Showcase Of Beautiful But Unusable Websites

“Form follows function” is a widely accepted — albeit controversial — principle that most designers in a variety of disciplines have adopted since its inception at the turn of the 20th century. On the web, we commonly refer to function as usability which is the ease of use and navigation of a website in order to achieve user’s goals.
In this showcase we present websites that sacrifice usability for beauty and present issues related to clutter, loading, navigation, archiving or visibility. Unfortunately, although the sites featured in this showcase are visually appealing, they are quite difficult to use. By studying such examples, we can learn what mistakes we can avoid in our designs and how not to strive for strong aesthetic appearances on the account of usability.
You may be interested in the showcase of Bizarre Websites On Which You Can Kill Time With Style as well.

Visual Clutter

Where do I look? Where do I click? What do I do? Visual clutter is one of the most serious issues a designer can present to an audience. Not only is the user unlikely to achieve the desired goals (because it’s hidden in the clutter), chances are they’ll just leave out of frustration before they do anything.
Creative With aK
Navigation overload! Not only are we unsure of where to look, we’re unsure of what’s clickable! Having to scan around the design with the mouse is not helpful for usability. And that’s if, and only if, you get past the load screen with no load progress bar. In addition to that, it takes a while until one has figured out that the welcome screen has to be closed to enable the actual in-site navigation. The inexistant scroll finally lets potentially interesting content disappear under the frame of the browser window.

Marc Ecko
Marc Ecko is an extremely successful businessman with countless ventures and he definitely wants us to know it. The problem is, he’s got so much business we don’t know where to start, provided you get used to the almost erratic horizontal scrolling feature! Getting the information you are looking for will take quite some time.

Content Of
Even after reading the “About” page and randomly clicking links, we’re still not sure what this page actually is about. Our best guess is a portfolio, but due to link clutter and no solid explanation of what the navigation does, we’re left confused.

There Studio
Half of the circles that look clickable aren’t; the other half jumble into a new rotation if you drag and drop them. Granted, the movement makes sense for the philosophy of the company, and there isn’t too much clutter, but it took us a minute to figure it all out and that’s 58 seconds too long. If you feel the need for more bubbles, click and drag on the empty space to add more to the confusion.

Loading Issues

As bounce rates increase, and time-on-sites decreases web-wide, it is becoming increasingly important to grab people’s attention immediately. By the time all of your effects load, chances are your user is back on Google or Facebook looking for the next cool site. Loading times, skip buttons, missing instructions on navigation and many other issues are all subject of considerations here.
Coke Light
One of the worst things you can do as a Flash designer is force an introduction on your audience. A long intro and no skip button means this site is likely to be abandoned by most of its visitors before they get in. Add an unclear “Call to Action” and no visual navigation indicators and most people will never encounter the beauty this site has to offer. Long transitions back to the home screen waste time the visitior could have spent successfully “travelling the world”, searching for the numerous balloons hidden within the map.

Design Sul
We’ve never seen so many load issues on one site. Multiple load times for different elements, re-loads once you’re in to the site core, and no clear indication that loading is finished make for an extremely confusing and difficult to use website. Actually, discovering how to reach the content takes some time, what it all has to do with milk cartons is a different question.

Nicola Walbeck
A big loading wait-time at the beginning of the site is excruciating, but sometimes manageable once you enter a beautiful, usable website. Scratch that here, because once you get in, you’ll have to wait again and again for each individual image, forcing you to stare at blurred photographs. A better idea would be to use loading bars on the image to indicate that the image is loading. If you are on a broadband connection, then it’s fine, but if you are not, you start to get nervous very quickly. Add the fact that there’s no prominent back button and the experience could be a bit frustrating.

Navigation Issues

For content/category heavy sites especially, navigation is extremely important. Imagine driving without a map, or the grocery store with no aisle indicators. Navigation tells us where to go and how, or — in these cases — tells us very little. You might consider taking a compass with you, these examples make getting lost easy.
EContent
After quite a long load, this site requires the user to click “enter”. Okay, we’re in. Unfortunately, although there is a quick-menu, it does not draw attention and the user is required to blindly scroll over images to see categories. Navigate with caution and carefully look out for navigation buttons!

Prism Girl
Unusable sites have actually developed conventions. When we don’t see clear category navigation on a beautiful site, we poke around with our mouse looking for the category links. This site is beautiful (and complex) enough to poke around for an hour, but you’ll probably never guess you have to click on the mouse trailing icon to enter. Other than impressive design work, this site does not have much to offer.

On Toyota’s Mind
Slow load time leads to an unclear ‘Call to Action’, no visually clear navigation as well as a hard-to-find back action. Our question: What crossed Toyota’s mind when conceptualising this site?

Theologos
No button to skip intro. No visually clear navigation. Slow transitions. And here’s the kicker, a separate page to mute the music player. When visiting the site using a fast connection, the animations make the visit even less enjoyable.

Archiving/Category Issues

Your site loaded fine, it’s clear what you want people to do, you have a solid navigation, but once the user begins moving around, they can’t figure out your category structure. When you want meat, you go to the deli, not the dairy aisle. Some sites, unfortunately, get it wrong.
Self Titled
A hidden quick menu and unclear category organization make this site difficult to navigate. The actual information one gets when entering a category is rather scarce.

Vanalen
Image slivers make-up the category composition on this site, giving us very little information as to where/what to click on. If you’re new to the site, you are likely to spend a while until you find what you were looking for.

