The internet has been abuzz recently with talk of a new kid in town: HTML5. There has been a slew of articles detailing the new features that this version of HTML offers and what they mean for the web, but the real question is whether or not HTML5 can topple Flash from its position as the king of rich media.

What is HTML5?

HTML is the coding language that the internet is built on. With this in mind, HTML5 is just an upgrade providing some new tricks and features as well as some judicious trimming of the fat and old outdated code.

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Usability is generally trumpeted as a major consideration in website design. What is often ignored are the results of a website losing its usability – or, indeed, its familiarity. Yesterday, a number of users were unable to log on to Facebook. Why? Because they weren’t actually on Facebook.

What happened was that, for a couple of hours, Facebook slipped off the top Google rank for the search “Facebook login”. Instead, a blog called ReadWriteWeb (an excellent read, by the way) slipped into first place. Not noticing the change, users simply clicked on the top link anyway and were taken to a ReadWriteWeb article about Facebook, which looked entirely unlike the actual Facebook page.

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Art by Kelly “Suuqin” Chan – Words by Geoff “NotWelshMan” Scaplehorn

Click here to see another cartoon from us!

Technology has made the gathering and storage of data easier but much of this data is useless unless it can be displayed in meaningful ways. Dashboards provide an engaging and interactive means of displaying and understanding data. Furthermore, data visualisation helps employees become more conscious of their performance and in turn, improve it.

There are various dashboarding tools available on the web. These can be effective but are sometimes hard to implement or do not provide the data view that you want to show. To get around this, we build custom dashboards for many of our clients for both intranets and websites.

Click to read more about the various types of dashboards

It’s not enough for a website to simply look good. It’s not even enough to have a good product. If a user can’t find their way to that product, the best images in the world won’t help your sales.

As designers it’s our job to take stock of the behaviour of typical users and position navigational elements where users would expect to find them.

Your navigation will be based on the Information Architecture (IA) – the structure and organisation – of your site. When choosing a navigation type you should weigh up its limitations and benefits. Will it be a series of buttons? Is it Flash-based? Does it use any special features? Where is it on a page?

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Nothing kills the authority of an intranet site – or any website – faster than obvious, avoidable errors. These errors can be factual (such as job titles or general facts), graphical (the wrong image assigned to the wrong person, for example) or grammatical (bad spelling or punctuation), but whatever the mistakes the effect is the same: users go elsewhere.

It’s not enough to make sure that your site owner is thorough. Everyone makes mistakes, and the best way to cope with the possibility of a slip-up is to ensure that you have a dedicated quality control process in place at all times. If you use an agency to run your site, then they should be able to work this out with you. If you work on the site yourself, read on for some key areas that you should focus on…

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We’ve already written our top 5 resolutions for 2010 for intranet owners – but what about those of you out there on the Great Wide Web? Keep reading for our top 5 New Year resolutions for website owners…

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It is, as everyone knows, best practice to use analytics code on websites to track visitors.

Pretty much every client we talk to expects metrics on their website (and we soon suggest them if the client doesn’t),  but no one seems to know that you can track visitors in Flash applications too.

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What’s the best way to design your intranet site? Who should you centre your intranet around: the site owners, or the site users? Take a look at our presentation that highlights the advantages – and disadvantages – of both approaches, and that offers advice on how to build your site to be usable for everyone.

Using search analysis to improve your site.

Running user surveys and interviews are good ways of finding out what your users want, but they might not give you the whole picture. People can’t always say exactly what it is that would make a site and its content more usable. Furthermore, what a user wants and what a user needs might not be the same thing!

Analysing search patterns and results on your site is a great way of studying user behaviour which can give you different insights into how your site and its content could be improved to better meet their needs, as well as how you can optimise the internal search on your site.

It’s nothing to sniff at: users are becoming very comfortable and very proficient at using search engines, both on the web (using search engines such as Google) and internally (using your site’s search function). So the better your search works, well, the better.

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