Mozilla Firefox is a very popular browser, especially among web designers and developers. These days, with such a crowded field, staying at the top of the browser heap takes a lot of work. One of the factors that make Firefox so well-liked is the huge library of great extensions that enhance your browsing experience. Among the massive list of add-ons, many are vital to web designers and developers. If used, it will make your workflow quicker and more productive.

Let’s look at our top 20 essential Firefox extensions geared for people who build websites.

1. Web Developer

The Web Developer add-on extends Mozilla Firefox by adding a toolbar with various options for working with web pages. For example, it has an option to inspect CSS styles of page elements that will tell you what CSS attributes they have, and which styles affect them.

2. SeoQuake

You are the most important person in the world. Wow, I got you to read the second sentence. Your interest is now piqued and you want to read more. If you do read this article, you will learn exactly how important it is to create compelling web copy. Between you and me, most readers just scan, but if you find a way to hook them in the first sentence and reel them in on the second sentence, you have a good chance that they will read the third. They may even read the entire article.

Don’t listen to those naysayers who tell you that website visitors only scan headlines and look at cute pictures. It’s a fact that visitors are more interested in what you write than every other aspect on the page. The problem is that most web writing is dreadfully boring, and oddly self-gratifying. Under the premise of helping you, the visitor, the writing is geared more towards establishing the writer as some sort of authority. Most web writing is very didactic, or teacher-student. I’m the first to admit I’m guilty of it, but not anymore. Here are some useful tips in creating words that people will want to read:

We’re all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy.

User Experience Videos

The State of User Experience
Jesse James Garett, founder of Adaptive Path and author of the book The Elements of User Experience, speaks on what UX and UX design is, what UX looked like before and what are some of the challenges people are encountering now. He cites engagement as the main goal of UX design and, through some fantastic examples, shows that engagement is an universal quality achieved through visuality, sound, touch, smell, taste, body and mind. One of the most impressive moments from the session is when Jesse compares Beethoven to an experience designer, accompanied by the Ninth Symphony. Duration: 40 minutes.

Back in the old days, almost every website had a sitemap where they listed out all the pages. The purpose of the sitemap is to help visitors and search engine spiders to find information on the site. Now, a lot of modern websites have dropped the sitemap page, instead they place the sitemap in the footer area. I’m going to review 20 websites (from big corporation to small portfolio sites) who organized their footer cleverly to enhance usability. (more…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

By Jacob Gube

When Should You Use Breadcrumbs?

Use breadcrumb navigation for large websites and websites that have hierarchically arranged pages. An excellent scenario is e-commerce websites, in which a large variety of products is grouped into logical categories.

You shouldn’t use breadcrumbs for single-level websites that have no logical hierarchy or grouping. A great way to determine if a website would benefit from breadcrumb navigation is to construct a site map or a diagram representing the website’s navigation architecture, and then analyze whether breadcrumbs would improve the user’s ability to navigate within and between categories.

Breadcrumb navigation should be regarded as an extra feature and shouldn’t replace effective primary navigation menus. It’s a convenience feature; a secondary navigation scheme that allows users to establish where they are; and an alternative way to navigate around your website.

Types of Breadcrumbs

There are three main types of breadcrumbs.

by Matt Cronin

Readability is one of the more important aspects of Web design usability. Readable text affects how users process the information in the content. Poor readability scares readers away from the content. On the other hand, done correctly, readability allows users to efficiently read and take in the information in the text. You want users to be able to read your content and absorb it easily.

In this post, we’ll explain some Web typography terms and how they play into readability; we’ll present numerous tips to help improve the readability of your content; and we’ll showcase very readable websites, layouts and articles.

The Terms, And What Each Means For Readability

There are many factors that play into the readability of text. There are also a number of terms, all very important. Here are a few of the more common Web typography terms and an explanation of how each term affects readability.

By Glen Stansberry and Smashing Magazine Editorial Team

In this post we present an ultimate collection of resources, tools and tips to help you make the most out of Google AdSense. Among other things, this post covers various Google AdSense tools, Firefox-extensions, WordPress-plugins and related resources.

Please feel free to suggest related tools in the comments to this post. You may also be interested in our post Google AdSense: Facts, FAQs and Tools that was published two years ago.

1. Google AdSense Tools

iPhone AdSense Statistics Application
SenseApp is a program that lets you track your Google Adsense earnings on your Apple iPhone.

AdSense Earnings Tool
Free and fast tool to monitor adsense earnings in realtime. This tool posts all the correct post fields to Googles universal Account Services login and collects information about your earnings. You’ll able to see today, yesterday, this month and since last payment earnings. You don’t need to log in to Google anymore.

There is no “Consumer Trust for Dummies,” but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur.

1. Paint Your Pictures At Home

If your core demographic is women between the ages 35 and 65 who have an annual income of $60,000+, you would treat them different than the 18- to 25-year-old male demographic. First and foremost in e-tail: forcing your visitor to think is a bad idea. When creativity stops being subjective and can be measured by a dollar amount, making sure you’re designing for the customer is a no-brainer.

As a general rule, most Web developers, especially usability enthusiasts, say it is bad practice to use drop-down menus because they are confusing, annoying and oftentimes dysfunctional. From a design standpoint, however, drop-down menus are an excellent feature because they help clean up a busy layout. If structured correctly, drop-down menus can be a great navigation tool, while still being a usable and attractive design feature.

Yes, that’s right: drop-down navigation menus can be user-friendly. Just yesterday Jacob Nielsen the results of his recent drop-down menus study, in which he found out that big, two-dimensional drop-down panels that group navigation options help users to avoid scrolling and can precisely explain the user’s choices with effective use of typography, icons, and tooltips.

These panels appear temporarily and disappear on their own when users move the pointer to another top-level option or to a “regular” part of the screen. You can find more information about Nielsen’s study in his article Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well.

Web design has come a long way since its beginning, especially in terms of styling. Take a look at a website from 10 years ago and compare it to one from today. The differences are enormous. One of the major changes you will notice is the background. Today, backgrounds are one of the core features that determine how visually interesting a website is.

The background holds the theme of the website, and there are a vast amount of possibilities when designing a website background. This article goes over the best practices and popular trends of backgrounds in the current stage of innovative Web design.

The Basic Background Structures

Before talking about how to design a good background, we need to go over basic background set ups. While not the only structures out there, these three are the most often used.