PSDTUTS, etc.). They also run the site FlashDen, which is a marketplace for Flash components. With your FlashDen account, not only can you browse and buy their giant collection of Flash components (think photo galleries, audio players, animations, even full website templates), but you can also be an author and sell Flash stuff that you make. The top authors on FlashDen make thousands of dollars a week, and have made hundreds of thousands of dollars overall. Modeled after the success of FlashDen, Eden also launched AudioJungle, which works the same way only for stock audio. Now there is going to be a third member joining the party: ThemeForest. (Info about beta invites below!)

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When creating a web form, one of the many choices you must make is how you are going to align your labels with your inputs. This is not a trivial decision, as this placement affects the readability/usability of your form, completion rates, speed of completion, and ultimately the satisfaction level of the users trying to get through your form. But is there one ultimate answer for how you should be aligning labels? Not really, it depends on the specific needs of your form and the design constraints of the page.

Lets take a look at the different choices and see the advantages to each.

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I always liked the idea of having a community links section on websites. Lots of sites in this genre have that and I think it’s great. The driving purpose behind a tutorial site like this is helping people learn and sharing inspiration. I do my weekly “Links of Interest” posts (which I will probably keep doing), but I wanted a better way to have a “stream” of links going to other good reading in the community. Hence the birth of Script & Style!

Script & Style is going to be a user-driven stream of links, which anybody can submit to using the article submission form. Each entry will be moderated and checked for quality so each link that goes through is surely of interest and spam-free.

There will also be exclusive tutorials from time to time. David Walsh (the brains behind the idea), kicked things off with a great article on using MooTools 1.2 for Drag, Drop, Sort & Save. If you are interested, you can pick up the new feed here, which will include both the link stream and the exclusive tutorials.

I’m going to be creating a little sidebar-widgety thing for here on the site which will pull recent entries from Script & Style. I’ll be probably writing up a tutorial on how to do that, so stay tuned for that =)

Integrating search on a website can be an incredibly complex subject far beyond my web development skills. Fortunately, Google offers a service called “Custom Search Engine” which you can integrate right into your own site. This leverages Googles awesome search power, and it can all happen directly on your own website!

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