Grip Limited
The website does tell you to “click and drag” but finding this instruction amidst what looks like a typographic poster is something we suspect many people weren’t able to do. Realizing this might be a problem, Grip did create an “Open Menu” bar at the top of the page, but what are the chances you’re going to look there?

Kyle Tezak
Another example of an extremely talented visual artist who has great design work, but a small usability problem makes the user experience less enjoyable. There is no actual navigation on this page, just a floating header and illustrations of Kyle’s work. To find the designer’s contact information, you need to click on the “Information” link in the upper right corner. Using more traditional wording would improve usability: e.g. putting an e-mail right there or naming it “Contact information” or adding contact information at the bottom of the page would help. A nice example of how one little detail can improve site’s usability.

Visibility/Scrolling Issues

A site may be uncluttered and have great navigation, but if the magnification is off, or scrolling is dysfunctional, no one is going to see it. Visibility issues can quickly turn to invisibility issues as users navigate away from your site.
Real Casual
This site is invisible until you start hunting with your mouse, at which point different areas of the screen appear. A long roll-over hunt is followed by long load times, during which fade effects additionally take your chance to get a good look at content.

Lego Click
Scrolling is conventionally top to bottom or left to right, but this site starts at the bottom which is confusing. Add to that an inability to retrieve closed elements, and several other minor issues, and you get an extremely frustrating (but beautiful) website from Lego.

Journey to Zero
This site is rather large, but you wouldn’t know it. It starts magnified with no suggestion to drag scroll, leaving the user wondering where all the content is. If you scroll too far on the other hand, you might end up in empty regions of the site, making it hard to get back to the content. Very beautiful website that is difficult to use.

Faub (currently offline)
Another beautiful site that starts magnified and does not let you decrease the magnification, or suggest dragging for navigation.

Uniqlo
Uniqlo presents what looks like a beautiful and usable online store. That is, until you’ve added 10 items to your cart only to find out there is no check-out. Turns out it’s not a store at all, just a wishlist! A truely frustrating experience for every consumer willing to spend!

Bio Bak
Another drag navigation site that’s just too big for its own good. This is one of our favorite sites from a beauty/having fun perspective, but it does an awful job of presenting the design agency from a usability perspective. Using the mouse wheel by chance let us discover that the site has more to offer than what is visible on the first glace.

Summary

Design for function and communication. If your website ends up beautiful in the process, you kill two birds. Design for beauty only if the primary function of your site is to convey beauty.
Be wary of visual clutter, especially in navigation and on landing pages. Designing with too much clutter can make an audience unsure of how to use your site. In the worst case users won’t be able to load your page in the first place. Web customers don’t like to wait. Ensure that your site has a fast, clear load that conveys an easy understanding of how long it will take and when it is finished. This minimizes your risk of losing visitors to other sites in the meanwhile, keeping them occupied with joyous anticipation.
Once users arrive, you want to direct them to certain pages on your site. Always make clear what and where your navigation is, and what each element of your navigation does. Don’t make users guess or poke around to find an answer. On big sites, with lots of content, archiving and categorization is especially important. Make sure people can effectively navigate your archives. Try to make your menus self-explanatory, saving the users time, letting them invest it in effective exploration of your site.
Visibility is a huge issue most people don’t consider. In addition to designing for minimum resolutions, make sure your audience can clearly see the content you want them to at all times. If you’re designing to sell, make sure you’re designing to sell. This is especially important as your goal is to promote purchases. The more difficult you make it to buy your product, the less likely you’ll make money.

What’s Making Your Site Go Slow? Could Be The Like Button

What’s Making Your Site Go Slow? Could Be The Like Button: "

Based on a number of reports, it has become pretty clear that the Like buttons and other Facebook social plugins have been slowing down many of the sites that use their product.



For months now it has been a well known fact among the developer community that Facebook’s plugins can frequently run into loading problems. While Facebook is well aware of the issue, and most definitely working on resolving it, that doesn’t stop the fact that the page load can be extremely slow. One large publisher, who wanted to remain unnamed, sent us the chart below which highlights the peak loading time for the like button sometimes.

While most sites aim to have their site completely loaded within a fraction of a second, it appears as though the load time can drag on dramatically, and in the case of the publisher that reached out to us, Facebook can drive the sites to take up to 6 seconds to load. Ultimately, any external widgets you use can slow down a site, however it’s well known that Facebook can be one of the primary forces behind that. Now we have some numbers to show that’s the case.

Have you had the like button slow down your site at all?

Tips on How to Code Web Designs Better

Tips on How to Code Web Designs Better: "

Writing semantic, efficient and valid HTML and CSS can be a time-intensive process that only gets better with experience. While it is important to take the time to produce high-quality code — as it is what separates professionals from hobbyists — it is equally important to produce websites as expeditiously and efficiently as possible.

As web designers, we’re always looking for ways to be more productive. Getting more work done in less time while at the same time maintaining (or improving) our products’ quality is a lifelong quest for many of us.

This article discusses a few fundamental techniques for writing high quality and efficient HTML and CSS.

Use Templates and Frameworks (Even If It’s Homemade)

Using templates and frameworks provides you with a solid baseline from which to start from. For example, CSS frameworks such as the 960 Grid System and Blueprint can save you time in having to write code for bulletproof web page layouts. The purpose of a framework is to reduce development time by avoiding having to repeatedly write cross-browser-tested code for each of your projects. However, take note: Using frameworks involves a learning curve and can bulk up your web page sizes with unnecessary style rules and markup.

