• Security research and blog, University of Cambridge: www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/
• The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation: www.snopes.com
• Craigs List on avoiding scams and fraud
• 5 Tips from CNET about securing your laptop wireless in public areas
• IMSafer is a new service designed to protect children using instant messaging from online predators
• Consumer Reports (September 2006) ranks antispam software including: Trend Micro, Allume Systems SpamCatcher, Cloudmark, PC Tools, BitDefender, McAfee, Symantec, Sunbelt Software, Blue Squirrel, and CA/eTrust.
• Consumer Reports (September 2006) ranks antivirus software including: BitDefender, Zone Labs (ZoneAlarm), Kaspersky Labs, Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro, Alwil Avast, F-Secure, Panda Software, CA/eTrust, and PC Tools.
• Spam proof your email
• Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace

Content, Writing for the Web, and Content Management

• Jakob Nielsen: Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? ...bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.
• Eye-tracking research, dos and dont's for writing on the web
• The word farms of the web. The growing number of websites that mix and match low-quality articles produced by amateurs in order to generate traffic is causing concern, reports Danny Bradbury
• Jakob Nielsen: Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill?
• Evidence-based website management
• Time for content to be more scientific
• Web information—driving tasks on a web site
• Task Completion—key to website success
• The Problem of Dirty Data
• Six Tips for Writing Concisely
• Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers - Digits Boost Usability and Credibility
• Words that work: search words versus website words
• Links are the Grammar of the Web
• Google changes information management—information management will ask the question, "What was the person trying to do and did our information help them do it easily and quickly?
• Read why PDFS ARE EVIL, LAZY, SLOTHFUL AND SINFUL and PowerPoints are not much better
• Jakob Nielsen: Writing for the web
• Jakob Nielsen: How users read on the web
• Do not optimize for search engines; optimize for people who search.
• Some organizations believe all they need to create a better website is to choose the right content management software—they are not thinking about the quality and effectiveness of the content. "They’ll employ junior people to put up this content, and then a couple of years later they’ll wonder where it all went wrong".
• Jakob Nielsen: Users search using familiar words. There’s more to website success than simply being found, but it is the first step. Use old words and you’ll be that step ahead of the competition and their useless new words.
• 25:5 rule—25 percent of demand is for 5 percent of tasks; that 5 percent of content is read by 25 percent of people (he long neck)
• Eight Essential Writing Skills For Techies by ewriteonline.com
  Checklist: How Tech-Savvy Is Your Reader?
• Publish on the web to further your career
• The Importance of a Customer-Centric Design Approach: An Interview with Gerry McGovern
• Gerry McGovern: Killer content for intranet
• Recent Canadian research shows that website visitors decide in 1/20 of a second the quality of a site.
• Websites reflect the true face of an organization. A website is increasingly the place where customers get that vital first impression...learn if they are self-centered or customer-centered. Is the website structured so as to solve your problems fast, or is it based on some internal organization structure?
• Web Writing For The World: Five Tips On Writing For Global Readers
• Google's 5 Objectives of Website Copy - scroll to bottom left
• Jakob Nielsen, Writing for the Web
• Writing for the Web by Jakob Nielsen and Jonathan Fox, editor-in-chief, www.sun.com
• Nine Things We Thought You Knew About Web Writing
• To maximize value you must publish high-quality content (killer web content). That requires significant skill and active management. Low quality content is easy to get...Give authors control and let them publish what they want.
  Raising the Perceived Value of Your Website
• Incompetent Email Marketing = Lost Future Opportunities - Jakob Nielsen
• The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused. Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don't try and force the Web to be what it's not. Graphic Design Plays a Minor Role on the Web
• Number One Skill for Managing a Website. The web is a self-service environment, and self-service is about convenience, speed and price.
• Why Web Managers are Leaders
• What happens when you have more content than you have people to manage? The quality of content declines
• Why it Matters to Focus on your Reader
• Web Editors have a Great Future
• How to Measure the Value of you Web Content
• Web Content is a Hidden Asset
• It's the Content, Stupid: Search Engine Optimization
• Web Content Management: Top 10 Predictions for 2005
• How Do We Use Our Knowledge Effectively
• Some Business Effects of Customer Experience [The "multiplier effect" - the leverage that a good online customer experience has on the offline business. One obvious conclusion to draw is that it's more important than ever to make sure the website is fast, easy, clear, and a great experience overall.] and [GE links executive compensation to the customer experience]
• Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content
• On the Web, words come before looks . The primary activity on the Web is reading. It's very fast scan reading by impatient people who find web reading harder than print reading.
• Why it Matters to Focus on your Reader
• Web Content is not Data Management
• The Web is Not About Technology - it's About Content and People Who Read the Content
• In Praise of Web Experts...The Web is Maturing
• Websites: easy to start, hard to manage
• Exercise in Customer Experience
• Web content management
• Websites need to be professionally managed
• Secrets of Great Web Headings and Summaries
• Less is more for university websites
• Less is more for government websites
• What Makes a Great Website?
• Why content management fails? hint: get an editor
• Getting serious about metadata
• Recognition for creating good content
• Design for the rule, not exception - every added piece of content makes your website a little harder to navigate
• Web content management a process, not a project
• The essence of a website is self-service. There are three core things that self-service needs to get right: convenience, speed, and price
• Focus on the content that is directly applicable to your organization’s objectives. Any other content confuses. It wastes time and money.
• How to design for the tunnel reader
• How to tell people what else you do on your website
• 44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files,
• Users only come to the website when they have a goal - usually finding a specific piece of information, or conducting a specific transaction. The Goal is very specific, and it's the defining motivator of that user's experience on the website. Fulfill the Goal quickly and easily, and it's a good experience; otherwise, users will try to avoid the site in the future.
• How to make links work for your website
• Web content management predictions for 2004
• Avoid Santa Claus Approach to Content Management - Gerry McGovern
• The dangers of publishing your website in another language (content matters)
• The intranet gets serious
• The intranet gets serious: Part 2: making knowledge sharing work
• Content management: web publishing needs real discipline
• Information Pollution: Removing half of a website's words doubles amount of information users actually get - Jakob Nielsen
• Measuring your web content management processes
• Summary gateway pages for PDF files
• Information foraging
• Taking full responsibility for your content
• Metadata may be the difference between web content that succeeds or fails
• Poor content wastes time, wasting time is wasting money!
• Poor content on your website damages your brand and reputation
• Don't make these mistakes when buying content management software
• The Most Hated Advertising Techniques
• The Paradox of Choice

