I’m delighted to announce the launch of the redesigned JISC Collections website!

The team has worked hard on this for 18 months and we’re excited to bring it to everyone’s attention, as it represents some of our finest work to date.

JISC Collections brings a great variety of digital content to the academic market. These resources are now sold in a marketplace that brings publishers and end-users together.

Here’s a brief list of highlights:

• A hugely improved and useable catalogue, with filters and sorting
• A very bespoke basket and checkout process
• Many business processes, invoicing and reporting brought online and integrated
• Customers can now manage their subscriptions and account online
• Categorised news and events and a smarter search
• A very powerful and flexible CMS in EPiServer

This project has certainly provided us with a challenge, but one I think we’ve met brilliantly. Here’s why…

Continue reading “New website launch: JISC Collections”

A requirement that sometimes comes up at the beginning of a new project is that we should supply a text-only version of a website, often purportedly for improved accessibility. I thought I’d write a quick post to outline my thoughts on why this is a bad idea, and why we encourage our clients that it’s something best avoided.
Continue reading “Why you don’t want a text-only version of your website”

We’ve got a number of user experience projects on at the moment and I came across this great cartoon below from StuffThatHappens.com that should serve as an inspiration to us and our clients.

Apple and Google define what the user experience is right now. Apple is all about simplicity and intuitiveness; Google is all about search and the serendipity that comes from their magical algorithms. Apple’s vision is driven by the singular ego of Steve Jobs and the genius of Jonathan Ive; Google’s by the raw power of the masses of data gathered from all our web searches.

What neither of them do is rely on a design by committee, lowest common denominator, let’s copy what our rival is doing approach. Neither should we.

Are you planning a website re-design in 2010? If so you’ll want to show what a forward-looking type you are by leaving the Noughties look behind and embracing the 2010s. Here’s a quick roundup of styles that are proving to be more popular than ever as we emerge blinking into the light of the new decade. These are visual styles that are likely to see a growth during 2010.

Psychedelia Reloaded

Continue reading “Four web design styles for 2010″

How can you display a large amount of information on a web page and still have a good user experience? As web designers this is becoming a common scenario to deal with as users need to handle more and more data: search results, emails, tweets, blog posts. There are some emergent trends that are solving this problem in interesting ways, each with their own advantages. Let’s have a quick look at them.

Continue reading “How to design for infinite data”

Do your users mind scrolling? Does all your content have to appear on one screen? It’s a long-running debate in web design, recently revived by blog chatter on the significance of the “page fold”. But is it relevant to your website in 2009?

Continue reading “What everyone needs to know about the page fold”

Picture by Giuli-O

If you’ve ever needed a good photograph to illustrate something, you may have been frustrated that the usual stock photo sites have returned just the usual stream of polished, cheesy smiles. A lot of people seem to overlook Flickr as an option, which now contains a fantastic array of over 3 billion images, all uploaded by its users.

Until recently Flickr’s search wasn’t too helpful for browsing large numbers of images. Now Flickr has updated their search and presents the results in a nice grid, perfect for browsing. But can you legally use the images you find for commercial purposes?

Continue reading “HOW TO: Use Flickr for free commercial-use photos”

Picture: col_adamson on Flickr

How do you update your website? If you have a content management system, it will probably have some kind of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor built-in that gives you a set of controls something like this:

The basic TinyMCE toolbar

Tools like this are good because they give you a lot of control over what your content looks like, but that control and freedom comes with an important trade-off: Unlike a more restrictive system (think of a stock management system, say), it can’t tell you when something has gone wrong. Content can be formatted in so many ways and still, to the human eye, remain meaningful. Look at the example below:

Continue reading “Seeing meaning with semantic markup”

Recently here at Cubeworks we have undertaken in-depth website audits for two not-for-profit organisations.

Audits? “Yawn”, I hear you cry!

However, these audits have proven to be invaluable in enabling our clients to assess how their sites are performing against their business goals.

Continue reading “Website audit: How healthy is your website?”

Microsoft announced this month that they will be using Windows Update to upgrade Internet Explorer 6 & 7 users to the latest release, IE8. Although Microsoft insist you will still have to opt-in to the upgrade, it will be set as ‘High Priority’ for many users, which effectively means that if you don’t want it you’ll have to opt-out. For the online world, this is a pretty big milestone in browser history: the end of IE6.

Continue reading “Upgrading from Internet Explorer 6, for fun and profit”