Even something as simple as using this XHTML 1.0 strict template — a skeleton for your HTML documents — can be a time-saver.

Whether you choose to use a premade framework or not, the notion you should take a note of is just how much code you end up writing over and over again. It’s imperative to discover these repetitive tasks so that you can come up with a system (a custom template/framework) to help you speed up your workflow.

Conform to XHTML 1.0 Strict Doctype

Writing under the Strict doctype forces you to produce smarter and specifications-conformant code. Strict doctype lowers your desire to use hacks, deprecated elements, proprietary code, and unconventional markup that in the future will give you grief and maintenance costs related to debugging and updating projects.

Strict doctype also instructs web browsers to render your web pages under strict W3C specifications, which can reduce browser-specific bugs and thus lowering your development time.

Use Good and Consistent Naming Conventions

Always use consistent naming conventions for easier organization and so that you can produce work that is meaningful and expressive.

For example, if you use hyphens (-) to separate words in your classes and IDs (e.g. sidebar-blurb, about-us), don’t use underscores (_) for others (e.g. footer_nav, header_logo). Also, using standard and meaningful filenames for documents and directories is a good practice to get into.

Here are some popular classes, IDs and file names:

• Structural IDs: #header, #footer, #sidebar, #content, #wrapper, #container


• Main stylesheet: style.css, styles.css, global.css


• Main JavaScript library: javascript.js, scripts.js


• JavaScript directory: js, javascript or scripts


• Image directory: images, img


• CSS directory: css, stylesheets, styles

Always use meaningful words for your IDs and classes. For example, using left-col and right-col for div ID attribute values isn’t good because they rely on positional factors rather than semantics. Using something that has greater semantic value such as main-content or aside would be better so that you are giving your layout elements improved meaning and greater flexibility towards changes in the future.

In HTML5, the issue of proper naming conventions and uniformity for layout elements has been addressed with the introduction of new HTML elements such as <nav>, <footer> and <article>, but the concept of using proper naming conventions applies to all HTML elements with ID/class attributes, not just layout elements.

Read more about naming conventions in this article called Structural Naming Convention in CSS.

Good naming conventions are just a best practice in general, but as a bonus, it can help you speed up your development process because of organized and intuitive code, which makes finding and editing things quicker.

Understand and Take Advantage of CSS Inheritance

Instead of assigning every single element a font, color, background, etc., try to take advantage of CSS inheritance rules, especially for fonts, padding and margins. This can reduce the amount of code you have to write and maintain.

For example, the following is terser:

html, body {
 background: #eee;
 font: normal 11pt/14pt Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
 color: #000;
}
ul, ol {
 font-size: 18pt;
}

Compared to:

html, body {
 background: #eee;
}
p {
 font: normal 11pt/14pt Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
 color: #000;
}
ul, ol {
 font: normal 11pt/18pt Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
 color: #000;
}
blockquote {
 font: normal 11pt/14pt Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
 color: #000;
}

Reset Your Style Rules

One of the biggest time-sinks in web design is debugging browser-specific bugs. In order to ensure that you start off with a solid baseline — and thus avoid differences across web browsers — consider resetting your CSS. Read more about this subject in the article called Resetting Your Styles with CSS Reset.

Just like using CSS frameworks and HTML starter templates, there are several CSS reset templates that you can take advantage of. Here is a couple:

• Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS


• YUI CSS Reset

Here is Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS:

/* v1.0 | 20080212 */

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
 border: 0;
 outline: 0;
 font-size: 100%;
 vertical-align: baseline;
 background: transparent;
}
body {
 line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
 list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
 quotes: none;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
 content: '';
 content: none;
}

/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
 outline: 0;
}

/* remember to highlight inserts somehow! */
ins {
 text-decoration: none;
}
del {
 text-decoration: line-through;
}

/* tables still need 'cellspacing='0'' in the markup */
table {
 border-collapse: collapse;
 border-spacing: 0;
}

The best practice for using CSS reset templates is to fill in the property values of "resetted" styles instead of re-declaring them again.

For example, in Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS shown above, the line-height of web pages on the site is set to 1. If you know that your line-height needs to be 1.5, then you should change 1 to 1.5.

Do not do this when using CSS reset templates:

/ * Not good */
body {
line-height: 1;
}
...
body { line-height: 1.5; }

In addition, it’s best to avoid resetting CSS properties using the universal selector (e.g. * { margin: 0; padding: 0; }) because, performance-wise, it is inefficient and can be resource-taxing on older computers. Read more about using efficient CSS selectors.

Use CSS Shorthand Properties

Writing less CSS means saving time. Not only does using shorthand CSS reduce code-writing, but it also lowers the file sizes of your stylesheets, which ultimately means faster page response times. Additionally, shorthand CSS makes your code cleaner and — albeit arguably depending on your preference — easier to read and maintain.

The following are some popular shorthand syntax to memorize and use, with the longhand syntax equivalent preceding it.

