Category Archives: Design

What Makes Someone Leave Your Website?

Vandelay Design has a list of some of the most common things that cause people to leave your website. While it’s not a good idea to obsess over keeping people on your site, it’s worth reading up on how to optimize your site to promote staying longer.

Part of having a successful website is attracting visitors. Keeping those visitors on your site, however, is another topic altogether. Of course, once you have the visitor on your site you’ll want to keep them around for a while rather than seeing them quickly leaving to go somewhere else.

In order to do a good job of retaining visitors, increasing pageviews and time on the site, it’s important to think about what could cause visitors to leave. By knowing some of the major reasons that people are leaving your site, you can make adjustments to improve this situation.

The list covers the main areas that you want to pay attention to to successfuly optimize your site in this manner, which pretty much fall into the categories of content, design, and advertisements. Keep in mind though, that if people notice that you are actively trying to keep them on your site, it will be a major turn off. So don’t

  • Be stingy with outgoing links
  • Open external links in pop-up windows
  • Try to disable the Back button

Stay away from little tricks like that that hinder the user experience.

Design Spotlight: Web Design Ledger

I realized it’s been awhile since I did one of my Design Spotlight posts. It is about time to highlight a noteworthy design, isn’t it? Today I would like to ponit you toward Web Design Ledger, a design blog I’ve started reading recently. Designed…

10 Cool and Useful CSS Tutorials

If you work with CSS much at all, these ten tutorials are must-reads. They range from sprites to print stylesheets, speech bubbles to sliding doors. The sorts of things that are nice to have in your CSS toolbox for future use, when you’ll undoubtedly…

CSS Tip: Remove Link and Form Field Outlines

In most browsers, a dotted outline appears around links when they are clicked. In some cases, this is annoying, such as with a JavaScript tabbed box or a graphical navigation menu. While it’s a minor issue, it still doesn’t look quite right… Then you…

You Can’t Opt-In to Redesigns

There have been a lot of website redesigns this year, and more are on the way. With each one, there have been major complaints. Not just the usual “Eh, the old one was better,” but actual resistances. It’s fairly common knowledge among designers and…

Why You Should Avoid Forcing New Windows

Target=”_blank” tells a user’s browser to “open this link in a new window” (or a tab, if you’ve configured your browser to treat windows as tabs). Many people don’t like this behavior, and many usability “experts” have argued against it’s use. The W3C has…

The Mobile Web Part 6: 7 Useful Mobile Site Resources

Over the past five days we have covered quite a few bases in the mobile website area. In case you missed them, you can find the posts here: Part 1: Why Go Mobile? Part 2: Mobilize Your Site the Easy Way Part 3: iPhonitizing…

The Mobile Web Part 5: iPhoneMicrosites.com

While I was looking for some extra iPhone-formatted websites to round out yesterday’s list, I came across iPhone Microsites. The site caught my attention, so I figured I’d make it part of the Mobile Web series. iPhone Microsites is based entirely around the “iPhone…

The Mobile Web Part 4: 14 iPhone-Formatted Websites

Welcome to day four of The Mobile Web. We’ve previously covered a lot of ground on the subject of mobile websites over the last few days. Today will be lighter reading though. Who’s up for a design roundup of mobile websites? What are some…

The Mobile Web Part 3: iPhonitizing Your Site Sans MoFuse

In part two of the “The Mobile Web” series, I covered MoFuse, a service that automatically generates (and hosts) iPhone and WML versions of websites for you. Today we will be doing something a little more interesting. Today we will be putting together iPhone-formatted…