Usability

Web technology advances harmful to business?

Nik — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:51:00 -0500

Use of so-called “Web 2.0” web development techniques by businesses could be foolhardy, according to usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen warns against believing all the Web 2.0 hype when designing with the end-user in mind. While some 2.0 features can help, the majority of sites should focus on mastering the 1.0 aspects that users know and love.

Creating custom error pages in Drupal

Nik — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:28:43 -0500

Currently there are three options for creating error pages in the Drupal system, that I know of. I’m going to show here which I think is the best, for reasons of usability, performance and general webmaster sanity. At the foot of this article, there’s some free code too!

The options:

Drupal’s built-in support for error pages (@ /admin/settings/error-reporting)
Search404.module (404’s only, of course)

Customerror.module (404 & 403)

Drupal’s build in error page support

Page not found? What would Google do?

Nik — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:43:37 -0500

The Google Operating system blog posted this short article about “page not found” (aka 404) errors.

These errors can be frustrating for users, as they are often uninformative if not properly handled. For example, an unmanaged 404 from an Apache web server simply says “404 not found” and another short sentence saying almost the same thing. No help text, nothing.