Margin and Padding Properties

/* Longhand */
margin-top: 0;
margin-right: 20px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
margin-left: 15px;
padding-top: 0px;
padding-right: 20px;
padding-bottom: 0px;
padding-left: 20px;

/* Shorthand */
margin: 0 20px 10px 15px;
padding: 15px 20px 0;

A quick guide:

• When 4 property values are used – margin/padding: [top | right | bottom | left]


• When 3 property values are used – margin/padding: [top | left and right | bottom]


• When 2 property values are used – margin/padding: [top and bottom | left and right]


• When 1 property value is used – margin/padding: [top, right, bottom, and left ]

Font Properties

/* Longhand */
font-style: normal;
line-height: 11px;
font-size: 18px;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

/* Shorthand */
font: normal 18px/11px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

A quick guide:

• font: [font-style | font-size/line-height | font-family];

Background Properties

/* Longhand */
background-color: #ffffff;
background-image: url('../images/background.jpg');
background-repeat: repeat-x;
background-position: top center;

/* Shorthand */
background: #fff url('../images/background.jpg') repeat-x top center;

A quick guide:

• background: [background-color | background-image:url() | background-repeat | background-position];

To discover more shorthand CSS syntax, take a look at the CSS Shorthand Guide.

Put Things in the Proper Place and Order

Always put things in the conventional place, i.e., where best practices and W3C specifications say they should go. For example, it is best practice to reference external JavaScript libraries after external stylesheet references to improve page responsiveness and to take advantage of the nature of parallel downloading.

This is the best way:

<head>
  <!-- CSS on top, JavaScript after -->
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />
 <script type="text/javascript" src="script.js" />
</head>

The suboptimal way:

<head>
<!-- CSS at the bottom, JavaScript on top -->
 <script type="text/javascript" src="script.js" />
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" />
</head>

Note that both code blocks above are valid under specs, but one is better than the other.

When writing structural markup, think in terms of top to bottom and left to right because that’s the accepted convention. If a sidebar is to the right of a content area and below a header, then the markup should be organized as follows:

<div id="header">
</div>
<div id="content">
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
</div>

However, if the sidebar is on the left, a better practice would be to organize markup like this:

<div id="header">
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
</div>
<div id="content">
</div>

A caveat to the above is when you are optimizing your work for screen readers. The second code block above means that screen readers will always encounter the secondary content (#sidebar) before the main content (#content), which can hamper the reading of people that require screen-reading assistive technologies. In this case, you could place #sidebar lower down the document and use CSS for visual positioning (i.e. float #sidebar to the left, float #content to the right).

In addition to putting HTML elements in their respective places, it’s also important to organize CSS (again, for easier maintenance and readability). In a way, it should mimic the organization of your markup. For example, the #header styles should be before the #footer styles. This is a matter of preference, but it is also a conventional way of organizing style rules.

/* Structural Styles */
#header {
 // header properties
}
#header .logo {
 //site's logo properties
}
#footer {
 // footer properties
}

Conclusion

As in most things, the way to better and more efficient coding is to work smarter, not harder. The tips discussed in this article are basic; however, it might also inspire you to delve deeper into these sorts of optimizations and enhancements for improving the craftsmanship of the things you make.

What are your own tips and techniques for better and more efficient coding?

Related Content

• 10 Ways to Improve Your Web Page Performance


• 8 Excellent Tools for Optimizing Your Images


• Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines


• Related categories: Web Development and Web Design

About the Author

Kayla Knight is a web designer and web developer who loves coding way too much for her own good. She does freelance design/development work and helps run the XHTML Shop. Connect with her by visiting her website and following her on Twitter @ KaylaMaeKnight.

"

Facebook’s Efforts in Japan, South Korea and Russia Show New Localization Focus

Facebook’s Efforts in Japan, South Korea and Russia Show New Localization Focus: "

For most of its history, Facebook has tried to build a single product that works for everyone in the world. The only localization it offered was the text on the site, and even that was a one-size-fits-all product — its Translation tool allowed it to quickly launch in new languages using feedback from users.

But now, we’re seeing more signs of Facebook trying to customize its products for specific locations, at least for a few major markets where it wants to grow. Some of the latest examples are a new game-style Facebook site tour for new Japanese users, and a small engineering expansion in South Korea. We’ll look at these and more, below.

Certain Countries Get Special Attention

The stage has already been set for product localization. Company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in October that four countries had become targets for new growth over the past year: South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. Aside from all being located at least partly in Asia, these four companies are also notable because they all have well-established local social networking competitors: Vkontakte in Russia, Cyworld in Korea, Mixi in Japan and Tencent among others in China. More generally, all of these countries have unique languages, cultures, and in some cases government regulations that have historically hindered outside competitors.

Out of those four, Facebook is blocked in China — the company has hinted that it might work with the government in order to be allowed in, but that hasn’t happened yet. So here’s a look at what’s happening with Facebook in the other three locations. All data is from our Global Monitor report, part of our Inside Facebook Gold subscription service. Note for subscribers: We’ll be coming out with a detailed new monthly report analyzing worldwide Facebook traffic and trends, with the first one arriving in early December.

Japan

Facebook’s first foreign engineering office opened in Tokyo, Japan, this past year. So far, it has introduced products like a customized interface for mobile users, and an in-house app designed to help users with job searches. That app, the first Facebook has made for a local market, is most interesting for its cultural focus — it is intended as a way for users to make connections in the traditionally rigid Japanese job market.

It also introduced a way to syndicate Facebook content to Mixi accounts.