Website and Email Design, Usability

• Google User Experience
• Designing user-friendly left navigation menus
• Jakob Nielsen: User skills improving slightly, browser and research skills poor, Google gullibility
• Local Government Local Tasks Made Easy - Gerry McGovern
• Jakob Nielsen: building tabs right
• Intranet Personalization: Does it Work?
• Jakob Nielsen strongly advises the vast majority of websites to scale back their features and dramatically simplify the user experience for initial use... to progress to the deeper engagement levels, prospective customers must first successfully pass through the initial use phase
• Jakob Nielsen: Having a specialized usability person is best, but smaller design teams can still benefit when designers do their own user testing and other usability work.
• Classificatin: everything that is added to a classification subtracts from what is already there, prompting the question: Has more been added than subtracted?
• 5 Key Characteristics of Web Brands
• Why simplicity is essential to web design
• User Interface Engineering: Simplicity: The Ultimate Sophistication
• Command links in Vista, buy/check out buttons
• Jakob Nielsen: Location is Irrelevant for Usability Studies
• Why the web demands simplicty
• Jakob Nielsen, international usability expert, lists 10 redesign high priorities that can increase your return on investment ROI
• Banner blindness causes problems in voter elections in Florida and Website design: lacked a single expert on human-computer interaction
• Wikiasari: The convergence of USABILITY and SEO?
• The sooner you complete a usability study, the higher its impact on the design process; competitive studies
• Jakob Nielsen: optimize web pages for varying screen resolutions
• The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site (Release Early, Release Often )
• An alternative to MySpace: create your own social networking site
• Jakob Nielsen: Eyetracking Research Overview for Websites
• User expectations for search / Jakob Nielsen: Mental Models For Search Are Getting Firmer
• When users go to the wrong section of the website most of the time, your site has an information architecture problem; article proposes 6 fixes
• Designing Web Applications for Use from User Interface Engineering: If designers go back to the drawing board every time a user stumbles or hesitates or flinches, the results are same-old-same-old applications that stick users with so-so tools
• Clickstream heatmap study shows dynamic web / eyetracking
• HumanFactors.com: Leveraging heat maps (and other eye tracking data) to refine your information architecture
  1. "Do users know where to start? Analyzed by evaluating how many warm spots there are on the page. (Lots is not good!) And critically, if the true target is ‘cold,’ or never gazed at."
  2. "Are they confident when they find it? Evaluated by looking at how many times users look back and forth between options before they select one and click."
• Jakob Nielsen: design/optimize web pages for 1024 x 768 resolution
• There are two key characteristics of websites that fail: technology-centric and organization-centric. Belief that if you buy a "portal" or some other fancily-named software you will solve all your problems is unfortunately common and incredibly naive... websites that have succeeded have had two key characteristics: customer-centric and task-centric.
• Insights into the Millennial generation
• The Millennials—email, multi-tasking, and the media
• User Interface Engineering: Lifestyles of the Link-Rich Home Pages
• What users hate most about Web sites (low on usability ...)
• Gerry McGovern: Are you using the wrong web metrics?
• Jakob Nielsen:Variability in User Performance
• Read Jakob Nielsen’s study on user and online behavior; goal was to research the purchase of a portable computer projector for use during presentations.
• Do you really need a search on your site?
• Jakob Nielsen: Eyetracking and Reading Web Content
