Jens Meiert

Website Optimization Measures, Part V

Almost half a year since my last article in that regard it’s about time to present version 5 of some random website optimization measures hopefully being great for your site as well. Short and crispy, to use some equally random German saying …

¶ November 3, 2008, filed under Web Development, Usability, Design.

When Guidelines Should Be Descriptive or Prescriptive

Every time I’m setting up guidelines and standards, mostly within companies, one of the questions I need to ask and answer myself is whether or not they, or which parts of them, should be descriptive or prescriptive. For coding guidelines this would mean the difference between …

¶ September 13, 2008, filed under Web Development, Accessibility, Usability, Design.

Updating a Definition of Art

When I once tried to define art, design, and decoration, I described art as: “Art hides. Art has a meaning, and it hides it, on purpose. Art delivers a message, and that message is hidden, on purpose. It is an art to create art. Art is unusable, by definition.” Several months and discussions later …

¶ July 29, 2008, filed under Usability, Design.

Compared to What?

… is probably one of the most important questions there is. “Compared to what?” is the question that should be answered every time it is about data, be it presented in graphs, in newspapers, on websites, or when just talked about. Yet it is rarely answered, rarely …

¶ July 3, 2008, filed under Marketing, Design.

10 Measures for Continuous Website Maintenance

Website maintenance and quality assurance mean the backbone of high quality offers of information, and they represent the difference between an amateurish or professional approach to web design and development. Consequently, guidelines for quality web design define maintenance …

¶ June 24, 2008, filed under Web Development, Usability, Design, User Experience.

Web Design: 10 Additional Research Findings You Should Know

Following up on last year’s post on web design research, here’s a new collection of research results, this time featuring further reading as well. It happens that I still watch the work of Association for Computing Machinery, Human Factors International, and the like …

¶ June 5, 2008, filed under Usability, Design, User Experience.

Less Is Still More

How much time and money gets spent on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating. Allow me to elaborate, starting with HTML newsletters: People (let) spend hours on writing supposed content, create and decorate mockups, work around ridiculous email client implementations, …

¶ May 21, 2008, filed under Web Development, Accessibility, Usability, Design, User Experience.

Website Optimization Measures, Part IV

Once again, though already covering a few weeks of various improvements. Some have been taken place in Bremen, others in Zurich, all on one or more of my sites. Anyway, enjoy some additional tips, this time roughly touching typography, usability, SEO, and web development with performance focus …

¶ May 5, 2008, filed under Web Development, Usability, Design.

Standardistas, Help Fix Wikipedia

When it comes to professional web design and web development, the English Wikipedia is in questionable condition. Considering the value Wikipedia has as a contact point for rubbernecks and novices, it should be in our best interest to take care of …

¶ April 13, 2008, filed under Web Development, Accessibility, Usability, Design.

The 10 Design Theses of Dieter Rams

Moving up industrial design on my agenda and studying the work of German top designer Dieter Rams, who was responsible for the mostly great design of Braun products for about 30 years, I considered it to be useful to bring up his design theses again …

¶ March 25, 2008, filed under Design.