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Great post on Writing effective email copy by folks at Campaign Monitor.

50 All-Time Great Retail Subject Lines by VerticalResponse should be bookmarked.

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Great article on video podcasting tools and equipment you need for shooting videos for the web. This is a two part series, view part 1 and part 2.

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Great article by Adaptive Path on business strategy and prototyping.

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10 great tips for Graphics Design majors in college. (via zeldman.com)

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Recession Tips for Web Designers by Jeffrey Zeldman is very timely and offers good tips on how to survive in these difficult times as a freenlancer.

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Marketing & branding tips by great folks at Neutron.

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Don Norman’s write-up on Simplicity is a good read. He points out that “simplicity is not the answer” for all design problems.

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According to Paul Boutin of Wired.com, Yes. Read his full explanation at wired.com. If blogging is dead, Wired.com would have pulled the plug on all of their blogs already.

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I came across an interesting article by Luke Wroblewski on how site visitors within 2-3 seconds can quickly identify whether the site they are visiting is worth staying or leaving. That means as a site owner you got 3 seconds to impress your site visitors. 3 seconds might not be the exact amount of time for each visitor, but it emphasizes that you have a few seconds to grab people’s attention and communicate who you are, what you do and what to do next on your site.

A great book that goes beyond the web to explain this phenomenon is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

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Email design is one of the most difficult tasks that take a lot of time and planning by web designers. Recipients of your pretty HTML emails have a very short attention span and on top of that your email looks different depending on what type of email program or service people are using. You have to keep testing the email to make sure it looks normal across many different email platforms.

Once the design of the email is completed, then you have to pay attention to the subjectline, images, wording and contents of your email, because it might trigger spam firewalls and throw your pretty HTML email into a Junk Mail of the recipient.

I came across this short article by good folks at Campaign Monitor on Email Design Guidelines, which could help us make sense of all this mess and maybe help to get our email message across to our recipients without getting shotdown by spam firewalls.

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There is a short article on “How to Build a Web Design Business” by Peggie Brown that’s worth checking out if you are planning to start a web design business in the new year.

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According to Jeffrey Zeldman:

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

I think this is by far the best and the most concise definition of web design you can find online.

To see what is not web design, read Zeldman’s article on Understanding Web Design in the new issue of A List Apart.

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Computerworld magazine highlights 10 biggest Web annoyances, which is right on target, except they forgot to include Pop-ads that keep coming up on their site as well other millions of sites on the web. So here is their list of top 10 annoyances:

1. Dubious privacy policies
2. Difficult online forms
3. Overcommercialization of the Web
4. Need for standards
5. Trolls in forums
6. Buying event tickets
7. Web 2.0 help doesn’t help
8. The expense of e-books
9. Disappointing Web video
10. Boring virtual worlds

You can read the full article on their web site.

Reading this article made me come up with my own top 10 web annoyances, here they are:

1. Blog Spammers
2. Endless pop-up ads on popular web sites
3. Flash ads that automatically expand over content areas
4. Flash intros on sites without ’skip intro’ options
5. Autoloading music and avatars on sites
6. Overuse of AJAX without purpose and function
7. Usage of term Web 2.0 for simple Javascript effects
8. Reset buttons on Web Forms
9. Animated banner ads
10. Snap Preview screens for all links on a web page

Share your web annoyances by commenting below.

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The article Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype by Jared Spool offers a fresh perspective on Web 2.0 from a usability stand point. He explains some of the usability implications and benefits of using these technologies both by users and developers.

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Is Your Web Site Having a Mid-Life Crisis? is an excellent article written by Jennifer Schiff on redesigning your web site.

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