ThemePassion is all about premium themes of course, but more precisely, themes for content management systems, most of which are Open Source CMS projects. Right now there are well over 100 theme reviews on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Magento, ExpressionEngine, OpenCart, phpBB, standalones and Photoshop. It’s taken about 3 months to compile all these, and the list keeps growing daily. So far the site has been a success and I’ve grown my readership faster than with any site in the past. Theme builders love to have more exposure, and the great thing about ThemePassion is that I only write positive reviews — I don’t believe there would be any value in people wasting time on themes that look ugly. These are all themes that I personally think look fantastic and in some cases really raise the bar.

ThemePassion itself is based on a template from Elegant Themes, a fantastic theme provider and probably the best value on the market at the time of writing. This was a hard decision for me as I have always built the themes myself for every iteration of this blog and I am quite capable of building and designing my own WordPress template. The issue was time, I wanted to get started, and really what better place for a premium theme than on a site about premium themes. The site is a grid layout so you can easily glance over all the thumbnailed screenshots for each review. The reviews themselves are short, but every one is written by yours truly.

The review process has really exposed me to a variety of designs in a very short time. In the future I plan on releasing some of my own themes through ThemePassion. Viewing beautiful themes every day really lights a fire in you. I would also like to provide more tutorials here on this site with whatever valuable lessons I learn along the way.  So if you are into themes or great design, I invite you to peruse ThemePassion, and if you have any ideas or advice, feel free to get in contact with me.

It is becoming more and more important to at least have a basic understanding of all the information that goes into making a fantastic website. Knowing limitations and pushing those limits makes web design and development fun, interesting, and challenging. If you work in this field you probably already know that web work is all about constantly learning new technologies, tools, tips and tricks.

Smashing Magazine

If you don’t know about this one then you have been missing out. While there is some fluff from time to time, you learn a lot from this site. There are a lot of top website and tools lists which can get tedious, but Smashing Magazine really does have the pulse of the web and this is the spot to be if you want to keep up to date on web trends. Some of their most popular posts are actually their trend posts. Critics will say that Smashing causes everyone to create the same type of designs, but I think it’s good to know what is working out there and what is not.

Noupe

Noupe is part of the Smashing network. It has a huge amount inspirational lists and resources. When you need a break from work or if you are feeling creatively drained it can be a great quick stop for a creative inspirational recharge.

Grafpedia

Grafpedia is the holy grail of Photoshop web design tutorials. The site sells their templates, but the real guts of the site is the full on tutorials. You can create all of their PSD templates by following their extremely detailed tutorials. Most of us won’t want to do that of course, but browsing the designs until you see something that makes you say “how did they do that” and then getting a detailed play by play tutorial on just that question is pretty cool. A fantastic resource for Photoshop web design techniques. Also a great place to start if you are completely new to creating Photoshop mockups.

ProBlogger

If you are a blogger, you should be reading this guys stuff. I started reading ProBlogger about two years ago. Some of the subject matter may be obvious for the more advanced bloggers, but you’ll probably gain new insights regardless of your skill level. Once you digest a lot of Darren’s site it does start to feel a bit regurgitated, but a quick visit every now and then always reveals something new for me. He also does a lot of his own tests and research on analytics and SEO. Problogger is also very professional and way less spamy than a lot of the get rich quick blogging tip sites out there.

Ajaxian

Ajaxian is for the more technically minded web designers and developers out there. As the name suggests they follow a lot of Ajax techniques, but the site has much more to offer than news about Ajax. If you want to know where the future of Web Apps are headed, this is a good starting point. Even if you are not a programmer, there’s a lot of cool bleeding edge stuff to see on this site.

Adobe BrowserLab

The best way to really test your websites is with the actual browser, usually via a virtual machine. Not everyone has time to install a load of browsers under virtual machines and if you don’t need to test the functionality then Adobe BrowserLab is the answer to your testing needs. The layout is slick and easy to use. You can select all the browser you want to test with and save them. The site then quickly renders image screenshots of all the browsers you selected. The next time you need to test out good old IE6 or some other hard to find browser version, give it a try.

Focus: Cross-browser testing
browserlab.adobe.com

Web Designer Wall

“A wall of design ideas, web trends, and tutorials.” This is another personal blog with a broad range of web design content. Tutorials, news, funky design techniques and everything in between. There’s a lot of content here and this guy posts often.

