As Far As I Can Tell

Building a Web Site That Works

Seth Godin released a new eBook this week entitled "Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works".  Your can purchase it from his website for $9 or wait till September when it's free.  Since we're in the beginning stages of doing a redesign of our website I decided to purchase it now.  It's a quick read, yet is full of insight.  I'd recommend it to anyone getting ready to either create a new website or redesign a current one.  The book is filled with great tips on how to view your website from the eyes of the visitor and includes many real world examples.

As a side note... when reading his eBook Seth references a book entitled "Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results".  I've since started on that book and have found it really good material!  More to come when I'm finished.

Google Web Accelerator

Google just release it's latest tool (these guys are busy!) called Google Web Accelerator.  I usually stay far away from these types of utilities but... since it was Google I installed it immediately!  It works by providing an intelligent cache as well as prefetching pages.  For instance when searching Google it will pre-download the first search result for you.  So far I've saved a whopping 4.7 seconds (it provides a toolbar for tracking such things).  No bad for 5 minutes of use.  Hopefully some day they will provide a .adm file for managing the settings via Group Policy....

Misconceptions About Teenagers

Web usibility guru Jakob Nielsen recently completed a study of website usability for teenagers.  Several surprises came up.  Most notably:

Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites.

and...

We did confirm that teens like cool-looking graphics and that they pay more attention to a website's visual appearance than adult users do. Still, the sites that our teen users rated the highest for subjective satisfaction were sites with a relatively modest, clean design.

Read the full report on Jakob's website.  On a separate but related topic do you ever wonder why the web's usability guru has one of the blandest websites around?  You know it's not that easy to use either....

Remember When...

I stumbled across the oddest tool today.  The service is called Wayback (aka Internet Archive).  Give it a web address and it will show you how the site has changed over time.  I searched for our church website and it had examples back to 2000.  All I can say is what were we thinking!!!  You must spend at least 15 minutes on this site....

Great Church Websites

As the leader of our church's website I'm always looking for some fresh ideas on what people are doing. Until this morning I thought I knew most of the churches with great websites. That was until I ran across the link for http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/. While the site is still in the process of being created I found several new awesome looking sites. Take a look!