alecs » usability http://www.ylipsis.com/blog web development, SEO, technology Sat, 15 May 2010 11:51:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Full or partial articles in feeds? http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/2008/08/full-or-partial-articles-in-feeds/ http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/2008/08/full-or-partial-articles-in-feeds/#comments Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:26:54 +0000 alecs http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/?p=38 Today almost every blog and media website has at least one feed. But some of them prefer to include their entire articles in the feed, while others have only a small snippet or catchy paragraph. The latter ones aim to achieve one goal – by reading the small (and usually teasing) introduction, the person might be tempted to visit the actual page from the website to read the full story.

Before jumping to conclusions, let’s take a look at the details:

First situation: full article in the RSS feed

Most people use feed readers such as Google Reader, or a desktop application that manages feeds from various websites. By reading the entire article using the application there is no more need to go to the original page where the article is situated. The end user achieved his goal with ease. On the other hand, the website lost at least one page view (traffic), which in most cases translates to fewer ad impressions or even clicks and in the end less revenue.

However, in some cases, the user will want to comment on the article, action which would require him to visit the original page.

Second situation: partial article in the RSS feed

Now the user only has a small part of the original article. The skill of the article writer plays an important part here. Using only a short paragraph, he must convince the reader to follow and continue reading the rest of the story on the website. Tricks like rhetorical questions or making unusual statements are meant to do just this. Of course, there is the unfortunate situation when the reader is not convinced that the story is worth reading and the website receives no traffic.

Quick conclusion

As long as the no 1 source of income for websites remains advertising, giving users the full information may not be good practice for webmasters. Also take into consideration that some of your daily readers might have no idea how your website looks like.

I am currently opting for the full posts on my blog. So what’s your position on this?

]]> http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/2008/08/full-or-partial-articles-in-feeds/feed/ 0 Favicons: the why and how http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/2008/08/favicons-the-why-and-how/ http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/2008/08/favicons-the-why-and-how/#comments Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:44:02 +0000 alecs http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/?p=5 Google.com's favicon

The favicon appears both in the address bar and in the tabs on Mozilla browsers

So why should you even bother creating your favicon?

  1. It gives you exposure. Visitors can quickly match your website with the image. Just to test this out, can you quickly match each of the following icons to their corresponding website/brand?
  2. Favicons are used in bookmarks across many browsers. Your website has the ability to stand out and create a visual impact (even through a small 16 x 16 image) in a visitor’s bookmark collection.
  3. It only takes 5 minutes to set up.

How to make one

Let’s assume you already have a company/website logo. It is a good idea to use it in your favicon as well. However, you only have 16 x 16 pixels at your disposal, so you might want to edit your logo a bit before shrinking it to the lowest size possible. For example, let’s take Adobe’s and Carlsberg’s logos:

Adobe’s logo is pretty simple in it’s form; only 3 shapes, red & white, no curves. So the resulting favicon is pretty straight forward: . Although you cannot read the “Adobe” underneath the big “A”, the goal is met.

On the other hand, a beer’s logo is often very complex. Creating a 16 x 16 image with “Carlsberg” written all over it is probably not a good idea. In this case, it is common practice to simplify the graphic while retaining colors and shapes as much as possible. Here’s what they did:

Some graphic editors may not support exporting files in .ico format. There are some desktop applications for conversions, but the quickest way to do this is using an online tool such as ConvertIcon (only converts .png to .ico and back).

Keep in mind to save the file as favicon.ico and upload it to your website root directory (it should be accessible through www.example.com/favicon.ico). In the past this was used by Internet Explorer as the default place to look for the favicon. Only one thing remains: include the following HTML tag in your pages within the <head> </head> tags.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
]]> http://www.ylipsis.com/blog/2008/08/favicons-the-why-and-how/feed/ 0