Pro Blog Design

This site has been around for a few years, but it only recently hit my radar. The focus is on web design with an emphasis on blogs. It’s got some fantastic tutorials and a lot of discussion.

WebKitBits

I recently discovered this gem of a site and it’s quickly becoming a favourite. WebKitBits is all about really cool projects done using the power of the Webkit rendering engine. Webkit is the browser engine built into Safari, Chrome, iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android, and it’s pretty awesome. This engine blows away Internet Explorer and even gives Gecko a run for it’s money. The stuff here is bleeding edge and some of it possibly years away before we see it in mainstream websites, but it will reignite you passion for everything web and you will be ready for the next wave of awesome.

Learning jQuery

jQuery should need no introduction by now and should be in every web designers arsenal. I would be lost without it or at least spending many more hours on my scripting. It’s the JavaScript framework library that went from “jWhat?” to “oh yeah, that’s easy we can do it with jQuery”. If you’re looking for people who know jQuery like the back of their hand, then this is the site for you as the authors share tips, techniques and tutorials and have written fantastic books on jQuery too.

BrushKing

While not exactly a web design focused site this is still a must see for web designers. It’s a Photoshop brush site with loads of free brushes. There’s always that one brush that you can plop into a web page and just add that little bit of extra wow. The quality of most of the brushes is stunning.

Web Design Ledger

Web Design Ledger or WDL for short is a web design knowledge and resources site. It’s another one of those fully loaded blogs that you can absorb information and inspiration from for hours. If you need a break from Smashing Magazine, check out Web Design Ledger.

COLOURlovers

Colour is so important, and COLOURlovers have got it covered. It’s basically a social media colour palette sharing site. Users share their colours, palettes, patterns and trends with the COLOURlovers community. The site is a great first step in the early design phase. They also oddly spell Colour correctly and incorrectly throughout the site.

Nettuts +

This is another one of those massive resource sites out there that offers free content and premium content. Nettuts + is only part of their huge tutorial network. If you need information on a topic or just want to get exposed to new techniques and ideas than this is the place to go.

A List Apart

This list would not be complete without A List Apart. I my opinion this site is the de facto authority on best web practices and techniques. Many of the well known techniques used today originated on A List Apart. Although they don’t post near as much as some of the other sites listed here, the content is almost always top notch. The topics cover code, content, culture, design, process and user science. A lot of well known industry leaders and thinkers have written for A List Apart.

Did I miss something?

If you think there is some awesome super duper resource that is missing from this list including your own site, please don’t hesitate to post it below in the comments.

My new design is larger in every aspect. Larger width, bigger fonts, fatter masthead, more prominent navigation and taller footer. I also wanted to simply the site. I found the old site was too busy and parts of it always felt like after thoughts. This time around I made a concentrated effort to layout almost everything in Photoshop before hand and then mark it up all on a static HTML page before applying WordPress tags. Headers, block quotes, preformatted text, comments, twitter posts, form fields, buttons and images were all visually tested in Photoshop first. In the past I have done all the graphic elements and worried about things like form and comment styling afterwords. There is something to be said for both approaches, and I don’t think one has more merit than the other, but I wanted to really feel this new design from the start. No after thoughts. That said, I did end up tweaking a few elements and even forgetting to Photoshop a few parts, and there will always be future additions that are after thoughs, but I think I started with a solid base. I’ve tried to keep my layout flexible enough to anticipate future fine tuning.

A new design and a new focus

With the new design comes a new focus. In the future I will be writing more in depth tutorials and content. I will be posting less banter and chatter, that’s what Twitter is for. That doesn’t mean I won’t still have the occasional gadget review or rant, but expect a lot more web related content. I also hope to post some YouTube tutorials if I ever get up the courage.

Why Flash sucks — most of the time

Flash usually sucks because it is used in places where it’s not needed, breaks usability basics, or tries to deliver a rich media experience to people who don’t care. Lets face it, most of us are not coming to a site to see Flash animations, flashy enter pages and load dialogues; sure this was impressive 5 to 8 years ago, but most of us are over it now. I remember animating menus, playing with collision and elastic algorithms I found on the web and drooling at the newest Flash in the Can awards which are still pretty impressive. It was really cool and fun, and there are a lot of places where this will still fly if done right, your website may not be one of them.

