"Transactional email can be a website's customer service ambassador, but messages must first survive a ruthless selection process in the user's in-box. Differentiating your message from spam is thus the first duty of email design.
Email is one of a website's most powerful tools for strengthening customer service and increasing users' confidence and trust in the site. Confirmation messages and other automated transactional email can complete the user experience: they reach out to customers in ways that are otherwise impossible for websites, which must sit still and wait for users to approach."
"Once you choose a blogging service and set up an account, you will be provided with a standard blog template. But this template will suffer from a cookie-cutter design, and if you don't personalize it your blog may become lost. To be noticed your blog needs to make a splash - as there are more than ten million blogs out there. So what we'll concentrate on here is working with some design elements that can help you add more zing to your blog."
"One of the biggest misconceptions is that hackers will target only large companies. The truth is computers get attacked for a variety of reasons. Some of these include the following:
- Snooping: Reading private mail and other personal files.
- Destroying or corrupting computer data: Making files unusable, or making a whole computer unusable.
- Stealing computer data: Taking credit card numbers, e-mail addresses, company information and so on.
- Stopping computers from functioning properly: Blocking incoming traffic so that intended users cannot get access, etc.
- Misusing computer resources: Sending spam without you knowing it, etc.
- Pranks: practical jokes, breaking in just because it's a challenge.
The bottom line, don't think your network is safe just because you're not that important or well-known. Assuming that you aren't personally targeted, moderately secure networks usually cause hackers to attack elsewhere. Yet attacks can come from many different sources and your computer should be equipped to deal with each of these types of attacks."
" Finding quality images and photos for complementing an important article, essay or news report is already quite a challenge for many. Imagine when the goal is not just too find good images, but find some that you could openly and freely use without needing to pay royalties or one-time publishing rights to someone."
"PDPhoto.org is a repository for free public domain photos. Unless something is clearly marked as being copyrighted, you can assume it is free to use. But if you intend to use an image you find here for commercial use, please be aware that standards for such use are higher. Specifically, you should assume no model release was obtained. And pictures featuring products or property should be used with care. The photos are here to be used, but I don't want you to get either of us in trouble over it."
"There are many Web technologies, from simple to complex, and explaining each in detail is beyond the scope of this article. However, to help you get started with developing your own Web sites, beyond simple WYSIWYG designing of Web pages in FrontPage, this article provides brief definitions of the major Web technologies along with links to sites where you can find more information, tutorials, and reference documentation."
"The Web-based Newsreader allows you to participate in discussion groups directly in your Web browser; you don't need to install or configure anything. You can use the Web-based Newsreader to read, post, search for, and reply to messages in discussion groups from the part of Usenet that concerns Microsoft products and technologies."
..."the personal website of Matt Pfeffer. It is an experiment more than anything. An attempt to learn a thing or two, get some exercise, maybe have a laugh now and then.
Everything here is either trivial, or wrong."
"The guidelines this document describes will tell you how to improve the user experience on your site. They apply to web copy generally - both marketing copy and navigational (or instructional or "guide") copy - and their value is indirect but significant: Observing them will improve your site's ability to do its job well. "
"This style guide seeks to serve as a resource for anyone writing or editing web copy, and to document some of the conventions that distinguish good writing, as published on the web, from writing published in other media."
"I am glad to provide free editing help to nonprofit organizations and independent web publishers. The offer is generally for one-time edits of a web site, or of any reasonable amount of web content."
"FavIcon from Pics is an online tool that can generate a favicon from a picture, logo or other graphic of any size/resolution. It was also the first online tool that simplified the creation of favicons using a regular image without requiring manual edits."Makiko Itoh:
" Here's a roundup of some of the favicons that caught my eye. Please click through to the sites themselves, to see how the favicon works (or not) with the site. Maybe it will get you thinking about your own site's favicon."
"There is nothing quite like The WELL, and the secret has a lot to do with its evolution. Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link in 1985, starting with a dialog between the fiercely independent writers and readers of the Whole Earth Review.
This set the tone for the open but remarkably literate and uninhibited intellectual gathering that continues today. Over the years, WELL members have made fast friends, created enduring traditions, gathered casually face-to-face in cities 'round the world, and provided support to strangers.
They have founded organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Craig's List, and documented what was emerging in books like Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community, John Seabrook's Deeper, and Katie Hafner's The WELL. They have gone into business together, fallen in and out of love, cultivated feuds, taken kickass vacations together and enriched lives.
Salon.com bought The WELL in 1999, and upgraded its servers to greet the century. These days WELL members enjoy access to Salon's remarkable independent journalist and the benefits of Salon Premium."
"In my discussions with other Google users, I am always amazed at how few of Google's tools they have heard of. For the most part, people are only familiar with the main search areas such as the web, news and images. And even in these areas, their knowledge of all the options that would allow them to better harness the power of Google is limited.
When I've told others of the vast features and formidable power of Google tools, they are quite frankly astonished. Compounding the problem of this unfamiliarity is the fact the Google does not make much of an effort to even tell us what's new and what's in public beta. You've usually got to hear about it somewhere else or just stumble upon it."
"ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).
Even if your web application already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application."
"This site documents my attempts at understanding and exploring the possibilities of CSS. From standard navigation links to my more bizarre experimental techniques.
All my examples are produced with JUST CSS, no javascript, or any other language, has been used in any of the examples. The demonstrations are designed to work in all the latest browsers, but, if you're lucky, some may also work in earlier versions."
"You will no doubt come across many quirky layout issues when building a site with CSS. You'll end up banging your head against a wall time and again. This is an attempt to make the design process easier, and provide a quick reference to check when you run into trouble."And:
"The old-timers had to figure out the hard way all the tricks and techniques we now take for granted; lucky folks who came in later (myself included) can benefit from their sweat and tears.
In the end, when your skill using standard-based design eclipses your skill using old-school table-based methods, you’ll look back and marvel at how much more sense it makes to layout a page with CSS."
"[Participants] told us that they often copied and pasted material into Word where they could enlarge the font even more and make it bold, thus rendering it easier for them to see."
"We have not done a good job of catering to these screen-magnification or zoom users. Using CSS, it's easy to do, as we shall soon see. And moreover, using CSS to develop zoom layouts is almost exactly what developers of handheld and PDA browsers are doing in their quest for small-screen rendering of wide, multicolumn web pages."
