Time to Say Goodbye to the Pagefold? Nope!

by Jonathan on 18th Dec 2009 in Design

My friend and colleague Jon Frost sent me an interesting link this morning, to ThereIsNoPageFold which got me thinking about the page fold and whether it’s still relevant in modern web design.

My conclusion was simple; of course it bloody is!

Please turn off real time search Google!

by Jonathan on 9th Dec 2009 in Google

Anyone else finding that thing bloody annoying? Could they at least make it opt-in?

I type in a query and expect to see a nice list of relevant results, but now instead I see not only a couple of adverts (which I’ve gotten used to ignoring, unless a company is stupid enough to bid on their own name, in which case I click it) but now 2 massive twitter quotes too, which pushed the search results to almost below the pagefold on my 15″ laptop screen!

What has become of Mr. X?

by Jonathan on 6th Dec 2009 in Random

I few weeks ago I read the post on Dustin Curtis’ blog about how rubbish American Airlines’ website is, and the subsequent response from one of their employees, Mr. X. And then, a few days later I was shocked to read that AA had fired Mr. X!

I stumbled upon the post again and was reminded that Andrew Daniel, who leads the UX team at Sears asked Mr. X to send his resume and portfolio so they could discuss the possibility of a job. So now I’d like to know how that turned out!

Did Mr. X send his portfolio? Did he get a job with Sears? And if not, what’s the poor bugger up to? He’s become something of a celebrity in the web design world so should make the most of it!

So, anyone know where we can find out?

Good lord there are some sick web developers out there

by Jonathan on 5th Dec 2009 in Rants

I’m not prone to angry outbursts, but I’ve just seen something that’s really pissed me off.

A Refreshing Variation on the old “List of # <insert anything>” blog post

by Jonathan on 5th Dec 2009 in Design

Just when I was losing faith this shows up.

Josh Sears’ post, “25 Examples of Web 2.0 and Traditional Design Rules Coming Together” doesn’t just list the websites, but each one is also accompanied by a good chunk of content which talks you through the site and how elements of its design apply to the topic at hand.

Google Analytics goes Asynchronous

by Jonathan on 2nd Dec 2009 in Google Analytics

Google have just announced an amazing new feature / change to the way we implement Google Analytics tracking code. It’s called Asynchronous Tracking and basically it means that the GA javascript can be downloaded separately from the rest of the page’s content, resulting in faster load times.

Another nice effect of this is that we can now put GA code at the top of the page, meaning accuracy will increase!

I won’t go into the technical details, you can read those over at the Google Code Blog, and you should check out the migration examples too.