For a lot of products, such as alarm clocks, you’re only going to write a review if you have a negative experience. How does Amazon get people to write reviews? Most people don’t leave reviews. About 0.7% of people who buy something leave a review. But because Amazon has such a huge amount of customers, that equates to quite a lot. So the next time someone says, we should have reviews; that works really well for Amazon, you can respond with sure, we should have customers too; that works really well for Amazon.

It’s easy to build a product that copies other products, or run a business that mimics how another company does business. But do you add features just because the other product or company does it, or because you have customers that would use and love that feature?

The new feature may be good—it might be even be awesome—but having customers is good, too. Does your product or business attract and hold on to passionate customers?

(Via Adactio: Journal—Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon.)

Of course, it is a bonus when you are your own client—if you use your own product, then you can answer user experience questions from both a professional and a personal perspective.

My rule of thumb is to use color only as a secondary indicator. This means that an important detail in my user interface should not rely on color alone to indicate meaning.

This type of design decision came up recently in my work on DF Studio. As part of a redesign for version 5 of the software, the design called for colored icons to show status for a photographer’s online portfolio. A green icon for an active portfolio and yellow icon for a disabled one (a disabled portfolio is not accessible to public viewers).

The problem with the icons being only differentiated by color is that a color-blind person that can’t distinguish yellow versus green would not be able to easily know the portfolio’s status.

The solution was simple: add a lock overlay to the disabled yellow icon. You can now easily tell that one is “locked” and one is not.

It is always good to run your design through a color-blind testing tool like Colorblind Color Filter or Vision Simulator. The DigitalFusion development team is fortunate in that the CTO of the company (who is also our product development manager) has a color vision deficiency; since he is constantly looking at the interface we have a way to find color-blindness issues in early stages of development.

If you work on websites or any kind of visual user interface, I would highly recommend reading the Particletree article, including the Additional Reading links. Knowing about the problem is half the battle, and you’ll be able to keep color-blindness in mind when developing and designing your interfaces.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Read more and download the PDF guide at Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google’s SEO Starter Guide.

We offer WordPress as a one-click install, and there is a reason for that. Right out of the box, WordPress is a highly efficient, easy-to-use blogging platform. However, just like any other piece of software, things happen and it can run out of control. To help prevent issues, we have a few plugins we suggest that customers try out. We have listed these below along and have included a few other hints to boot.

Visit Fine Tuning Your WordPress Install – DreamHost.

Now more than ever, it is a student’s responsibility to craft his or her own career preparedness in addition to, even in spite of, the plans and curricula defined by schools. This fact is especially true for aspiring Web designers, for every indication is that most higher education institutions don’t have the first clue about the interactive professions or how to prepare future professionals.

As a web craftsman, I think even seasoned web designers could take a look at this list of skills and traits that make a truly employable web professional. Pay close attention to the “Technology and Web Craft Skills” section since those items require constant reading, learning, and exploration.

I hope that this list and my suggestions help aspiring web designers to better craft their own preparedness and, if necessary, adjust their degree plans toward a more effective and responsible result.

Andy’s list is not only a great resource for aspiring web designers and developers, but I see it serving as a standard for all web professionals to live up to.

(Also, see my take on preparing for a career in web design, Learning Web Design, from 2006.)

Many of the tips should be obvious to you if you maintain websites on a regular basis, but if you are a non-technical website owner or maintainer, bookmark the article and reference it when you are working on your website marketing and optimization.

(Also see my 2006 post Search Engine Rankings for Your Site.)

When picking URLs, we envison [sic] someone at the client’s firm reading the URL to someone over the phone. How easy is it going to be?

I especially like this idea of reading someone the URL over the phone and asking them to write it down, remember it, or type as you read. Great URL design and implementation makes this interaction painless and pleasant.

I agree whole-heartedly that URLs can and should be beautiful, and I firmly believe they should not only look good, but should also be useful, meaningful, and “discoverable.” In the case of OmniTI, the first subcategory in the URL is based on an action verb, like “is”, “helps”, or “thinks.” This gives the URL a powerful mnemonic quality, since it reads like a sentence. It also describes the content of the page it represents, which is awesome.

The only downside I can see is the “discoverability” for common URLs like “about” and “contact”. A lot of people are used to finding those URLs the same on most sites, especially typical brochure-type business websites. But, you can always have a redirect rule for those if it’s important. The creativity and unique design of OmniTI’s URL scheme might just make up for the loss of predictability.

I’m glad to see a great example of a beautiful and semantic URL scheme to use as inspiration for my own projects.

UPDATE: As a nice follow-up, Nate Abele explains how to set up nice URLs in the CakePHP framework by defining custom routes: Advanced URL Routing and SEO Techniques with CakePHP.

As I read their introductory post I reminded myself that in my one-man business I’ve already put several of these ideas into practice.

Shorter work week
I started a 4-day work week April 25th, 2007. Having Fridays free from client work has been a huge blessing. I can play, work on personal projects, or just catch up on reading and learning. In the middle of our traveling and RVing it was often a perfect day to leave our RV park and hit the road. We would beat the weekend traffic, get to our location sooner, and be able to visit and sightsee before starting the next week of work. And as 37signals points out, “We found that just about the same amount of work gets done in four days vs. five days.” So true.

Funding my passions
This is self-fulfilling since I am a freelancer. But, I still have to be disciplined enough to put it into practice. My current passion is travel and learning; this includes working with my wife to publish our photos and stories (she does most of that work). Our work discipline has paid off big in this regard. Having a mobile and flexible work situation funds our passions directly. We can travel where we wish—visiting family and friends and seeing every corner of our beautiful country.

Spending accounts
This one is also easy to do when you are your own boss and accountant. I generally buy any book that is needed for learning web design or development—especially if I can find a used copy on Amazon. I decided with my wife, who I include on business and financial decisions, that anything under a certain amount (say $100) would not require a discussion—I could just buy it and not have to worry about it. Big ticket items still require careful thinking and planning, which is the way it should be whether you are a one-man team or a 100-person in-house group.

I’m glad to see 37signals set the bar high for the industry in publishing their workplace experiments. They continue to be an enormous inspiration to businesses big and small. I’m also happy that I’ve been setting these same principles into practice for at least a year—with great results.