Why do some people take ownership of problems that others pass by without a response? I don’t have an answer, but if you do, please add a comment.

Supposedly, the Ivory Tower has nothing to teach business people, but here are three lessons business could learn by looking a bit more closely.

My brother was having trouble getting WAMP Server running on his machine. This is the process I took him through to get it running. These tips apply equally to XAMPP or any other install of an Apache server on Windows. If you don’t know, WAMP and XAMPP are installers that let you set up a [...]

This one is not as much fun as my Testimonial Fail post that earned a mention by Brad Geddes. This one comes from someone advertising on Weather.com. Obviously this is a cheap spammy ad no matter where you are. But in this case, it takes Yosemite National Park as my city, and then tells me [...]

I was doing something the other day (I forget what it was) that involved filters for reducing line noise and amplifiers for boosting signal. Or roughly that, because I forget the situation exactly. But it suddenly struck me that people can either be amplifiers or filters, and which one you are at a given moment [...]

We needed to grab a special report in time for tax season. Fortunately, with a bit of SQL it’s easy t grab pretty much anything you want from Ubercart

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the reset button. Most computer problems can be solved by rebooting. Our heater was malfunctioning and until the repairman could get there, I could keep it going by hitting the reset button. I started thinking about forest fires. We used to think fire was bad, but now that [...]