Monthly Archives: January 2008

Simplify Your Search?

Here’s something interesting to think about: Should you simplify the design of your search fields? Looking at various sites, like IMDB and Amazon, I’ve noticed that a lot of sites feature drop-down boxes allowing you to pick what areas of the site to search (in the case of Amazon, Books, DVD, Electronics, etc). Here are a couple of examples:

Then there are sites that move this feature to an “Advanced Search” page.

There are two arguments about this:

  1. It makes it easier to find things by offering more power up front.
  2. It confuses people to have too many options.

I kind of like having the extra functionality within reach when I’m searching, but that doesn’t mean everyone else does. However, I absolutely cannot stand sites that force you to make a selection, rather than having an “all” option. It’s not like it’s difficult to create a search system that can look in all areas at once.

What do you think? Is it better to have the dropdown, or not? Why? Of course it really depends on the website, and the audience.

MiniAjax

Looking for some AJAX scripts? MiniAjax is a gallery of “nice looking simple downloadable dhtml and ajax code.” The one-page site shows 62 (to date) entries for various useful scripts. There are star-rating systems, modal dialogs, heatmap generators, poll scripts, tabbed interfaces, and more.…

How Many Images is Too Many?

It depends. Theoretically, the less images on a page the better, as your pages will load faster (and put less strain on your server). There are two types of images. There are template-level images and post-level images. Template-level images exist in your blog’s header/footer/sidebar…

BlogBuzz January 5, 2008

Why Does Technorati Report False Inbound Links?

I was looking at Technorati yesterday, just checking for links to Webmaster-Source. According to Technorati yesterday, the large blog about the publishing industry, GalleyCat, was linking to me. Yeah, right. First of all, I’d have noticed an increase of traffic. Second of all, I…

How Ironic

Hehe. I told you all to update your copyright notices as soon as the new year started, and I forgot to update mine! I just noticed it today.

8 Tips For a Blazing-Fast Blog

No one actually likes waiting. Some of us are just better at it than others. The internet seems to be a parallel reality where time passes differently, slow at times, fast at others. Web pages seem to take eons to load, no matter how…

Blogger is Beyond Easy

I’ve been playing around with blogger lately, for a bit of a pet project, and I’ve been amazed at it’s recent improvements. It’s a little too easy to edit your template. You can just drag-around little building blocks, and you’re done. It’s like playing…

WordPress Theme of the Month: Visionary 1.1

Visionary is this month’s highlighted WordPress theme.

Best of 2007

It’s 2008! Webmaster-Source has been a blog for a year (okay, half a year…), so let’s recap some of the better posts, and review our progress. I say “our progress”, because there wouldn’t be any without all of you who read this blog. A…