FoxLand » Link

Inayaili is an “amazing female role model for web designers”

Andrew Fox — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:09:49 +0000

We knew she was great already, but we’re still proud that Inayaili has been nominated as one of 40 amazing female models for web designers at Line25.

The meaning of membership

Andrew Fox — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:21:02 +0000

That’s part of the secret to successful networks: everyone’s a member, no one is king.

As newspapers struggle to eek revenue from their activities many are discussing ‘membership areas’, that could include special access to forums, content or freebies. But what could membership mean? Could it mean something more radical? Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian suggests the model employed by Barcelona Football Club in which the fans own the club. Jeff Jarvis talks more about what website membership could mean…

The decline of Microsoft

Andrew Fox — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:53:53 +0000

Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

In some ways Microsoft seems to be getting more exciting again. Whether it is the good early reports of Windows 7, Project Natal, their Yahoo! search deal, the XBox’s continuing strength or their Bing search engine, things appear to be happening for them again. Nevertheless, they have just posted some very poor results, and there are still plenty of questions about their business strategies. The problem they have, is that whatever they do, Windows is their life-blood. Take a look at John Gruber’s take on Microsoft’s Long Slow Decline.

CAPTCHAs aren’t worth it

Andrew Fox — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:54:14 +0000

Everyone hates CAPTCHAs — those hard-to-read squiggles of text and numbers that you sometimes need to decipher before you can use a website — but now someone has done some research and it looks like they aren’t worth it. While they helped stop spam, the effect on the failure of conversions in site sign-up was worse. (via Christian)

Twitter and The Prince

Andrew Fox — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:03:22 +0000

Our friends at The Prince’s Charities have just started tweeting. Take a look at http://twitter.com/powcharities. Follow them and start asking questions!

Why support Internet Explorer 6?

Andrew Fox — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:50:58 +0000

Popular link sharing website Digg recently considered removing functionality from the site as they spent so much time trying to get things to work with the ancient web browser. With that in mind they did some research into their users — the findings weren’t great news for web designers. Take a look at their research results here.

The most-hated font in the world

Andrew Fox — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:47:47 +0000

Poor old misunderstood Comic Sans – created with the best intentions – but either hated or poorly used. Take a look at this story on Wall Street Journal about the font, and its creator Vincent Connare.

Taming trolls

Andrew Fox — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:45:31 +0000

Troll: someone who is deliberately aggressive or disruptive in a discussion.

When the new whitehouse.gov went live many people questioned why it wasn’t open to comments and discussion. We have worked on a few projects where this is a very sensitive issue. We’d have loved the comments to have been more open, but issues of the appropriate use of language on sensitive websites could have opened them up to various problems (a subject for a much longer journal entry). That said there have been some intriguing innovations in how to handle commenting on blogs, discussed in this article on Wired.