Flash sites have to be better than awesome

The only flash sites that will ever hold my attention are ones that are unbelievably clever or awesome on a huge scale, and even if you qualify in both these areas you have to get your users to stay at your site long enough for it to load and initialize. The point I’m trying to make is if you are going to use flash, you better have a good reason for it, you need to be a fantastic flash guru, and it better be freaken phenomenal.

Information, content is still king on the web

People like cool screen savers, even little visual touchy feely apps are getting very popular on handhelds like the iPhone, but when people are searching the web they usually are looking for information. That information is best found in plain text. Google and most of the other search engines index plain text on your site, if it’s content people want they will most likely find your site via Google or some other search engine. Yes Adobe is working hard with search engine providers to make Flash more search engine friendly, but we are not there yet, and even when we are a lot of my reasons for not using flash will still be valid.

I remember several years ago people were talking about high speed bandwidth and how we would be able to use as many graphics and as much Flash and rich multimedia as we craved. Yet here we are and the web is more text heavy than ever. RSS feeds are gaining popularity daily, and in some cases you are seeing less graphics, not more. Why? Because content is king, and so is searchability. There is a whole package to developing a fantastic website and Geeks In Training has a great article called Developing websites — structure, content, and design that delves into this deeper, but we are going to limit ourselves to Flash here.

Flash has changed the web

There is no doubt, Flash has changed the web, and mostly for the better, but it has done it in ways no one could have imagined several years ago. It hasn’t changed how we navigate the web, it hasn’t changed the fundamental structure, or usability, although I would say it has hurt usability when used poorly.

Flash has obviously changed how most of us view video online. It’s also added rich content in what I like to call Flash modules. I define a Flash module as a tiny piece of a website that is Flash based. This could be an advertisement, a video, interactive graphs, a game or application. This is where flash really shines.

Where Flash fails

Full on Flash websites are where things get ugly. I remember visiting a then famous Flash site called Gabocorp in 1997. It blew us all away, us being any web designer / student I knew at the time. I have found an archived version of the original Gabocorp website. I remember this thing took forever to load on my Pentium 133 and chugged and stuttered away as I watched the animation in awe at 3 frames per second. It even held this bold statement:

You are about to enter a new era in website design. This is the new standard for all things to come.

Welcome to the new Gabocorp.

Go

What we have here is a splash / enter page and a Go button, both considered bad by today’s standards. I don’t want to bash this site though, at the time it was jaw dropping and completely innovative, but the web was mostly geeks back then and there was nothing on this site that came anywhere close to what we see today, it was just cool because it was a new technology used in a way we had never seen before and for no other reason. The time when things are cool just because they are Flash is long gone. Yes people are still doing amazing things with it, but for mainstream sites Flash is usually an add-on component.

This brings me back to Flash portfolios, when we look for new web developers and designers we want to see great usability, standards compliant code and an engaging site that we don’t have to sit there and figure out. As soon as you have to explain what a button does (click the cool little animated thingy and drag it to the box) you fail. You have lost me and you have definitely lost Google and the majority of search engines indexing your site. You’ve probably lost all of your less tech savvy users too.

So let get back to basics, the web is not TV, although we may watch TV on it, we expect the containing site to be usable in all the ways that we are used to. I think the topic of usability can scare off some designers, but usability in some ways is easier than design. Design is an art and it’s subjective. Having your site practice good SEO and accessibility for everyone is not subjective, it either works or does not, and you can measure this through your website analytics software.

Usability, usability, usability

Right now Flash sites do not work on iPhones and other handheld devices, if a fraction of your visitors could be coming from these devices than you effectively have zero usability on these platforms. When these devices do support flash there will still be major limitations like file size, download speeds, tiny screens and limited processor power to deal with. Good usability is also even more important on a small screen, so use Flash wisely; impress without sending all your search engine traffic away and give people the great content, applications and experience they came for. Make that experience last past the load screen.

