Now this is where FedEx proves that they are paying attention. Within 48 hours, Matthew Thornton, senior V.P. FedEx Express U.S. Operations responds to the video with an apology and talks about the actions taken. Unlike many other responses to public outcries, FedEx did something simple and smart. They didn’t respond by issuing a press release. They responded in the same channel that the issue arose from, YouTube.

This is how it should be. Well done FedEx.

http://css-tricks.com/15377-this-sites-domain-is-stolen/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/say-no-to-sopa/

As described, it is trying to “To prevent online threats to economic creativity and theft of intellectual property, and for other purposes.” Yeah, right. The “and for other purposes” bit is the scary part.

Read Matt Cutts post about this. He has some good links to even more info.

If we allow this then we only have ourselves to blame.

What can you do you ask? Follow this link NOW and call your congress person. It is REALLY easy.

1. Information about technology
2. Downloads
3. Advertising

The last two is where I have issue. Not the fact that they have both, that is a good mix. Free files for some spammy adverts. Often times the ads are well-paired with the content you are viewing. I’m not even getting into the issue where a site that provides reviews for software also is paid advertising dollars from the same software makers. What gets me is the advertising they allow.

Example:

User goes to download an update to a bit of software. They get to the download page and find this:

You can click it for a larger view. The user is told to “click the link below”. Yet there are THREE links with the word “Download”, and two of them are ads. I’m sure many many users click the wrong link and begin a path of frustration that leads to confusion, extra toolbars in their browser and some half-assed anti-virus program.

So, either CNET is asleep at the wheel, or they just don’t care about their product. Either way, they are doing it wrong and thus killing their user’s experience.

In this case (see image) I want to send an email. The message is complete and I look for the button to send the email. Of course the button is there, in plain sight. However, visually, the “File” tab and the “Paste” button are highlighted by a bright color, drawing the user’s eye to these locations. The “Send” button, while not small by any means, is a light gray color!

When creating any UI design, be sure to make sure that the most common tasks are the ones that stand out. Don’t make the user hunt… not even for a second.

How many elements can you count on the image that use color? How many of those tasks would you commonly need EVERY time you type and send an email?

http://diythemes.com/thesis/credit-card-business/

It used to be that you had to worry a great deal about the resolution of the user’s computer screens. It was suicide to cause the users to have a horizontal scroll bar in their browser window. This was solved by one of a couple common options:

1. Design for the lowest common denominator. I can remember designing for 640×480 screens. It was painful. You had to make a website fit into no more than 620px wide… you had to subtract the pixels that the browser itself took up on the screen.
2. Design with fluid widths. You set each content area to scale to a constant percentage of the width of the browser window. This was nice, but hard to really control the design.

As screens became cheaper and larger, this became somewhat less of an issue.

The issue these days is sort of the same! With the increasing growth of tablet and smartphones, once again, the size that a webpage has to fit into is an issue. Recently there have been only a few, all problematic solutions:

1. Have a separate website for mobile devices. Direct your users to something like mobile.company.com or company.mobi. This treats the mobile user as a 2nd class citizen. While the desktop user gets the real website, the mobile users get some pared-down site that often hasn’t the info they need and/or doesn’t allow the user to even access the full version of the site.
2. The next option is to use a bit of code that loads a different, “mobile-ready” CSS or theme for the site. This works relatively well, but the design is usually severely lacking.
3. You can still use fluid layouts, but they are much harder to use effectively since the differences between the smartphone screen and the larger monitors is so great.
4. Lastly, and this is most often the case, just let the mobile users deal with the regular site… this works, right? I mean how many people actually surf the web on their phones?

Enter the latest version of CSS (Cascading Stylesheets). CSS is what handles what most web pages look like. The web page itself SHOULD just be the content. It has a new item called Media Queries! This allows the CSS to tell the browser to do different things with the content depending in the width of the browser window. This is sort of like the fluid layouts mentioned above, but WAY more elegant. You can swap out various items like having a regular navigation menu on a normal to large screen and changing that on the fly for a pull-down box to be seen on a smartphone.

Here are some amazing examples:

• http://www.fork-cms.com/
  
• http://clearleft.com/
  
• http://seesparkbox.com/
  

So… I’m experimenting with some layouts using these new techniques. Take the current layout and try it out by resizing your browser window. Pretty awesome! I’ll likely be experimenting with various layouts and new designs as I dig deeper.

• http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/

The issue that most concerns me is what happens when the shortener goes down? And they DO go down, sometimes forever. URL shorteners add an additional variable. Variables are necessary, but the more moving parts a machine has, the greater the odds of a break down. This is especially concerning when have no control of some variables.

I use URL shorteners very often when generating a QR Code. This helps create a less dense, more scannable code. This is very important. This, however, is a lazy option. I admit, sometimes it is better to do something quick than right. It all depends on the situation (read: budget).

Relying on a URL shortening service like bit.ly and sn.im (my favorite) is relatively safe for a tweet where the lifespan is typically an hour or less. You might consider looking into some alternatives for anything that needs to last.

What are the other options?

• 301 redirects
  Here you can use your Content Management System to redirect a user from something like “http://yoursite.com/m” to whatever URL you want to send them to. One great benefit to this beyond it being a variable you control is that you can change the redirect to another address later if you see fit. I have some pages hosted on tappinn.com that this works well for.
• short internal URLs
  Simpler than redirecting the users to anything is to use a URL like  ”http://yoursite.com/m” and actually have the necessary content hosted on that page. Remember, your sire MUST be mobile ready to make this work.
• Do you have other ideas? Leave them in the comments!