Thoughts on website design — the process, the details, and the results. I include user experience (which some shorten to UX and I still habitually call usability) with design because the two are so closely linked.

Design philosophy

I don’t sell design — I design websites. Design is not a line item in the budget, it’s not about up-sell or branding, nor is it the sacred, mysterious product of overly-sensitive artists.

Designing a website is about meeting your business objectives while respecting your customers’ time and intelligence. Design is the problem-solving process.

While some think of design as how a thing looks, it’s not about decoration — it’s about how that thing works and the process that gets you there.

Good design is never an accident. Great design is all about care and attention to details.

• Think your desktop site’s good enough for mobile visitors? Does Google?
• Typography — the clothes you dress your message in
• Publishing PDFs: how to make a website harder to use
• Content formatting
  • Addresses (physical and web)
  • Date formats
  • Forms
  • Full justification
  • Hyphenation
  • Language
  • Noon and midnight
  • Ordinals
  • Quotation/foot/inch marks & apostrophes
  • Single-space between sentences
  • Times & prices
  • Underlining text
• FAQs are a blight on your website
• Opening off-site links in new windows doesn’t keep visitors on-site
• Stay DRY
• Forms