The most recent example of Japanese localization is from a couple weeks ago, when Facebook added a new site tour that prompts users to take a set of four “missions.” The missions are just a series of screenshots and text explaining how people can fill out their profiles, and include tips aimed at Japanese users (like talking about the value of using real-world names). This sort of site tour page doesn’t currently exist in other languages that we know of, which is reflected in the Japanese page’s generic Facebook URL.

Japan’s growth began picking up around the middle of 2009, after the first translated version of the site became available. Since then, it has lagged much of the rest of Asia in the world. But it’s continued to steadily climb, and had its highest numbers yet in October, with 1.69 million monthly active users and 262,000 new ones.

South Korea

Facebook isn’t saying much about what it’s doing in the country. The two previous postings about contract sales engineering positions are no longer on the Careers page, but there’s a new posting for a full-time sales engineering position. Besides the job listings, the most prominent thing the company has done was launch a dedicated page about the country.

We’ve heard it could be expanding its local engineering operations beyond sales, but a spokesperson’s response seems to shoot that down. “We are currently only hiring for jobs that are posted on the Careers page, and don’t have much more to say on rumors and speculation.” The expansion, in whatever form it might be taking, has not yet resulted in any Korea-focused Facebook products.

Yet, after a first year or so of slow growth, the country’s Facebook base has quadrupled since April, passing Japan to reach 267,000 new users and 1.73 million total MAU by October. Facebook, as Zuckerberg suggested, has even bigger ambitions.

Russia

The last difficult-but-winnable country on the list is Russia, where the social network faces a number of homegrown rivals. Facebook shares an investor, Digital Sky Technologies, with a few of these including Vkontakte. So far, the company has done a couple 0.facebook.com mobile integration deals so mobile users with some local carriers can get free access to the site, for example. But the ’0′ deals aren’t particularly special, since the company has done dozens of those deals around the world.

Facebook started making Russia-specific moves a few weeks ago, when leading Russian search engine company Yandex began tightly integrating Facebook content in a special deal similar to what Facebook is doing with Microsoft’s Bing search engine (but not with Google).

Russia, like the previous two countries, is seeing a distinct growth surge. It grew by 548,000 last month to reach 2.132 million MAU — a striking increase given its slower history, and local competition.

What the Future Holds

These examples are new and mostly basic, but we expect the localization efforts to increase as Facebook looks to strengthen its market position around the world. Beyond more guides and other content, it will likely try to use its products to benefit key local partners , as with the case with Yandex, or to help solve relevant market problems, as is the case with the Japan job search app.

Stay tuned for more detailed coverage of Facebook around the world in our Inside Facebook Gold data and analysis service.

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How To Use the “Seven Deadly Sins” to Turn Visitors into Customers

How To Use the “Seven Deadly Sins” to Turn Visitors into Customers: "

Since the beginning of time, people have exploited the human desire to sin so that they could achieve their goals. Finding out what causes people to sin helps us understand the triggers which prompt people to take an action. The Web has made it even easier to exploit these tendencies to sin, in order to build user engagement and excitement about your service or product. In this article we’ll show examples of how successful companies exploit the tendency to conduct all the famous Seven Deadly Sins, and in turn generate momentum with their website visitors. Ready? Let’s roll.

Sin #1: Pride

Pride is defined as having an excessively high opinion of oneself. You must remember someone from your school days who had an extremely high sense of their personal appearance or abilities. That’s pride at work. On the Web, this sin will help you sell your product. Every website visitor wants to be associated with a successful service that other people might find impressive.

People want to say: “Yes, Fortune 500 companies use this tool and I use it as well,” or “Yes, I got on the homepage of Dribbble in front of thousands of other designers; that’s the type of work I do.” In all these examples, people are proud of their achievements and the website helps them show their pride. Here are examples of this first sin in action:

Showing off your customers. People want to use tools that big brands use. SEOmoz does a great job of fronting up the logos of famous companies that pay for their tools, with a simple call to action prompting you to be as successful as these top brands. This entices users to try this tool: “I want to use something big brands use.”

Full Interactive View | Summary view

Fronting up the top users. People want to be considered the best. You are proud to be nominated or picked to be the best. You brag about it to your friends. You mention your accomplishments to your significant other. You want to to be picked as the best one, over thousands of others. Dribbble fronts up top designs on their homepage. This forces people to use their website more and more, to get to the top. A little pride on your site just might get many more customers to use your service.

Full Interactive View | Summary view

Sin #2: Gluttony

Most people think of gluttony in terms of eating. However, the more generic definition of this sin is over-consuming something to the point that it is wasted. It’s a desire to consume more than you can possibly consume. On the Web, companies use this sin to seduce the user into signing up by promising an endless supply of goods.

How many times have you seen “Unlimited” as one of the motivators to get you to buy a tool or service? We are a consumer generation. We want more and more awesome functionality and coolness for our money. The more a website promises us for our money, the more likely you are to sign up. Here are examples of this sin in action:

Full Interactive View | Summary view

The unlimited gluttony of features for a cheap price drives people to sign up for a product or service. If you want to attract user’s attention, create a valuable offer and provide unlimited resources for customers to use or collect.