• Jakob Nielsen: "Focus on fixing the basics to get a simple and communicative website. Simple steps don’t get hyped, but they drive much more business value for the average site than the issues that everyone writes about...we’re seeing more and more simple websites that meet customers’ needs and thus generate substantial business value. Often the sites that do nothing special are the best: it’s more important to focus on doing things right than to chase the latest fad."
• Jakob Nielsen: Search Engines as Leeches on the Web
• Jakob Nielsen: Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First
  • Why Useless, Fancy Stuff Gets Promoted
  • Better Content
  • Elite Experience vs. User Experience
  • Top Three Design Priorities
• Avoid Within-Page Links by Jakob Nielsen
• Recent Canadian research shows that website visitors decide in milliseconds the quality of a site.
• 5-Second Test for Usability
• International Websites: Minimum Requirements
• The Power of Defaults Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings...
• Time Budgets for Usability Sessions Up to 40% of precious testing time is wasted while users engage in nonessential activities ...
• Eyetracking data show that users are easily distracted when watching video on websites
• Email Newsletter Usability, Nielsen Norman Group Report
• University websites come of age
• Scrolling and Scrollbars, Usability
• Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes
• Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability
• Putting A/B Testing in Its Place
• Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents
• Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005
• International Sites: Minimum Requirements
• Jakob Nielsen: Usability's job is to research user behavior and find out what works. Usability should also defend users' rights and fight for simplicity.
• Users have developed a firm mental model for how search is supposed to look and to work
• Formal Usability Reports vs. Quick Findings | When to Use Formal Reports by Jakob Nielsen
• Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design
• Jakob Nielsen: Designs that support user empowerment
• Web task management principles
• Medical Usability: How to Kill Patients Through Bad Design
• Building your website for lower-literacy users and their unique needs improves success rate for higher-literacy users as well
• Evangelizing Usability: Change Your Strategy at the Halfway Point
• Websites for Teenagers, Usability
• Authentic Behavior in User Testing
• Web-User Satisfaction on the Upswing
• Heuristic Evaluation by Jakob Nielsen
• Mastery, Mystery, and Misery: The Ideologies of Web Design
• The Need for Web Design Standards
• The key to any customer-centered effort is to respect the customer
• Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products: cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem
• Why Google is such a Great Brand: clean, minimalist interface.
• Usability and listening to customers have limits
• Guidelines for links
• Web Design: Never Let an Ad Agency Near Your Website
• Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
• KJ method for assigning priorities
• Usability improves productivity
• Common Myths about Web Design
• Differences in Design from Multiple Companies in the same Industry - Competitive Testing
• Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 - Jakob Nielsen
• When performing simple internet tasks on websites, users fail 35% of the time
• The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines - Jakob Nielsen
• Four Words to Improve User Research
• "About Us" -- Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website
• Why personalization hasn't worked (aka stick to the basics)
• Websites Require Flexible Not Fixed Design
• GoodExperience.com's page paradigm
• Misconceptions about Usability - Jakob Nielsen
• Usability 101 - Jakob Nielsen
• Paper Prototyping - getting data before you code
• PDF [files]: Unfit for human consumption
• Usability for $200 on small site
• Convincing clients to pay for usability
• Simple text, clear photos communicate better with users than high-end media
• Top 10 web design mistakes of 2002
• Usability redesigns increase website usability by 135%
• How Usability-Focused Companies Think
• Jakob Nielsen: Usability for Senior Citizen