You can see more pictures on Engadget of both the desktop and the laptop. I only wish I could get this sucker with Windows XP, I am not a fan of Vista. The desktop comes with a 500GB hard drive, 3GB memory, Wi-Fi,  built in camera, wireless keyboard and all the expected bells and whistles including high performance with the exception of a great grpahics card, you get the Intel GMA X4500HD. There are three models to choose from ranging in size from 20 to 25 inch. Here is a first look YouTube video.

Another thing that makes a setup like this great and no one gets this more than Apple is the clean look. Unfortunately, this baby will come plastered with tacky stickers all over it and these things are not fun to peel off. Why on earth they would do this to such a beautiful machine is beyond me, but this is the way every windows machine works. The same can be said for cellphone branding. How come apple is the only manufacturer that does not uglify their hardware? Here is the Sony Desktop uglified with tacky stickers.

Anyway, after peeling off the stickers and upgrading to Windows XP, this system should be pretty sweet. Will wait to see this baby in the stores, but I’m still leaning ever further towards a Mac these days. My next computer upgrade is still a ways off, but it’s nice to see windows machines getting the Apple type treatment.

Lately E Ink has been getting a lot of press. Earlier this month Esquire showed off the worlds first ever E Ink magazine cover. This brought visions of the science fiction film Minority Report to many people and an environmental disaster in the making for others. There are also many e-readers being released with iRex to introduce a 10.2-inch E Ink reader next week. Although I love the technology, I think the current vision of E Ink by the press and blog sphere is somewhat flawed.

Minority report animated paper

Every where I read about E Ink I hear things like “Will this replace paper” and “This will allow for a more print / newspaper friendly layout”. These are all flawed concepts to me. It reminds me of other great technological advances like “Will the TV replace radio” or “Will the Internet replace TV”. Yes some of these technologies merged and can be used over the Internet, but no technology replaced the other. We still listen to the radio, whether it is satalite radio in our car, FM, or streaming radio, and we all certainly still watch television. We also use the web in the way it was envisioned also.

The grid

My art teacher would shoot me for saying this as she felt that the failure to adhere to a print like grid was a major failing of the web. I on the other hand believe it is a major advancement, I really hope that we don’t resort back to old fashioned print style layouts. This was done on paper because there was a finite amount of space and paper costs money so you have to use it all up. Writing content to fit little boxes isn’t fun. Anyone who has had to create print style web layouts knows this, it usually doesn’t work. The wonderful thing about a digital display is that you have a liquid medium and unlimited paper. The text can be as long as you want and flow around images and boxes according to font size or display type. With CSS you even have the power to display the content in different formats, independent from the layout. This allows web designers to support many different platforms, and make sites usable for the visually impaired.

If e-readers do take off, and I think they will, I really hope that print changes to be more like the web, and not the other way around, it’s a far more flexable approch. It’s also only a matter of time before touch sensitive E Ink displays will be the norm, why lock it down to old fashioned design principals. Will I even have to click/touch my way to page 5 to continue the story? Maybe we can even add E Mess to the reader itself so that when you hold your reader for a long time your fingers become all soiled just like with a real newspaper.

A land fill nightmare, why?

While everyone was praising Esquire for bringing magazines into the 21st century did anyone stop to think of the environmental implications? This is a little more serious than my first grip; why do we have this disposable attitude towards everything? Here we have this fantastic reusable technology, but we want to turn it into a throw away medium? Don’t we have enough garbage clogging the landfills already. I know we can recycle newspapers, but I’m not so sure about E Ink, and recycling costs a lot of money. Why bother when we can just re-use the technology. Once everyone has an e-reader they can just wirelessly download their favourite newspaper.

If papers had to stay old fashioned with their multi-columned mess, companies could even deliver content in multiple formats. Lets hope that every time we read a newpaper or magazine in the future we are not dropping batteries by the boatload into our garbage cans as we step off the subway for work. It should be about reusability, not a throw away technology.

Cost

The cost is the last major hurdle. Right now really popular readers cost anywhere from 300 to 1000 dollars. This is just too much for the average Joe. The new 10.2 inch iRex reader to be released next week clocks in at $850 for the high end model with Wi-fi, Bluetooth and 3G. Couple that with the fact that a lot of people don’t even get through a book a month and the cost of buying physical books is still a lot cheaper.

