Tips for improving your website

If you manage a business or a community organization, a web site of some type is a must. It’s the primary way people find and learn about you. Given how important a good website is, it’s amazing how little thought many website owners put into the design and content of their site. Web design is a complex skill. If you don’t have the resources to hire a professional, you need to think critically about what you publish and how you present it.

By the dots

I’ve been having trouble coming up with something to write about. Fortunately for me, the WordPress Daily Prompt came to my rescue once again.

We all have strange relationships with punctuation — do you overuse exclamation marks? Do you avoid semicolons like the plague? What type of punctuation could you never live without? Tell us all about your punctuation quirks!

Questioning print layout standards in digital content

This blog post by Richard Hamilton got me thinking. Do layout standards developed years ago for print media still apply today? In the post, Hamilton mentions that the XML production process they use at XML Press doesn’t have advanced layout features that desktop publishing tools like InDesign have. To avoid bad line or page breaks, they have to edit the content to add or remove characters. It was the second sentence of the fifth paragraph that really got me thinking.

Icon confusion

I’ve been thinking about software icons lately. Icons are intended to help us work faster by being easy to recognize, recall, and scan. Other reasons for using icons are to save space and reduce translation costs. At least that’s what William Horton wrote in The Icon Book¹ in 1994.

His logic made sense to me at the time and it still does. But I’m not seeing his vision of icon use in the software I use today. What I see are a lot of unrecognizable icons, icons that have multiple meanings, and icons with labels.