This trick is done entirely with CSS, and it works in all modern browsers. (Read: IE6 won’t do it right…) No JavaScript, just a little bit of styling with the :hover pseudoelement and absolute positioning.

You can find out how to do it for yourself by reading this tutorial by Michael Martin:

How to Create a Beautiful Dropdown Blogroll Without JavaScript.

The Usability Post covers, well, usability. It’s focus is not the visual aspect of design, but how design works. From the About page:

The Usability Post is a blog about design. Design isn’t what something looks like, design is about how it works. Making something usable means understanding what people expect from your product and thinking of ways to make the use of the product simple and enjoyable.

The blog shows promise, and is worth checking out.

Here are a couple of posts from Usability Post that I enjoyed:

• Usability Tip: Use Verbs as Labels on Buttons
• 5 Steps for the Perfect Tabbed Navigation Menu

Let’s start with their blog. When it launched, it was known as Monkey Bites. Eventually the blog was moved over to Wired.com, where it ran for awhile before being renamed to “Compiler.” The blog is, once again, known as Monkey Bites, and is now residing at webmonkey.com/blog and it’s integrated more tightly with Webmonkey than ever before.

The WebMonkey site itself is now a wiki. What used to be a repository for tutorials penned by HotWired’s designers and developers is now opening-up and allowing anyone who knows what they’re talking about to submit articles to be included. It looks like WebMonkey is moving forward into the 21st century, making an effort to keep up with today’s technologies, instead of staying a dusty collection of out-of-date tutorials.

Now, let’s move on to the design.

Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? It’s clean and modern, and the layout seems well-planned. The colors are pleasing, the navigation good. The ads are unobtrusive. Overall the design is well done, following more of a magazine-type style than before.

Yes, the design has come a long way from the 90s-type look it kept until recently.

One of my favorite elements of the design is the navigation. It’s a good example of usable navigation. The large buttons are few, and clearly labeled. The dropdown menus help to keep the navigation uncluttered, providing narrower navigation when it’s needed. In addition to being simple, the button styling looks great.

The site has the standard, ugly Wired footer, so there’s nothing to see there…

The front page is structured well. Above the fold, you get the most recent articles and blog posts and articles, as well as a “Getting Started” box telling a little about the new Webmonkey, and providing some useful links Below that you get a roll of the most recent posts from the MonkeyBites blog, and a sidebar with some headlines from programming.reddit.com. (Reddit is another Condé Nast property.)

Webmonkey’s revamp was well-executed, and it looks like the site will shape-up to be a major player once again.

Taglines are by no means exclusive to websites. Traditional publications use them, corporations have them, and even movies have taglines. Who hasn’t heard (or heard references to) “Think Different” or “Yo Quiero Taco Bell”? What about “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”? Just run a Google search on “tagline” and you’ll find plenty of corporate taglines. Or look at IMDB.com, and you’ll notice that they list the tagline(s) for all your favorite movies.

If you don’t already have a good tagline for your website, get one. Here are a few noteworthy examples:

• We smash you with the information that will make your life easier. Really. [Smashing Magazine]
• News for nerds. Stuff that matters [Slashdot]
• The Art of Technology [Ars Technica]
• Shoppers Bite Back [The Consumerist]

For more funny taglines, check out The Best Website Taglines Around the Internet.

Consider adding a tagline. Whether you decide to be funny or not, be sure to check out Copyblogger’s guide to writing taglines.

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 fast your internet connection is. I remember having to wait more than a minute for most pages to load (that was back when I had dial-up). Nowadays I have a DSL connection that generally runs in the 700k-900k range. It’s a lot faster, but not fast enough. Sure, some pages load lightning-fast, but others still seem to crawl along. While they’re not taking over a minute to load, it sure seems like it.

While you’re using the web, time flies by overly quick. It seemed like it was taking an hour for that video to load, but it was really only five minutes. So why is it four o’clock? Oh yeah, you logged-on to World of Warcraft for a few minutes… But how does that come-out to be an hour?

Do you get what I’m saying?

So what can you do to make your blog load faster?

• Install WP Super Cache. You’ll notice the difference immediately. While it won’t magically make every page load faster, it will make your more popular posts quicker.
• Pick a Faster Host. If your webhost has a slow connection, and horribly oversold servers, you can’t expect great performance out of your site. I’m currently getting by with a 1and1 shared server plan, which is okay (and cheap), but not as fast as it could be. Michael of Pro Blog Design uses Media Temple, a pricier host that is held in high regard by bloggers everywhere. MT is known for their speed and reliability. For those looking for cheaper plans, I’ve also heard hood things about A Small Orange. Do your research before buying hosting. Check loading times for sites that use the host, look for current reviews (from reputable sources), etc
• Lighten your images. Use less images in your template if possible, and make sure you optimize them correctly.
• Compress your CSS. Use a CSS-optimization service like Clean CSS, or CSS Optimizer. Make sure you save the original stylesheet, in case something goes wrong!
• Remove excess widgets and whatnot. Any extra files (JavaScript or otherwise) that must be loaded will cause a performance hit. If a bit of JavaScript doesn’t serve any purpose, then remove it. does “MyBlogLog” benefit your readers? I doubt it. Refer to this chart for help deciding what to keep.
• Disable plugins. As with miscellaneous bits of JavaScript, plugins detract from performance as well. There’s the overhead from running the PHP commands, there’s MySQL access times, etc. If you don’t have a good reason to use it, then toss it.
• Kill unnecessary template tags. Don’t waste server resources by using bloginfo(‘name’) when you can just write the name of your blog. See Pro Blog Design’s 13 Tags to Delete From your Theme.
• Simplify your design. Go simplistic, and your blog will load faster. As of this writing, Webmaster-Source’s overall design only has two images. The logo, and the tiled edge graphic. Everything else is just CSS magic. The aforementioned ProBlogDesign.com takes a similar approach.

Now that you’ve optimized your blog, you can use the time you will save waiting for your blog to load every day to play World of Warcraft, er, write more blog posts.