E-readers will have to get a lot more competitive or offer features that we can’t live without. Right now the average smartphone / laptop can do everything an e-reader can do, and in colour. The only real advantages an e-reader has is a screen that can be seen in bright daylight and long battery life, not enough for a lot of people, but if you read lots of books it can be worth it. I think back to breaking my back with college and university books; an e-reader would have come in handy back then.

The future is electronic paper

That said I do think the future is in electronic paper. Like any technology it is still in its infancy. Some day in the near future refresh rates which are pretty slow right now will be faster and the technology will be available in colour as E Ink has already demonstrated. I could even see monitors switching to this technology someday.

Like it or not here it comes

This week Facebook is in the process of migrating all of it’s users over to the new design whether they like it or not, and right now there is a lot of kicking and screaming going on. Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows I love a good rant, but I don’t really get it this one.

I switched to the new Facebook when it was optional and never switched back. One of my biggest beefs with the old Facebook was how narrow it was. It was smaller than any site I visit and there was really no need for it, it’s not 1999 and there are mobile versions for smaller hand held devices. As for usability, I never really got the old or new design and still have trouble finding things, but I’m not a power user of Facebook. I’m sure if I used it everyday it would become second nature to me as will this new design for all the power users out there.

That said, protests are popping up all over the web over the past few days. Mashable has a list of 10 petitions you can sign and a way to temporarily get the old facebook back. So if that tickles your fancy check it out.

Take a deep breath

Will Facebook bow to pressure and change the design? Highly unlikely, this design probably took a lot of effort and research. The majority of people won’t care, and when you hear numbers thrown around like hundreds of thousands of people hate the new design, take it with a grain of salt. Lets not forget that this is Facebook, one of the most visited sites in the world with over 100 million active users worldwide, a few hundred thousand users is nothing, and even a million users is only 1%.

What I think will most likely happen here is people will have their little tantrum and then continue on using Facebook. Within a few weeks we won’t even remember the great Facebook protests of 2008.

Custom user created themes?

This got me thinking about customization; how open is Android going to be? Is it open to developers and carriers, or everyone, even the end users? If it’s really truly open one would think that anyone could develop a UI for it. Skinning Android could be very fun indeed and we could finally have truly personalized phones similar to the glory days of the Winamp mp3 player and the thousands of user created skins that arrived on an almost daily basis.

I would love to create custom skins/themes for Android and I’m sure a lot of others would too and Android is skinnable. Many people customize their operating systems, media players, browsers and even handheld gaming devices. Imagine the creativity we would see if Android was easily skinnable! We would see the typical OS clones and no doubt iPhone skins, but we would also see some truly original and creative designs. Will this be a possibility with Android? Most likely to some degree, but how easy will it be on a locked phone? We all know how most carriers like to make you feel like it’s not even your phone and fill it with their branding. I really hope Android is the OS that changes the industry. When we buy a phone it is ours, we should be able to do as we please with it.

Related:

• Android Android Android!everyone’s talking about Android
• Give me Android, Give me “commitment to openness” – Google gets it!
  

Openmoko is open.
Open to life, desire, function, and simple beauty. Never closed, perfect, or complete. An empty vessel, ready to be filled with your ideas.

Openmoko is truly Open Source, even the physical phone is open—anyone can download the actual CAD files and design their own phone. Openmoko has a GNU/Linux OS base. This project almost has a pro hobby feel to it, something you can build, design, and program from the ground up. The current developer phone has all the bells and whistles you would expect from a touch phone.

Size and Weight
4.75 x 2.44 x 0.73 inches
6.5 ounces (185 grams)

Display
Touch Screen
2.8″ VGA (480×640) VGA Screen

Speed
ARM9 @ 400 MHz
2D/3D Graphics Acceleration

GSM
Tri band 850/1800/1900 MHz
Tri band 900/1800/1900 MHz

Power
Removable 1200 mAh battery

Memory
128MB SDRAM
256MB NAND Flash
microSD Slot

Input and Output
Input and Output
2.5 mm audio jack
GPS external connector

Hardware Highlights
Wi-Fi (802.1 1b/g)
AGPS
GPRS (2.5G not EDGE)
Bluetooth 2.0
3axis Motion Sensors (2)

Software Highlights
Openmoko GNU/Linux-based
100% FOSS on CPU
GNU/Linux development tools

(specifications are from OpenMoko website)

You can already get the developers version of the phone, and it costs around $400. You can order it in Canada through Koolu or you can order it from the Openmoko site. Koolu says due to large demand it will take 2 to 3 weeks to ship, so obviously this phone has a market.

