Smashing Magazine has a great list of usability problems that are pervasive on some of the biggest sites.

Personally the whole “Popup to get content” drives me batty. You usually see this on full flash sites (movie sites are the worst), but it is used by lazy designers everywhere…

At the end of the article they have a nice checklist to keep in mind while you are designing new sites. Here is a slimmed down version…

1. You don’t use pop-ups.
2. You don’t change users’ window size.
3. You don’t use too small font sizes.
4. You don’t have unclear link text.
5. You don’t have dead links.
6. You have at most one animation per page.
7. You make it easy to contact you.
8. Your links open in the same window.

Definitely worth a look.

So yesterday I was a bit bored and headed on over to the Sitepoint Marketplace. If you have never been there it is pretty interesting to see what is up for sale. Basically they are an auction site selling full websites, domain names, templates etc.

Personally I always peruse the established websites section to see what is up for grabs. While reading several of the listings I noticed that a good part of the sites are just a couple of months old. Sure there are exceptions, but I was really amazed to see how many sites were barely off the ground, much less successful. The really strange thing is, some of the sites are sold for a pretty good amount of money (several thousand dollars in some cases).

Does this seem weird to anyone? After building and working on this site since April I know that it is tough to find an audience on the web nowadays. So how do sites one and two months old get enough traffic/customers to warrant such a price? Are they buying their traffic? Do they know something I don’t on how to attract people (always possible)?

Another thing I noticed is there is a good bit of turnaround. You will see a site for sale and in the post the owner will say “I bought this site from Sitepoint a few weeks ago…”. Huh? Why buy the site if you are just going to sell it again right away? How can you get your money back much less turn a profit? Its not like a few weeks is gonna show that you have caused a major turnaround and your site is the new “it” thing. Again, I must be missing something

Its kinda like watching an infomercial at 2 in the morning. You are bleary eyed and those knives that cut like a lightsaber are calling to you. You almost pick up the phone, but you finally wake up enough to ask yourself “when do I need to cut a coke can in half then slice a tomato?”. You sigh, put the phone down, and finally mosey on off to bed.

To me Sitepoint is a similar temptation…there is an “established” site out there. If you sell your vintage Battlestar Galactica collection you can probably come up with the money. It looks like a no brainer because the current owner says they make so much money every day that they have to sell it for fear of drowning in cash. You really start thinking about it…then you realize that you have no experience in dog grooming supplies nor do you really want any. You sigh, move away from the keyboard, and mosey on over to your Xbox.

So has anyone ever taken the plunge and bought one of these sites? How did it work out for you. Did you make the money you hoped? Would you do it again? Inquiring minds want to know…

I love ask a ninja. It is seriously one of the funniest things on the net. My favorite are the “omnibuses” that they have from time to time.

If you are a fan, then you might be interested to know that .net Magazine has an interview with the creators of the show. Its short and sweet, but it does answer some of the questions I had been wondering (like if they are making some serious cash off of the program).

It is nice to see “regular people” making it big on the net and getting to do what they love. Very cool stuff.

Man it has been too long…its been crazy on the homefront and it has kept me away from writing. For the regular readers, I apologize for slipping away. Onto the task at hand…

Recently, a commenter asked…how does Yahoo! Reset CSS fit in with Blueprint and Tripoli?

The answer is quite snugly really. I have talked about Tripoli and Blueprint in the past, so I figure that you have a grasp on those guys. So what about Yahoo!?

According to the Yahoo! crew:

The foundational YUI Reset CSS file removes and neutralizes the inconsistent default styling of HTML elements, creating a level playing field across A-grade browsers and providing a sound foundation upon which you can explicitly declare your intentions.

To take out all the big words, this basically means that it takes out all the funkiness that the most common browsers automatically put into all of their rendering. In other words, you get a clean slate in which to build your own funkiness. Cool.

So how does this stack up? Well, its purpose is just about the same as Tripoli’s purpose. Neither are frameworks in and of themselves. Instead they just clear everything out. In order to make things look the same across browsers the Yahoo! guys have created their own base CSS which then sits on top of the now defunkified reset (much like Tripoli does).

If you want to go a step further and start encroaching on Blueprint’s territory, you can implement Yahoo! Grids CSS. The grid’s job is to setup some markup that will layout your page for you. Like I mentioned in my overview of Blueprint, this can make things get ugly really quickly. When you have classes like “yui-t3″, you have, in my opinion, crossed the line from helpful to painful. There are uses for such CSS, but in all honesty, I think I would build this complex CSS from scratch.

The YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) really is a kind of “one stop shop” for just about everything web related it seems. It may not be the best implementation of everything, but overall they do a great job and, more importantly, they provide great documentation.

So there ya have it. Hope that helps anyone who was a bit confused.

Thanks for the question “mike from ohio”!

So the stats are in for the month of August, and it was…by far…the best month this little blog has ever had. My side scroller series seemed to have gotten a lot of attention. Another big performers was the pretty popups article from July.

After I released the side scroller series the developer’s site DZone grabbed it and ran giving a boost of over 1,000 hits throughout the month. So thanks DZone!

The site gotta few digs now and then, but not enough to matter. I have found that my traffic primarily comes from google searches from designers/developers looking for a tutorial of some type. In my opinion this is the best kind of visitor because when they find me, I know I can provide them some value. Visits from the social sites are great, but I notice that there are a lot of “hit and runs” that come from those sites. My goal is still to create a community for designers and developers so a hit and run doesn’t add a lot to that.

With that said, in between the runners, the social sites do attract some great people here that visit, learn, and contribute. The more of these we have, the better the community will be.

So how good was August? Well, according to Mint, here are my stats.

Total Visits: 8,420
Unique Visits: 4,060

This averages out to be about 130 people a day. Now, you take out the bump from DZone and this was still an amazing month. The average daily traffic Monday - Friday is around 230 or so which is a huge increase compared to any other month. This average has been holding steady for about 3 weeks now so that is pretty exciting. My initial goal is 1,000 visits a day so I am still a ways off, but it is fun to watch the site and community grow.

With feedburner I am averaging just about 70 for the month of August (69 to be exact). I get about 800 or so hits from the feed every day. That is awesome, but I am not sure what constitutes a hit when it comes to RSS (anyone?).

Will September be better? I have no idea really…if I keep the same averages we have for the last few weeks then it will be close. Only time will tell…