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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A news item on the radio today caught my imagination. It made the point that many of us today suffer from a hitherto undocumented mental illness, the core symptom of which is an inability to focus one’s attention for any significant amount of time (have I lost you yet?). This often chronic condition is brought about by the ever increasing amount of digital disruptive media which we receive onto various devices around us: PCs, mobiles, telephones, and so on.

As I write this sentence Skype is bleeping an alert and a little bubble is popping up in the corner of my screen containing the first (meaningless) line of a chat conversation going on in the agency between a few people. Now an email alert (Subject line: Monthly newsletter: January 2010) is popping up and a text (minutes remaining on my price plan) has just arrived on my mobile phone. Someone tweets “an interesting article on the digital economy ”.

So far I am not struggling to maintain my concentration. The temptation to turn my alert-blasted attention to these items is small. Have I lost you yet?

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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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Maintaining an intranet can be a tricky business, but why not kick off 2010 with some New Year resolutions that will make your intranet fly? Read on for our top 5 tips for the year…

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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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Social media: it’s the ‘in thing’ for marketing departments around the world. But not all campaigns are created equal, and the internet is a fickle place. What works for one campaign might not for another, and ideas quickly get stale.

We’re always impressed with creative uses of social media, and this year we’ve seen some incredibly inventive ideas. Keep reading to find out about three of our favourite campaigns of 2009, and one of the worst. Don’t forget to let us know about your favourites in the comments!

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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.

Read on..

Stuff the turkey, set light to the pudding and have an egg nog on us
while you play the most traditional of festive games:
Charades!