After a much-mentioned article by Jakob Nielsen, “mega menus” became all the rage, but there are some serious issues to consider before diving in. The can create serious usability issues and negatively impact your site information architecture and, ultimately how you are found, ranked and categorized by the search engines.

[Read more →]

Mega menus have been heralded as a usability enhancement, but they can also result in serious usability challenges. It’s not a simple yes or no. It’s quite easy to end up with navigation that is difficult, occasionally impossible, for the user to actually navigate.

[Read more →]

Search engines have made a lot of progress in terms of figuring out what your page is about, but large numbers of navigation links muddy the signal you send to the search engines, both about your page and about the rest of your site. There are lots of possible solutions, but the real solution is getting the information architecture right.

[Read more →]

Everyone has their favorite Wordpress Plugins. Here are some of my favorites.

[Read more →]

There is no Drupal 6 module that lets you add a meta noindex to pages tagged with a specific term, but here’s how to do it easily in the theme layer.

[Read more →]

How do you promote your book with Twitter? It’s not necessarily obvious, especially for those of us who are writers and scholars first and foremost. But publishers aren’t doing much for new authors anymore, so you have to do it yourself.

[Read more →]

I’ve been thinking about what I like and don’t like on Twitter and why I follow some people and block others. In short: don’t spame me and I’m not actually that interested in whether or not you’re doing laundry.

[Read more →]

Some friends went rock climbing in Siuriana, Spain and brought back some hot chocolate for us. I don’t think they know what SEO stands for and I have no idea what it is in Spanish, but it made me think that this hot chocolate company should have an outstanding website.

[Read more →]

WordPress is pretty good off the shelf, but there are some things that are a bit annoying or sub-optimal. For the basics of getting the major kinks out, there are some excellent videos. Matt Cutts, the head of search quality at Google, has a nice overview on how to make the most of WordPress. Tubetorial [...]

[Read more →]

I use Google Analytics to see how many people come to my sites and how they get there. It’s pretty amazing, but it has a couple of things that really annoy me: no full referrer data and it’s unfriendly to tabbed browsing.

[Read more →]