The Four Key Components of a Great Web Design

Nice post with beautiful examples by Henry Jones over at webdesignledger.com

The Four Key Components of a Great Web Design

1. A Solid Layout
- Use Wireframes
- Be generous with whitespace
- Learn more about layout and wireframes

2. Effective Typography
- Big = important
- Make it legible
- Learn more about typography

3. The Right Color Scheme
- Dare to be different
- Sometimes little color is the right color
- Need help choosing the right color scheme?

4. Appropriate Design Elements
- Consistency in action
- Attention to detail
- Less really is more

Tony Hsieh: Why I Sold Zappos

Tony-hsieh-zappos

Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?
...
By early 2009, we were at a stalemate. Because of a complicated legal structure, I effectively controlled the majority of the common shares, so that the board couldn't force a sale of the company. But on the five-person board, only two of us -- Alfred Lin, our CFO and COO, and myself -- were completely committed to Zappos's culture. This made it likely that if the economy didn't improve, the board would fire me and hire a new CEO who was concerned only with maximizing profits. The threat was never made overtly, but I could tell that was the direction things were going.

It was a stressful time for me and Alfred. But we'd gotten through much tougher times before, and this seemed like just another challenge we needed to figure out. We began brainstorming ways that we could get out from under the board. We certainly didn't want to sell the company and move on to something else. To us, Zappos wasn't just a job -- it was a calling. So we came up with a plan: We would buy out our board of directors.

We figured to do so would cost about $200 million. As we were talking to potential investors, Amazon approached Alfred about buying Zappos outright. Although that still didn't seem like the best option to me, Alfred sensed that Amazon would be more open than last time to the idea of letting Zappos continue to operate as an independent entity. And we felt that the price Amazon was talking about was too large for us to ignore without potentially violating our fiduciary duty to our shareholders.
...
The acquisition closed on November 1, at a valuation of $1.2 billion (based on Amazon's stock price on the day of closing). Our investors at Sequoia made $248 million. Our board was replaced by a management committee that includes me, Jeff, two Amazon executives, and two Zappos executives. As CEO, I report to the committee every quarter, and Zappos is responsible for hitting revenue and profitability numbers. But unlike our former board of directors, our new management committee seems to understand the importance of our culture -- the "social experiments" -- to our long-term success. In fact, one Amazon distribution center recently began experimenting with its own version of Zappos's policy of paying new employees $2,000 to quit if they're unhappy with their jobs.

The lynda.com Story: 10 things i know to be true

The lynda.com Story: Bruce Heavin and Lynda Weinman share accounts of learning, teaching, and building their company.

  1. Things i did early in life may not seem to have meaning then. But today they make all the sense in the world.
  2. Business doesn't have to be a win / lose or winner take all proposition. Everyone can win.
  3. Your passions are your drive in life, love & career. Do not ignore them.
  4. To master anything in life you must do it again and again, over and over. Often without success, but learning and fine tuning along the way.
  5. Education is life long. Stay hungry. Stay curious.
  6. Our biggest successes happened when the biggest doors of opportunity were slammed shut. Learn to look for other ways to achieve your goals when opportunities close. Own your problem and invent your own solution when others will not solve the problem for you.
  7. Do what you love and do it really, really, really well.
  8. My best education experiences happened when I was the motivated learner, making up my own experience.
  9. Curiosity only kills cats.
  10. Make your mistakes, frequently, fast and often. Just not repetitively.

Webmonkey on Information Architecture

Great article about Information Architecture from webmonkey. I think i came across this article for the first time around 2005. It appears it has been assimilated into the wired site.

Reading through it I came across the following interesting section:

"Metaphor Exploration
This next step, which is called “metaphor exploration,” can help refine your vision of the site’s structure, but it’s important to remember that this step is only an exercise. It will give you many good ideas, but they may be impractical, at best. Don’t let that discourage you, though - it can be a lot of fun.

It’s useful to explore various metaphors in trying to determine the site’s structure. A good metaphor can go a long way in helping users understand how to use and navigate the site. However, no metaphor is perfect, so don’t feel that you have to adhere rigidly to just one. You could take the best parts of several metaphors and roll them into one (or you might not find any useful metaphors at all).

Three types of metaphors are useful to site design:

Organizational metaphors

Organizational metaphors rely on the existing structure of a group, system, or organization. For example, if you are creating a site to sell groceries, your metaphor could be a supermarket, where products are grouped logically by type (canned vegetables, dairy products, cereal, snacks, household items, etc.). Beware that copying the organizational hierarchy of your client company is usually not a good idea - grocery customers couldn’t care less about a supermarket’s corporate structure.

Functional metaphors

Functional metaphors relate tasks you can do on the site with tasks you can do in another environment. Photoshop, a graphics program, relies on a lot of functional metaphors:You can figuratively “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” graphics on a computer - as though you were using real-world scissors and glue.

Visual metaphors

Visual metaphors are based on common graphic elements familiar to most people in our culture. If you are designing a music site that allows users to play songs, you might want to use the traditional “start,” “stop,” and “pause” icons found on CD players everywhere.

