The story of usability is a perverse journey from simplicity to complexity. That's right, from simplicity to complexity—not the other way around.
If you expect a "user-friendly" introduction to usability and that the history of usability is full of well-defined concepts and lean methods, you're in for a surprise. Usability is a messy, ill-defined, and downright confusing concept. The more you think about it—or practice it—the more confusing it becomes.
Read more...
Editor's Note: This post is the seventh in the new Smashing Daily series on Smashing Magazine, where we highlight items to help you stay on the top of what's going on in the Web industry. Vasilis van Gemert will carefully pick the most interesting discussions, tools, techniques and articles that have been published recently and present them in a nice compact overview.
Vasilis goes through dozens of RSS feeds and hundreds of tweets so that you don’t have to. Do you find the new series interesting? What would you like to have? And what wouldn’t you like to see? Let us know! We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!
Read more...
At our company, we process a lot of requests on the leading gift cards and coupons websites in the world. The senior developers had a meeting in late October to discuss working on a solution to replicate the MySQL functions of AES_ENCRYPT and AES_DECRYPT in the language of PHP.
This article centers on what was produced from Senior Developer Derek Woods and how to use it within your own applications. Security should be on the top of every developers mind when building an application that could hold sensitive data. We wanted to replicate MySQL's functions because we have a lot of our data already AES encrypted in our database, and if you are like us you probably do as well.
Read more...
What is it that makes a typeface into a text font, instead of a font for larger sizes? The answer differs slightly, depending on whether one aims for print or Web-based environments.
Nevertheless, there are certain features that most good text faces have in common. Familiarity with these helps to select the right fonts for a given project. This article presents a few criteria to help the process along.
Read more...
Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.
The goal of a "regular" text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar. Hiring a professional copywriter can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why this is a valuable skill to have yourself.
Read more...
Responsive design is the hottest topic in front-end Web development right now. It’s going to transform the Web into an all-singing, all-dancing, all-devices party, where we can access any information located anywhere in the world. But does responsive design translate well from the text-heavy Web design blogosphere to the cold hard reality of commercial systems?
Rumors came through our office grapevine that management was looking to revamp our mobile presence. There was talk of multiple apps being built externally that could be used on some of the major mobile devices.
Read more...
If you're just getting started with WordPress, or have been running with default functionality for a while and now want to dig in with some useful and easy ways to customize your WordPress site, a great place to start is the WordPress Admin area, or backend. One of the great things about WordPress is that each part of the backend is easily customized using simple PHP functions.
In this article, you'll learn how to customize the login page with your own logo, add new widgets to the dashboard, add custom content to the admin footer, make it easier to get in and out of the Admin area, and more. When combined, these techniques can improve branding, accessibility, and usability of your WordPress-powered site.
Read more...
E-commerce runs on secrets. Those secrets let you update your blog, shop at Amazon and share code on GitHub. Computer security is all about keeping your secrets known only to you and the people you choose to share them with.
We’ve been sharing secrets for centuries, but the Internet runs on a special kind of secret sharing called public-key cryptography. Most secret messages depend on a shared secret—a key or password that everyone agrees on ahead of time. Public-key cryptography shares secret messages without a shared secret key and makes technologies like SSL possible.
Read more...
