Web Design Archive
These posts are all in this one category.
Who says all the cool new web stuff has to happen in the San Francisco area? Tomorrow evening I'll be attending DC 2.0, our own local unconference on the next generation web.
Some local companies that will be represented:
Time and place:
Mar. 15, 2006
7 to 10 PMMintz Levin
12010 Sunset Hills Rd
Reston, Virginia 20190
Google Map
I'm trying to help a friend who is a student teacher purchase an affordable computer. We decided to go with Dell because they have some great discounts.
I've built computers for the last 10 years and I'm overwhelmed with all the choices on Dell's "Desktops starting at $299!" web site.
What does it say about a novice trying to pick out a computer when somebody highly technical like me can't figure out what to get?
Some things wrong with their web site:
- Pop-in ads for the page I'm already on.
- Huge ads on the top and side for the page I'm already on and discounts that have nothing to do with what the offers I'm currently looking at.
- Too much fine print about rebates, credit cards, and discounts.
- Too much technical details such as processor FSB speed (800), RAM bus speed (400 MHz), hard drive RPM (7200), and model numbers of monitors (E193FP)
- Too many links to apply for a dell credit card - over 50 links on that one page!
What Dell needs to do to fix it:
- Offer three choices: Cheap, Good, and Powerful.
- Ask the users what's most important to them. Maybe they can only spend $600, and are willing to get smaller hard drive in order to get a larger monitor.
- Stop trying to up sell so hard. The $299 Dell Desktop has thousands of dollars in extra up sell, from high end monitors to software, services, and even USB thumb drives. Is somebody buying a $299 computer going to add a monitor that costs more than the machine? Are they going to add a $150 printer when there isn't even a picture of the printer to help them decide?
The offending page: http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/odg_special49?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
Damn... I finally added tag clouds to my site and now Zeldman says they're the new mullets.
If you click on a photo caption my site brings you to photo album and jumps you to the image for that caption, scrolling the page to the right image if necessary. (Example)
The disappointing problem is that you can't see that particular image until Internet Explorer or Firefox download all images on the page that happen to be in the HTML before that image. This happens even though all of the images before the image you are trying to look at are off the screen. This means that you have to sit there and wait for all preceding images to load before you get to see the one right on your screen.
The fix seems simple: IE and Firefox should load images that are viewable to the user first, and then load off-screen images.
I can probably fix this via some fancy JavaScript, but it seems like more work than should be necessary.