Web governance
Web governance ensures long term success A selection of articles from Paul Boag and Headscape about web governance, strategy and so on. Now that our first big project has launched, our immediate focus is on sorting out…
Search by author: Duncan Stephen
The usability of homepages
Homepage usability: can users infer the breadth of your product catalogue? This article looks at the usability of shopping websites’ homepages. But there may still be lessons for us here, with our attention turning…
Do people use related links?
Rethinking related links Gov.uk have been looking at how often people use ‘related links’ areas on their website. It seems that they are not as popular as you might think. But looking at the analytics, just 0.5% of…
Focusing on top tasks
Evidence-based decision making at Cisco support In many models of web management, every 2-3 years the site gets a redesign. This could be called the ‘lipstick on a pig’ approach to website management. The result is…
Fact-driven web content
Interesting facts make webpages compelling Web users are task-driven and looking for information. They also dislike “marketese” and “happy talk” (or, as Jakob Nielsen calls it in this article, “blah-blah”). As such, it…
A/B test demonstrates that content is still king
One link on Gov.uk – 350,000 more organ donors Here is a fascinating article from the Government Digital Service about A/B testing, where different users are shown different versions of a page so that you can see which…
Creating a print style sheet
While we were very busy as we approached the end-of-February deadline for the new Study at St Andrews website, our daily update posts fizzled away. But I wanted to write about one further update that I made, because it…
What we mean by user-centred design
User-centred design The University of Kent web development team blog outlines their perspective on user-centred design and the agile development process. This is a great overview of the concept. This article makes it…
Why we should use plain English
It’s not dumbing down, it’s opening up Here is another great video from the Government Digital Service, this time outlining its approach towards using plain English throughout the website. The big one, and the one I…
The usefulness of global navigation
Global navigation is less useful on large, complex websites Here is a thought-provoking article about global navigation. We made the decision to remove the University’s global navigation menu from the Study at St…