Nielsen Wades Into Presidential Emails

Proving that no one can resist commenting on the American Presidential Election, Jakob Nielsen has waded into the debate by analysing the usability of the Bush and Kerry email newsletters.

Overall he rates them as equally bad in terms of their usability (as he puts it they are both “stuck in last century's understanding of media”), but interestingly enough finds that:

Even though the overall ratings are very close, there are interesting differences in the details: each campaign does well in some areas that are problematic for its opponent.

To me the most amazing point he makes is that the newsletters frequently change the FROM address, the Republicans most frequently, so that sometimes it is from Arnold Schwarzenegger (Termie!), and other times from Ed Gillespie (who?). Whilst that may help avoid spam filters that have been set to ignore one of the emails, it really doesn't help people make good use of the emails (like auto-forwarding it to a Politics folder for later perusal, rather than being forced to deal with it there and then).

Beautiful Sydney

The view from Sydney's Circular Quay

Sydney's Harbour Bridge

Ten CSS Tricks You May Not Know

This set of very cool, and nifty tricks is well worth having a look at. Of course there had to be someone who found a problem in them, and in this case its Wayne Burkett, who posts an alternative solution for 10. Background colour running to the screen bottom. This is the old problem with how to get equal length columns with unqeual length content. He proposes making the content div overwrite a background colour in a wrapper div that then is seen below the menu div. This solves the problem by cheating a little, the columns are different lengths, but visually they are now the same length.

GMail Invites

I've got 3 GMail invites to give away. Friends and family have already received ones, or don't need one, so these are up for grabs. First in, best dressed! (let me know why you want one too)

Update: I've got 5 invites now to give away! (it was 6 for a short while :-)

Update #2: I've now only got 4 invites to give away!

Web Essentials 04

Tossing up whether to go to Web Essentials 04 in Sydney. It's AUD$750, which is not much for 2 days of great speakers and good food ... but that's 2 days not earning money.

Hey, anyone else want to pay for me? ;-)

Website Complete!

Well I finally completed the website I was doing in my spare time.

The client was Kola Developments, a builder who does renovations and new constructions for residential and commercial clients.

I must admit the site design was inspired (ie. pinched) from StopDesign, the guys that designed many of the blog templates for Blogger.

The end result is I think pleasing, but you can judge for yourselves ;-), especially nice are the sample project pages' headers which use details from the project photos.