Full Interactive View | Summary view

Sin #3: Sloth

In the modern view, “sloth” means laziness and indifference. Let’s face it, some of us are extremely lazy by nature. If we don’t have to do something, we’d rather not do it. On the Web, this sin is seen as making tasks overly simple and easy for potential customers. Products and services which “do all the hard work for you” win customers over. Here are some examples of this technique in action:

Making posting a blog post ridiculously easy from anywhere. Posterous is another example of sloth. Don’t want to invest too much time in a blog post? Want to just email or text message your blog post to post it? Solved. Now you don’t have to worry about the formatting, the look and feel, or any other details. You just email the text for your blogs and Posterous takes care of all the details.

Making finances ridiculously easy. Mint is a great example of sloth. Who really wants to spend their time looking for the best interest rates for their savings accounts? Who wants to track their spending? All I have to do is give Mint my financial details and it will tell me where I’m overspending, and also look through thousands of banks to give me the best deals. The tagline reads: “We download and categorize your balances and transactions automatically every day—making it effortless to see graphs of your spending, income, balances, and net worth.” I could do all this on my own, but I’m lazy, and I want someone else to do this for me.

Sin #4: Envy

Envy is when you want something others have. You’re so envious of people that have a status or possession you want, that you’re willing to do what ever it takes to get. On the Web you see this in envy for reward points, followers, friends, and private invites. Here are examples of this in action:

Achieving a status. Mayorship in Foursquare is a great example of this. Ever hear something like this from someone you know: “Who has the mayorship of the Starbucks I go to? Oh, he has only 35 check-ins. I’ll totally beat him next week.” People want that “mayor” status. They’re envious of the person that has it. This drives people to use Foursquare more and more to achieve that status.

Full Interactive View | Summary view

Rockmelt is a web browser that can be downloaded only per invite. The developers portray the browser as “your browser, re-imagined.” They ask folks who want to join, to connect via Facebook and request an invite. Once you’ve done it, your friends on Facebook who already use Rockmelt can see that you asked for an invite and send you one through the browser’s interface.

You might also check up on whether existing members share invite codes on Twitter. This exclusivity creates envy in people who don’t have invites. This envy fuels their desire to constantly seek an invite to Rockmelt, all the time. Once you actually become a user of the tool, you feel like you’re part of an exclusive club and are strongly encouraged to engage with the tool.

Give people something to envy on your website, and you’ll see more loyal users engaging with your service or product.

Sin #5: Lust

Lust is usually thought of as excessive sexual desire. On the Web, this sin translates into our desire to buy sexy, shiny things which not all of us can afford. Websites use interactivity with large, bold, rotating images to seduce us into buying the gadget. Here is an example of lust in action:

Providing the ability to play around and view the product. In web design, lust is often triggered by professional product photography which appears shining, attractive and exclusive in its own right. Rolex’s website is an example of this. The sliding gallery encourages the site visitors to explore the site which is not just a showcase of Rolex’s products, but rather an exhibition of company’s image, style, philosophy and branding.

Rolex tells the story about the quality of its products, their precision and aesthetic appeal. Notice how the designers provide animations and various views for each product, making it more interesting and desireable.

Volkswagen does a good job of seducing people into buying their cars. Its interactive website lets you customize and build your own version of the car you’re interested in. It is even possible to paint the car in whichever color you like. The process of pimping your car in the way you want, makes you lust over the car you’ve just “created.” In this example, our lust for shiny things is exploited. The more we interact with the Volkswagen website, the more we want to buy their product.

Full Interactive View | Summary view

Sin #6: Greed

Greed is an overly excessive pursuit of status, power and wealth. It’s the desire to have more than you need or deserve. The pursuit is so strong that one would go through any means necessary to fulfill it. On the Web, this sin is seen in the desire to gain influence, followers and power.

Being hungry for more Twitter followers. Twitter is the perfect example of a website where all of us are hungry for more followers. The famous wars of Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, CNN and Britney Spears for more followers, shows us how greed gets the best of us. The more followers we have, the more influence we have over people. All of us are greedy for these followers.

Getting power through more Digg followers. The original model behind Digg was very simple: you “digg” a specific piece of news, or a website. Your friends see this, and “digg” this same article, moving it to the top. The top articles on the Digg homepage get millions of people checking them out. The more friends you have, the easier it is for you to move any news to the top. A person who has 500,000 friends can move a story to the top of Digg in minutes, as opposed to someone who is just starting out. People at the top have much more power over everyone else. The greed for friends on Digg is what keeps us hungry for more.

In these examples above, we are hungry to gain influence and power and want to engage with the service to fulfill our goal.

Sin #7: Wrath

Last but not least, wrath is defined as uncontrolled feelings of rage, anger and hatred. On the Web, this sin is used by companies to generate gossip and buzz around their product or service.

Encouraging criticism. Amazon is a perfect example of using wrath to create controversy and more engagement with the product. The website fronts up the most helpful critical review, right beside the most helpful, favorable review. This prompts the shoppers to respond to these reviews and to add their own reviews, as they try the product out.

Full Interactive View | Summary view

Catering to frustration. The Consumerist is a perfect example of using consumer frustration to generate content and activity on a website. Giving angry shoppers the ability to vent and to express their frustrations, generates tremendously long discussions and activity on the website. The concept of consumer anger is rooted deep in the Consumerist tagline:

Furthermore, as you use the website and vent your anger about products, you get even more worked up about banners such as these (found on the Consumerist website):

Conclusion

You can now see in what way the results sinning on the Web generate for your business. Keep in mind that when companies try to get their customers to sin too hard, it’s usually very apparent and often results in drawing potential customers away. It’s important to maintain a good balance between sin and common sense. Next time you’re creating a website for a product or service, think back to these examples of the Seven Deadly Sins in action and see how you can use them to your advantage. Now go out there and get your customers to sin. What are you waiting for?