Internet and Web

• Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee (Inventor of the Web)
• Web metrics: Don’t be a slave to the next hit
• Jakob Nielsen: Generic commands give users increased power without increasing user-experience complexity
• CNET’s top web ware / applications for 2007
• Web facilitates wisdom of crowds
• Future of the Web is collaborative
• The twilight of print
• Customer Power Driven by the Web: in the new Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase.
• Marc Andreessen, inventor of the first Netscape browser, has released Ning, a site that lets everybody create their own social networks.
• The Web is the New Organization; it allows for new forms of organization that will have a profound impact on how we live, work and play over the next twenty years
• Recommendation Systems: Last.fm is one of a relatively new breed of web applications called recommendation systems. Recommendation systems aggregate the online behavior of many people to find trends and make recommendations based on them.
• The Coming Age of the Cellcast or Mobilcast: It”s likely only a matter of time that many users will be able remove the step of downloading audio/video content and then playing it on an iPod/MP3 player.
• Jakob Neilsen: 100 Million Websites, Nov. 2006
• Firefox 2 browser now claims 12% market share, compare pros and cons of new Internet Explorer 7 versus Firefire 2
• c|net List of top 10 research tools on the web
• Designing web based interfaces: Deconstructing Web Applications (User Interface Engineering)
• The End of Deference and the Rise of Customer Power on the Internet
• Jakob Nielsen: One Billion Internet Users as of 2005 and Growing
• Political Blogosphere and the 2004 Election - Divided They Blog (PDF) by Natalie Glance, Intelliseek Applied Research Center
• Center for the Digital Future Identifies the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet’s First Decade of Public Use
• Undoing the Industrial Revolution: in the virtual world, you win by being good . Automation reduces the benefits of scale, the internet equalizes distribution, and reputation follows from quality rather than incessantly repeated slogans.
• Inventor of the Internet/Web Tim Berners-Lee to be Knighted by Queen Elizabeth
• Eyetracking - how users read a news website
• Priceline.com and Ramada.com have agreed to make their Web pages easier to navigate for the blind and visually impaired as part of a settlement with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
• Free accessibility tools
• If you're on the Web, you're in sales
• Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution - avoiding irrelevant information
• Web used as primary means for obtaining key information
• Shifting Trends of Internet Use by Americans - Pew Internet and American Life
• How people evaluate a website's credibility - Stanford Research
• Internet Now Treated as Household Utility, Necessity
• Should you centralize or decentralize your publishing?
• Life cycle of large websites
• Web team roles and responsibilities are changing
• Usable design saves money and saves jobs
• Insights on investor relations website design

Marketing / Search Engines

• Honest Marketing Works on the Web
• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines - Dos and Don'ts
• How to professionally manage search
• Googles Matt Cutts on Personalization and the Future of SEO
• Top Ten Tips for Improved Search Engine SEO Placement
• Black Hat Search Engine Optimization
• Wikiasari: The convergence of usability and SEO? Wikiasari is a search engine with a twist. It plans to display results based on what humans think are the most important
• AJAX, CSS, Web 2.0: What are they and how do they affect search engines
• Search Engine Watch: Understanding Searcher Behavior
• Search Engine Optimization: Beyond Search Keywords
• The Search Lurch: Have We Become Lazy Googlers or Smarter Web Researchers?
• Search Engines as Leeches on the Web: Search Bids Eat the Gains of Site Improvement
• 11 Search Optimization Tips
• Is Search Ruining the Web?
• Shift of Marketing Dollars from Traditional Forms of Communication to Online Tools
• Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO
• MarketingSherpa's Wisdom 2005 Report (51-page PDF) :
  Includes 105 real-life marketing lessons learned from MarketingSherpa readers:
  • Email tests that worked; search marketing tactics
  • Site design to raise conversions; direct mail, radio, & telemarketing stories
• Get linked to get found in search engines
• Domain Names Still Important Despite Search Engine Popularity
• Designing Web Ads on Google
• Who's visiting your website?
• Quality metadata makes for successful web content
• 80:20 Rule - twenty percent of your readers will help you achieve 80 percent of your objectives
• Metadata: seven tips for writing better keywords
• Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength
• Step by Step Marketing Blueprint
• 10 Ways to Increase Your Search Engine Marketing
• Metadata is essential web writing skill
• Larry Chase's Search Engine for Marketers
• Free Marketing Articles 2004

