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I was recently browsing Slate.com when I saw a link to a slide show referencing Banksy and gave it a look. The page presents you with a link that pops up a slide show (figure 1). The navigation is simple for the slide show with standard text-based navigation at the bottom of the text. I was enjoying the pictures, scrolling through (figure 2), and then got to the 4th picture (figure 3).

As much as I am impressed by the moxy of Donald Trump, I don't normally watch shows like the Celebrity Apprentice. This season's episodes caught my attention though because of how Poison's lead singer Bret Michaels handled himself. Kind of a weird topic to bring up in a Web Development blog - perhaps, but I felt there was a lesson to be learned.

I was looking around for a nifty way of examining load issues on clients sites. I wanted some way of quickly pin pointing which images/files were causing the issue (or the delay was even being caused by site file sizes in the first place!). I discovered a cool little site called Pingdom that did the job. Simply enter a URL and even check the save URL box. Pingdom drills down through your file load times and display in KB each different component of the page. It also gives you an outline summary of basic info about the site, how many images, style sheets, plugin, redirects, external objects etc. Simple and neat it does what I needed! But Pingdom is more than just that, it is also an uptime and performance monitoring system. The system lets you know if you site has gone down, gives you uptime reports, response time reports and connects nicely to Twitter, SMS and Email to alert you if troubles a-brewing.

Clients often are confused about the roles served by domain name registrars and website hosting providers. Both are necessary components in having a live website, and failing to keep active accounts at both can have unfortunate consequences such as having a website go offline, email services halted, or even losing a domain name to another party.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.

We use BaseCamp from 37signals for general work time tracking, including project development. Over time there can be a large amount of data accumulated, and there is a nifty way it can be consolidated and used for project analysis. In essence, export the time data out of BaseCamp and use the power of Excel to make summaries and graphs. In this way, you can easily see items such as:

I came across Clicktale and thought they deserved a shout out so to speak based on my interactions with them. My personal reasons for having an interest in heatmaps is because I find it interesting how little users are really interested in when they visit any given website. There are some very interesting usability challenges you can find having examined some of the results of these tests. Some of what they do is already under the Analytics umbrella but some hotspots (scuse the pun) I think worth a mention are as follows: - See how far down visitors scroll and see where they abandon the page. - See where users click or move their mouse on the page. - See what parts of your forms people spend more time on or have more difficulty with. - See what content on your page users care less about. If we spend a little more time on this type of user interaction we might very well be able to identify some very pragmatic and beneficial insights.

The only thing that surprised me this weekend more than the fact that Papa Johns were still running deliveries in crazy snow (kudos), was the fact that DNN doesn't make it easy to insert a Paypal form into DNN.

David McKillen WebStrategies Inc.