(ik)(vf)

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© ZURB for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: customers, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, seven deadly sins, sloth, visitors, wrath

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Beginning WordPress Development: A Look at Common Functions

Beginning WordPress Development: A Look at Common Functions: "

WordPress is a great blogging and CMS platform. It’s easy to use and customize, and there’s basically nothing you can’t do with it. If you haven’t used WordPress, give it a try by installing it on your own computer using a web server package like xampp or WampServer. You’ll need access to WordPress in order to follow along with this guide.

In this guide, we will take a look at some common functions in WordPress for use in custom WordPress theme development.

Introduction

As a developer, one of my favorite things about WordPress is its built-in functions, which allow you to easily manipulate and extend WordPress with just a few lines of code.

WordPress functions are an essential component of WordPress theme development; once you understand how they work, it’s easy to create your own custom WordPress themes.

Navigation

The most popular sets of functions in WordPress are navigation-related functions. For navigation menus, a popular function for dynamically generating them is to use the wp_list_pages WordPress function. Another method for dealing with site navigation was recently introduced in WordPress 3.0: the wp_nav_menu function.

We’ll talk about these two functions, starting with wp_list_pages.

Listing All Pages

If you want to list all of the pages you’ve got (note that pages and posts have different meanings in WordPress vernacular), there’s a simple function for that called wp_list_pages. When used without any parameters, it will list all of your pages in alphabetical order.

<?php wp_list_pages(); ?>

Listing Specific Pages

As with many WordPress functions, the wp_list_pages function takes several parameters. For example, the include parameter allows you to list specific pages by referencing their page IDs, separated by commas (,). The following example will only list two pages (the pages have IDs of 4 and 5).

<?php wp_list_pages('include=4,5'); ?>

Excluding Specific Pages from a List

You can also exclude specific pages using the exclude parameter:

<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=4,5'); ?>

Sorting Pages

As discussed earlier, the default sorting order of wp_list_pages is alphabetical. You can, however, change the order of the listing using the sort_column parameter. The sort_column parameter can have 1 of 7 values:

• post_title – Sort alphabetically (default value)


• menu_order – Sort by page order


• post_date – Sort by date of creation


• post_modified – Sort by time last modified


• ID – Sort by page ID


• post_author – Sort by the page author ID


• post_name – Sort alphabetically by post slug

Here is the code for sorting by creation date instead of the default alphabetical order:

<?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=post_date'); ?>

Specifying the Depth

Pages can have subpages, and subpages can have subpages. What if you only wanted to list top-level pages but exclude their subpages? Controlling the depth works great when using it to generate dropdown menus with submenus.

You can use the depth parameter like so:

<?php wp_list_pages('depth=1'); ?>

Enabling WordPress 3.0’s Navigation Menu Feature

If you’re wanting absolute control over your navigation, using WordPress 3.0’s new menu function, wp_nav_menu, is the way to go. With this function, you can add categories in menus, submenus and even insert external links into navigation menus.

To take advantage of the built-in navigation menu functionality, first you need to enable it in your theme. In your functions.php file located in the theme directory, you’ll need to add the following:

<?php add_theme_support( 'menus' ); ?>

Next, place the following code in the location where you want the menu to show on your site (this could be in your standard theme template files such as header.php or single.php):

<?php wp_nav_menu( array('menu' => '[Menu Name]' )); ?>

Replace [Menu Name] with what you want your menu to be named.

You’ll then need to navigate to Appearance > Menus and create your menu with the same exact name. Everything from there is simply drag and drop!

Displaying Blog Information

We’re moving on to getting and working with information about the blog. WordPress has a function for getting and printing your WordPress blog information called bloginfo. This is a good function to use for themes that will be used in multiple domains. There are many parameters you can use for bloginfo; to find all of them, read the bloginfo WordPress Codex documentation.

Getting the Site’s URL

Let’s say your site’s URL is http://example.com. If you want to print this out in the source, you can use the url parameter.

<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>

This works great for absolute link references. For example, if you wanted to reference your logo (let’s say the file name is logo.png) that is in a directory called images, you would do the following:

<img src="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/images/logo.png" />

The above outputs:

<img src=" http://example.com/images/logo.png" />

Getting the URL to the Current Theme

To grab the current theme directory’s URL, you can use the template_url parameter. This makes your WordPress themes more flexible so that when you change the domain name or use it in multiple domain names you don’t have to worry about changing anything that references the theme’s location. You can use this parameter a number of ways, such as for referencing custom external stylesheets, images, and JavaScript libraries that are inside the theme directory.

<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>

Getting the URL of Your RSS Feed

The bloginfo function can also be used for getting other URLs. For example, if you want to grab the RSS feed URL for your site, you can use the 'rss2_url' parameter:

<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>

If you wanted to create a link to your RSS feed, you could use the following:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>">Link to RSS feed</a>

Working with Content

The WordPress loop is used to display your posts. A basic loop looks like this:

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?><?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Not much to look at right now, but it’s what’s going to go inside the loop that really matters.

Querying Posts

First, let’s look at the most important function that goes inside the loop called query_posts. query_posts only needs to be used if you want to display information from another page, post or category than the one the user is currently on. For example, on the front page (controlled by index.php, home.php, or front-page.php theme template files) you could use query_posts to show the three newest posts in the hypothetical category called Featured.

