Creating a Bike Friendly City
via current.com
37% of people in Copenhagen commute to work by bike. Wow.
Adam is a digital marketing professional in Cambridge, MA with an interest in most of the things you find posted here. He blogs at www.discobeta.com, but seems to be spending a lot more time with the minidisco recently.
He can also be found at:
www.twitter.com/adamstewart
www.facebook.com/adstew
www.friendfeed.com/adstew
www.linkedin.com/in/adamstewart
www.google.com/ad.stew
37% of people in Copenhagen commute to work by bike. Wow.
This says some interesting things about the ongoing privacy debate. Also, I hope the folks on 4chan can track down this guy.
Yes, on a Monday. It's from a very well put observation that social media pros, somewhat oxymoronically, are self-centered, by a blog that writes a lot about social media."It’s almost like social media labors under the suspicion that if it stops talking about itself, it’ll cease to exist."
And another one by the same author but earlier:
"In our minds, we’re all Lady Gaga with a slightly smaller wardrobe."
The first statement nails it.
I didn't know anything about ESPO. This is a pretty interesting take on giving back to the community with graffiti.
Privacy seems to be a bit of a hot topic lately. It'll be interesting to see how users' behavior changes, or if they'll just forget about this latest flare up and keep sharing as usual.
• The fold is one of those guidelines that has been thrown about so much that it's now become a 'rule' of web design (or maybe more appropriately a 'ball and chain' of web design) with web designers blindly obeying without question.
The ‘above the fold’ concept came from Newspapers, the aim being to put the most eye catching story or image on the folded over, most visible part of the paper, with an ULTIMATE goal of encouraging people to then buy the paper to read the rest of it.
Web design adopted this idea, basing their integration of the concept upon the most common browser sizes.
However, the digital fold concept evolved into ‘squash as much content as you can above a certain number of pixels’.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Gone was the intent of putting your most eye catching content at the entrance point to entice your visitors to come in and explore the rest of the site. Now you were being pressured by ‘web design rule enforcers’ to sell everything on the front doorstep.
Imagine a newspaper squashed all of its quality content on the front page. How disappointed would you be to open the paper to only find the leftovers?
The same happens with your site. If everything of exceptional quality is pushed upon the reader at the beginning, once they start exploring and the rest of the site isn’t of the same calibre, they're going to be let down.
The newspaper's goal is for you to actually read the newspaper, not just the front page. That should be your goal too. You want your visitors to explore your site/see your product or content. Don't let the statistic scaremongers bully you into thinking the visitor will decide in 3 seconds whether to stay or leave your website. Trust me, having no space and information overload will most definitely make your visitors leave before the 3 seconds are up.
Guidelines have their place, but they should be viewed as only that. Guides! Web design is plagued by a long list of 'golden rules', such as 'never have more than 7 items in your main navigation' or 'Never, ever, ever use tables'.
Garbage. What if you need a table?
Think about the rules before obeying them!
I'll admit I've been thinking above 600px a bit too much lately.
