Category: Tips & How To’s

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Design Tips & How To's Web Development

Carousels Are Useless

Carousels are a lazy and ineffective way to surface content on the web. Stop using them.

— End of Post —

Earlier this year, Erik Runyon the director of web stuff at the prestigious University of Notre Dame, took a close look at how their users were interacting with carousel content.

He found that of the 1% of users even engaging with the carousel in the first place, 84% clicked on the first item in the carousel and PRACTICALLY NO ONE (~4% each equally) clicked on the remaining items.

To put it another way, you gaining practically nothing by putting content in a slider.

This data mirrors my recollection of the tracking we ran on hiphopdx.com when we were working on a redesign circa 2010.

This is not new information, yet carousels are more popular than ever.

If you absolutely must use a carousel, take a read through Brad Frosts post over here.

But seriously, find a better solution.

Update: Chris Noto asks a good question in the comments “why is hiphopdx.com still using a carousel.” While I can’t answer for certain, I tried.
TL;DR – the 0.04% of visitors who click through the last item in a carousel still generate real dollars in ad revenue.

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Tips & How To's Web Development WordPress

On Scaling WordPress

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that to scale WordPress you “just cache it.” That’s a pretty big claim to make without any sort of references.

Here’s Peter Chester of Modern Tribe’s talk on the subject from WordCamp LA 2011.

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Tips & How To's

My New RSS Diet: No News

Until last week, I had not touched an RSS reader. My Google Reader list had become completely unsustainable, I always seemed to have hundreds of unread items.

I’ve come to the realized that RSS is a crappy way to read news. I want my RSS reader to be a personalized daily magazine. Something I can pick up at the end of the day and browse through medium to long form articles of interest to me.

Last week I put myself on a new news-free RSS diet. I started a fresh list of RSS sources with one criteria, they need to post no more than 3 times per day or so. This rule excludes all traditional news sources, most “pro-bloggers” and link-bloggers, etc.

So far it’s been working out really well, I’ve got a manageable amount of content to digest every day and I’m finally able to keep up with web comics again, since they’re not being lost in a deluge of reposted stories.

As for real news, I keep up with that on Twitter and Reddit. Easy peasy livin’ greezy.

I still haven’t found a really great RSS reader though, but that’s another post.

Categories
Design Tips & How To's Web Development

Please don’t customize social media icons

When I put on my front-end developer hat, I’m often the last line of defence between the client and an unfortunate typo, bad idea or missed opportunity. I’m the last pair of eyes to examine a design before it hits the development environment. Designers probably hate me for it, but if I see a design choice that doesn’t make sense to me, I’ll mention it.

One of the most common design choice that irks me is customized social media icons. Web designers seem to have an inescapable need to redesign Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, whatever.app’s icons to match the overall look and feel of the site. One one hand, I can almost understand the appeal, these logos can stick out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, that’s the entire point!

Brands like Twitter and Facebook spend massive amounts of time and money tweaking their identity. They spend even more money marketing their brand, getting it in everybody’s face. Facebook’s white ‘F’, Twitter’s blue bird are immediately recognizable. In my humble opinion, if you actually want website’s visitor to notice and use those sharing features I’m supposed to implement, it’s probably a good idea to follow the social network’s brand guidelines. If you want people to share your content or follow the @account, it’s not a great idea to have the social media icons BLEND IN WITH THE REST OF THE SITE!

I’d love to do an A/B test to examine this theory.

Categories
Tips & How To's

Watching US Netflix in Canada, now easier than ever!

Update: I am sorry to report that Tunlr is no longer supporting Netflix. See their blog for more info. If you know of another FREE DNS service please leave a comment.

My friend Ron tipped me off to this free DNS service that allows you to watch Netflix (and other US geo-restricted content) outside of the USA! For free! (Did I mention that it’s free?)

These guys are calling themselves Tunlr.

I love these services. Unlike VPN services, with these DNS redirects your streams don’t get slowed down by being  proxied through a US server.

We set it up on our AppleTV and it works like a charm!

Here are the instructions for setting up ATV:

  1. Open Settings
  2. Open General
  3. Open Network
  4. Open Configure TCP/IP
  5. Select Manually (we assume you already have a fully functional network setup)
  6. Skip IP address by selecting Done (hit the left button on the remote and press OK)
  7. Skip Subnet Mask by selecting Done
  8. Skip Router Address by selecting Done
  9. Use 199.167.30.144 when asked for the DNS address and select Done
  10. Select Restart in the General menu

Instructions for other devices can be found on their site.

Edit: I should mention, that if you have a number of devices on your home network that you wish to use to access US services, you’re probably better off setting your router’s DNS to Tunlr.