To begin exploring metaphors, gather your people and brainstorm ideas. Review and evaluate each metaphor. Try not to discourage any suggestions you do not like, at least not right away. A metaphor’s punch might not be obvious right away. Try to map out the major sections of the site by connecting elements from the content inventory to each metaphor.

After what was probably a lively and entertaining experience, you must choose a metaphor or a rationale for the site’s structure. Remember, no metaphor is perfect. The overall site might not be explainable as a metaphor, but perhaps the navigation system (or smaller subsets of the site) can be."

Hadn't thought about it like this before! :)

Yahoo mail is utter crap

Pauldj_05

Quite a bold statement don't you think? Unfortunately it's true. There's a lot wrong with it (e.g. looking more like outlook/hotmail than gmail, always starting with the "what's new" tab, big annoying animated banners), but the absolute biggest failure is that it's not possible to send email in an easy straightforward way. Every other message I want to send I have to proof being a human being by solving an at some times very difficult to read CAPTCHA image.

I appreciate them trying to weed out spammers, but this is ludicrous! What use is a mail program if it isn't easy to send an email? To make matters worse you won't have this problem by using the iphone mail client. So that's the route I'd choose if I was a spammer :' )

One last thing, there's no way to give feedback to the development team. So that's why this is here. Anybody want to comment on this?

Primal Blueprint

It all sounds very logical, but on the other hand we have been doing agriculture for the last ten thousand years. So why do we do it if it's not what our body needs? The best thing about eating unprocessed foods, I think, is you don't get all the conservation crap :)

".. I call it the Primal Blueprint. It eschews complicated workout regimens, tedious calorie counting, and weight loss gimmicks. My Primal laws are based on a rock solid foundation: evolutionary biology and anthropology mixed with modern human ingenuity. I take what worked for tens of thousands of years throughout human prehistory and incorporate contemporary science to confirm its veracity. When you go back and look at the fossil records of our hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural ancestors, you find that they were healthy, strong, and largely free of degenerative diseases – especially compared to the health of post-agricultural and even modern humans.

The result is an incredibly simple, incredibly effective way to live, move, and eat: eat the things our ancestors ate, get the amount of sleep our ancestors used to get, and make the same movements our ancestors used to make before agriculture.

Take Action

If you take anything from this post remember these two action items:

1. The ideal human diet should consist of only whole, unprocessed foods – meat, fish, fowl, plants, fruits, and nuts. Whatever you can kill, pick, or dig up and eat on the spot. This is what your ancestors ate and what your body is meant to consume.

2. By the same token, the best exercise consists of natural, full-body movements – lifting heavy things, sprinting, walking, swimming, hiking, climbing, crawling. This is how your ancestors moved and how your body is meant to function."

verkiezingen in nederland

Stuk uit de column van Nico Dijkshoorn. Weet nog niet of ik het ermee eens ben, maar de tranen liepen me over de wangen van het lachen :' )

"De geregisseerde emotie. Vooral bij Agnes Kant. Die had, na de dramatisch verlopen debatten op Radio 1 en bij Pauw en Witteman, een middagje met wat mediadokters om de tafel gezeten. Dat moeten mooie gesprekken zijn geweest.
‘Agnes, kijk me eens aan. Ja, goed zo. Wat deed je nou net, toen de koffiejuffrouw langskwam? Precies, schreeuwen. En wat schreeuwde je? Geen suiker, hoer. Ja, precies. En voor wie komt de SP op? Zeg het maar. Voor de zwakkeren in de samenleving, ja. Dus wat moet je dan niet doen? Geen hoer schreeuwen. Schrijf je dat even op, in je handpalm? Geen hoer zeggen. Niet schreeuwen. En schrijf op je andere hand: “niet de mond laten hangen. Niet met enge dunne armen zwaaien.” Denk je dat dat gaat lukken? Antwoord nou nog eens, en dan zachtjes. Goed zo! Houd dat vast!”

Gedrogeerd
Agnes Kant leek gisteren de eerste minuten van het slotdebat gedrogeerd aan tafel te zitten. Je zag het malen in haar hoofd, als Femke aan het woord was. “Geen hoer roepen, geen hoer roepen, niet schreeuwen.” Je zag haar wegdromen als Femke sprak. Waarom kon zij dat niet, praten met zo’n omfloerst stemmetje? Femke kan hardop fluisteren. Dat is een gave. Wat ze ook zegt, al is het het woord “kernkoppen” of “hondenbelasting”, het klinkt als een oneerbaar voorstel.
Femke, daar wil je in de kibboets voor eeuwig sinaasappels mee plukken. Jij, in een stenen nederzetting, wachtend op het meisje waar je deze vakantie verliefd op bent geworden. Daar komt ze aanlopen met een mand vol natte zuidvruchten. Ze zwaait naar je. Je weet het zeker, Groen Links is jouw partij. Agnes Kant plukt geen sinaasappels, die schreeuwt in twee seconden een hele boom leeg. Hoef je alleen maar naast haar te gaan staan met een lege mand.

Doodsbang
Agnes hield het precies zes minuten vol en veranderde toen weer in de gelijkhebbende, met de armen zwaaiende tanige vrouw. Je keek er naar en wist: hier spoelt iemand 30 jaar werk van Jan Marijnissen door het toilet. Kant is de Verdonk van de SP."