You use query_posts not only to show different kinds of content, but how much content matches the query as well.

Displaying Posts in a Category

Keeping with our Featured category example above, here’s how we’d show the three newest posts from the Featured category:

<?php query_posts('category_name=Featured&posts_per_page=3'); ?>

Aside: Passing Multiple Parameters into Functions

Notice that we passed two parameters into the query_post function. The parameters we passed were category_name and post_per_page.

In functions with more than one parameter, you can pass multiple parameters all at once by separating them with an ampersand (&). You can pass as many parameters as you want. Doing so allows you to increase the specificity of your desired outputs.

Excluding Posts

Similar to wp_list_pages, query_posts has a way to exclude items from being displayed. To do so, you just place a minus character (-) in front of the ID of the items you want to exclude.

For example, let’s say you would like to list all posts except posts from two categories with category IDs of 97 and 34. You could use the cat parameter (which is typically used to display only posts within certain categories) for query_posts:

<?php query_posts('cat=-97,-34'); ?>

Displaying Common Information

Now let’s move on to some more functions we can use inside the loop. Many of these functions can only be used inside the loop and may not work if used outside of it.

Display the title of the post:

<?php the_title(); ?>

Display the URL of the post:

<?php the_permalink(); ?>

Display the content of the post:

<?php the_content(); ?>

Display the excerpt of the post:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Display the category of the post:

<?php the_category(); ?>

Display the tags used in the post:

<?php the_tags(); ?>

Display the time the post was published (uses PHP date formatting as a parameter):

<?php the_time(); ?>

Working with Custom Fields

One of the most powerful functions that WordPress has that seems to take developers a long time to learn is the use of custom fields. Custom fields allow users to add custom name/value pairs typically used for post metadata. For example, users can add a post_thumbnail_url key that has a URL value pointing to the thumbnail image.

Users can add custom fields while they are creating posts and pages in Posts > Add new or Pages > Add new.

I’ve used custom fields for everything — from post thumbnails and changing the background of the individual post to adding custom link and layout areas. It becomes very powerful once you’ve learned it properly.

Getting custom fields can be done from inside or outside of the loop. If you use it outside the loop, you have to reference the ID of the post or page you want the custom field name/value pair from.

Using Custom Fields to Display Image Thumbnails

Let’s say you want to display an image thumbnail in a post.

First, you must create a new post (Posts > Add new). Under the Custom Fields fieldset, type Thumbnail into the Name field and a URI for the Value field. Then publish the post.

Wherever in the loop you want the URI to be displayed, simply use the echo statement to output the result of get_post_meta (which is a function for getting custom fields).

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'Thumbnail', true); ?>

To use get_post_meta outside the loop, change $post->ID to the ID of the post. For example, here’s how to print the URI of the thumbnail image for the post with ID of 6.

<?php echo get_post_meta(6, 'Thumbnail', true); ?>

Since we want to display an image, what we actually need to do is use the echo statement inside the src attribute of an img element:

<img src="<?php echo get_post_meta(6, 'Thumbnail', true); ?>" />

The code from above should output the following:

<img src="/images/thumbnail.jpg" />

Related Content

• How to Customize the WordPress Admin Area


• A Guide to WordPress Custom Taxonomy


• WordPress Custom Post Types Guide


• Related categories: WordPress and Web Development

About the Author

Amber Weinberg is a freelancer with over 10 years of experience. She’s the founder of codesnipp.it, a social site for developers. She specializes in clean, semantic and valid 1.0 Strict XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She also writes a web development blog on her portfolio site at www.amberweinberg.com.

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8 Likely Facebook-MySpace Partnership Announcements That I Just Made Up

8 Likely Facebook-MySpace Partnership Announcements That I Just Made Up:

Facebook and MySpace have called a web-presser later today to make a surprise joint announcement that has many Internet insiders scratching their heads.

We could just wait a few hours to find out what this is all about, but there are a lot of page views in pointless speculation, and since a few of my extreme rock-climbing buds happen to be major players behind the scenes of this deal, here are 8 scenarios I just made up that might explain who is eating who’s lunch, and what the rival social networks will probably announce later.

1. MySpace and Facebook have made a bilateral agreement to TAKE FRIENDSTER DOWN.

2. Facebook will announce that they have officially bought the rights to fill in the blank of My_____’s new logo with: “FriendsAreAllOnFacebook”.

3. Facebook’s new Non-Email Email Thingy will offer users the option to Blingee their Messages, which will be powered by MySpace.

4. MySpace is actually just going to become a Farmville-like game within Facebook where players will do their best to build a successful social network without running it into the ground via bad business partnerships and Hollywood excess.

5. Facebook will suggest that MySpace become a fan of not being such a digital landfill for human garbage. MySpace will then ‘poke’ Facebook because they have no idea how the Internet works.

6. Facebook will shock the world by handing over control of their company to MySpace, followed shortly by MySpace posting a bulletin about the time they saw Facebook murder someone.

7. The two networks felt it necessary to use their combined reach and influence to make sure everyone hears the unforgettable news about the The Beatles’ music finally being available on the Internet!

8. There is no actual announcement. This presser is just an elaborately orchestrated opportunity for Facebook representatives to berate and degrade the submissive MySpace delegates in a humiliating display of public dominance.