E-commerce

• Reduce bounce rate, manage for maximum ROI and sales
• Amazon: No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design
• Beyond the Buy Button in E-Commerce
• How can we measure the effect of online promotion on sales, see You CAN Tell How You're Selling Offline
• Internet equals profits for more than half of the 400 small businesses ... 51 percent of the respondents indicated that the Internet has improved their profitability, 58 percent said the medium has helped their businesses grow or expand. Fully one-third of the survey participants... said the Internet is essential to their survival.
• B2B: Help Your Fans Convince Their Bosses
• World Usability Expert, Jakob Nielsen's 207 Guidelines for E-commerce Sites Report (for purchase)
• 2003 Holiday Online Spending Reached Record $15.8 Billion - an Increase 37% from 2002
• Wholesalers are Cutting Out the Expensive Middlemen and Selling Direct to the Consumer
• Visa reports that online purchases are up about 45 percent from last year
• E-commerce User Experience Design Guidelines for Category Pages - Nielsen Report
• Automated Email From Websites to Customers

Reports

• A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users PDF
  from Pew Internet www.pewinternet.org
  Fully 85% of American adults use the internet or cell phones—and most use both. Many also have broadband connections, digital cameras and video game systems. Yet the proportion of adults who exploit the connectivity, the capacity for self expression, and the interactivity of modern information technology is a modest 8%.
  Fully half of adults have a more distant or non-existent relationship to modern information technology. Some of this diffidence is driven by people’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master; some is connected to people’s sense that things like blogging and creating home-brew videos for YouTube is not for them; and some is rooted in people's inability to afford or their unwillingness to buy the gear that would bring them into the digital age.
  These findings come from the Pew Internet Project’s typology of information and communication technology (ICT) users. The typology categorizes Americans based on the amount of ICTs they possess, how they use them, and their attitudes about the role of ICTs are in their lives. Ten separate groups emerge in the typology.
• Internet users and wireless connections
• Ten Revelations About Interacting With College-Bound High SchoolStudents (PDF) by National Research Center for College & University Admissions
• Pew Internet Project today releases a new report on Bloggers:
  Much of the public and press attention to bloggers has focused on the small number of high-traffic, A-list bloggers, said Fox. "By asking a wide range of bloggers what they do and why they do it, we have found a different kind of story about the power of the internet to encourage creativity and community among all kinds of internet users."
• Pew Internet Reports. Demographics: How Women and Men Use the Internet: Women are catching up to men in most measures of online life. Men like the internet for the experiences it offers, while women like it for the human connections it promotes.
• Pew Internet Reports Spam and Phishing: Email users get more spam, but the harmful impact of unsolicited messages is diminishing for them. More than a third of email users have gotten phishing solicitations
• Pew Internet Reports Health Information Online: Eight in ten internet users have looked for health information online, with increased interest in diet, fitness, drugs, health insurance, experimental treatments, and particular doctors and hospitals
• Protecting Teens Online: More than half of American families with teenagers use filters to limit access to potentially harmful content online. But both teens and parents believe that teens do things on the internet that their parents would not approve of
• Pew Internet Reports Downloading Files: About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files (Music and Video Downloading Moves Beyond P2P)
• Pew Internet Reports on Search Engines: Internet users are extremely positive about search engines and the experiences they have when searching the internet. But these same satisfied internet users are generally unsophisticated about why and how they use search engines. Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results
• A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life
• Deep Web by Bright Planet [invisible web]
• Consumer WebWatch: Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study..Websites
• Pew Internet: 65% of Internet users have purchased a product online
• Consumer Reports WebWatch Guidelines

Technology

• Web Standards Checklist www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/checklist.cfm
• Yale’s Web Style Guide for Site Design www.webstyleguide.com/index.html?/sites/site_design.html

• Does your online image need a makeover?: Is there some unflattering or incorrect information about you out on the Web? Heres how to fix it.
• SEO Salaries - How Much Should You Make
• Scott Berkun on the Law of lost attention—reclaiming attention
• Knowledge management: Are you too busy to think?
• U of Minnesota Web Design References

Listed in the Syracuse Web Designer Directory