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The real cost of bad software

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What makes a good website?
Your website is often the first point of contact for so many people and most people who have found their way to your site will navigate away too easily if there’s not something there to hold their attention. Good graphics are important of course, but what else helps to hold the attention of your reader?
Make your homepage feel like home
This is your opportunity to make a good first impression, making it too flashy or with too much content on it could result in an information overload.
- An outline of what is on your site, and where the reader can find it
- Contact details
- Why they should explore the rest of your site
Get people to come back, and back, and back
Once you’ve managed to get someone to come to your website once, you have to have something attractive to the reader to make them come back again.
Content
Make sure your content is credible and original. Try to provide new relevant content on a regular basis, so that there is something new for your reader when they come back to your site. Your content also determines the strength of your presence on search engines, and with so many people using search engines every day it’s important to make your presence felt.
Here are some ideas for keeping your content up to date:
- Providing a news digest (or blog), which keeps people updated on the relevant subject matter.
- Offering objective analysis and feedback on current events in your industry
- Listening to and offering feedback to your customers’ comments, concerns and ideas
- Inviting informed contacts to write articles for you
- Avoid using Flash extensively - its not as search-engine friendly as a clean, css-driven, standards-compliant website (like the ones Siyelo design)
Navigation
Link positioning should be logical, and when you click them they should redirect you to the right place. Siyelo does extensive testing to make sure that what your website does what it promises, and your software developer should offer this service too. The layout should be intuitive, and there should be a flow through your site which makes your audience feel instantly comfortable. Try not to litter your pages with hundreds of links.
Try to view the website from the customer’s perspective - if you were a customer how would you want to interact with the site?
Design
The visuals of a site are important, but unless they are supported by compelling content, easy navigation and good solid coding, visuals on their own won’t be able to attract people to your site and keep them coming back.
There are some annoying things that can make people navigate away immediately:
- Poor, dated or cookie cutter designs. Invest in a professional web designer.
- Intros designed in Flash
- Too many pop-up or pop-under boxes
- Autoplay music. Let your customer choose to play music, if offering it strengthens your message
- Busy backgrounds.
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Full text search on Heroku with Texticle

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Are Agile Projects Doomed to Half-Baked Design?
The answer is no.
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Design Chunking with Scrum

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Using Git? How to know what branch you're on, and if its dirty.
Do you lie awake at night dreaming of a way to save your fingers from typing 'git status' too often? Ever wish you could just have an asterisk (*) on the command prompt to tell you that the working directory is dirty? No more insomnia for you;
Paste this code into your .bash_profile and off you go.Comments [0]
Fix for annoying bug in EmailSpec
EmailSpec with Cucumber is a great combo. How else could you get such nice BDD syntax such as;
Scenario Outline: Register new userGiven I am on the signup page
And I fill in "Email" with ""
And I fill in "Password" with ""
And I press "Create My Account"
Then I should
And I should receive an email
When I open the email
Then I should see "Please activate your new account" in the subject
When I click the first link in the email And if you happen to be using EmailSpec 0.3.5 and you're getting an error like this, I may have a solution for you; You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.include? (NoMethodError)
/Users/glennroberts/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/glennr-email_spec-0.3.5/lib/email_spec/deliveries.rb:45:in `mailbox_for'
/Users/glennroberts/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/glennr-email_spec-0.3.5/lib/email_spec/deliveries.rb:45:in `select'
/Users/glennroberts/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/glennr-email_spec-0.3.5/lib/email_spec/deliveries.rb:45:in `mailbox_for'
/Users/glennroberts/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/glennr-email_spec-0.3.5/lib/email_spec/helpers.rb:138:in `mailbox_for'
/Users/glennroberts/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/glennr-email_spec-0.3.5/lib/email_spec/helpers.rb:48:in `unread_emails_for'
./features/step_definitions/email_steps.rb:52 I fixed the offending bug - grab the code either at Gemcutter gem install glennr-email-spec or via GitHub http://github.com/glennr/email-spec If you're reading this Mr Mabey, please include in the next email-spec patch :-)
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Browser market share: Applying the 80:20 rule
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