Mar

9

Wordpress Customization Tutorials

Filed Under WordPress | Leave a Comment

Came across a good one, explaining some really neat feaures

Customizing Wordpress for Newbies

Although I love the pretty picture and this was the only layout I found that I could put it on, I’m not really happy with the yukky baby_potty color. I might just have to give it up and go with something plainer, especially being fond of 3 column layouts.

Mar

9

Studies of Eye Movements on Web Pages

Filed Under Web Development | Leave a Comment

There’s a discussion at Search Engine Watch forums about a presentation on the eye movement patterns and “hot spots” of surfers at search engines, as presented at SES last month

Google’s Golden Triangle

While that’s geared to looking at visitors to search engines, there are other studies and papers that delve into user behavior and eye patterns on web pages themselves. This one from Poynter Extra is looking at behavior in viewing homepages:

The Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes

This page at ACM has links to some valuable information resources:

Web Page Viewing Behavior

It’s a fascinating concept, and kind of dispels some well-ingrained notions on how best to lay out web pages when building websites. It will be interesting to try to adapt some of the findings to see how page placement can affect conversion and clickthroughs on pages.

Mar

9

Sometimes Life is a Mechanical Failure

Filed Under Marcia Personal | Comments Off

This post is actually the remnant of some kind of a WordPress bug, starting out as a duplicate that refused to be deleted even after multiple tries. It almost seems like there are seasons of mechanical failure, with fix-its coming in groups.

While a dead car battery, a stopped up WC, a dishwasher that’s flooding the floor and a vacuum cleaner that choked on a penny are not a good thing, the biggest fix-it at the moment is ME.

OK, it’s lovely and I know it’s a blossoming favorite among the blogging crowd, but I don’t find WordPress to be particularly friendly for the technically challenged who just don’t have time to delve; so I figured since everything else is breaking anyway it might be a good time to try the “Excerpt” feature to see what it does - or considering recent history, what it doesn’t do. It’s been a very out of sorts few weeks, which might be an indication that it’s time to grab a box of See’s candy, curl up on the couch and do absolutely nothing, since nothing seems to be working anyway. Nothing except the websites :-)

PS: Excerpt didn’t work - but then, who expected it to?