I think it’s great to see more phones like this. It should greatly help innovation, along with Googles Android and now even Nokia’s Symbian being opened up. I will definetly keep my eye on this one, there is also a consumer level phone on the way.

See Wired for more information in Openmoko Neo FreeRunner on Sale July 4 and Design Your Own Cellphone With OpenMoko.

How do you know when a site has done things right? Well the obvious ones are that it looks professional and is nicely designed, but these are both subjective, especially when it comes to design. What I think looks great, you might think looks like garbage. I can tell you how many times I’ve sent mock-ups for friends to critique only to find out that half of them love it and half don’t. This is why the look of the site should take a back seat to usability, but you also have to remember that good design can lead to good usability.

How many times have you been on a website, it looks great, its got what you want, but you are still left there scratching your head and clicking away trying to figure out where something is. This may be as simple as how do I comment on this post, or how do I add this to my shopping cart, or it could be more serious, like why is this form not excepting my postal code! A site should never annoy it’s users, I cringe when I see a form that says enter your postal code and then explains what format it should be in. People know what format their postal code should be in, don’t explain it to them.

Take for example my postal code, M8V 3X6. I should be able to type this as M8V-3X6, M8V 3X6, M8V3X6 or m8v3x6. The regular expression validation is simple for this, and there is really no excuse to allow only one of the mentioned formats, yet I see this all the time. Same goes for telephone numbers. If you have a format you prefer you should convert the data into your preferred format. Strip out the spaces and hyphens or add them, but don’t make the user do it.

Get a different perspective

I would love to be a fly on the wall (I was going to try and be witty and say a fly on the web until I realized the obvious implications) watching a users frustration in some of these scenarios and recording how many lost sales or even return visits this might cause. I’m sure it’s quite high. The problem is, sometimes it’s hard to notice bad usability on a website until you run across it. It’s even harder to notice it on your own site.

As designers and developers, while we build our sites we become so engrossed in the process that it becomes hard to notice the user experience at all. We are so intimately involved that we develop a blindness to it. You probably type in the exact page you want while working, or rapidly click through to your destination. Your user isn’t intimately involved in your site, and you have to try to pull yourself back, put yourself in the shoes of a new user, get a different perspective.

Obviously the best thing to do is to get other people to try out your site. For the same reasons it’s probably good to have testers who were not involved in the development of the site, it’s probably equally important to have regular users play around with the site for usability. Testing is usually taken pretty serious in larger companies, but I doubt usability ranks as high. What about small companies or private individuals that don’t have these resources at all? This is where paying attention to your own surfing habits can help.

Recognizing a good user experience

Obviously we can learn what not to do by a bad user experience, but I think it’s equally important to recognize a great user experience. Try to take note the next time you order something online or use a complicated website not only what annoys you, but also what is good about the experience. It’s so easy to throw your arms up in the air and say “This site sucks”, but when you are on a fantastic site it’s very easy to overlook that fact. Why is the site fantastic? Why do you like it? Why is it so easy to use? Take mental notes, and keep these idea’s for your own work.

Learn from excellence and apply it to your own sites

When you see a site doing something that you feel is working, ask yourself if your site is doing the same? The answer may be no. You might have that eureka moment when you realize that you have a really convoluted sign up form, or your navigation is hard to use. This may only be triggered by seeing it done better elsewhere, but the key is to recognize this.

A place where I have found a consistently bad user experience is restaurant websites and online ordering systems. When someone comes to a restaurant site, there is only a handful of things they probably want. A menu, a phone number, or an ordering system. Most of this should be simple, but an online food ordering system can be a pretty complex experience. You need to be able to navigate the site easily, add and remove items, and even customize order toppings and side dishes. I have seen one restaurant ordering system that literally looked like an excel spreadsheet of form fields, now that’s appetizing.

Now we know we don’t like the site at all, but could we do better? Maybe we visit a site that is similar with a much better user experience but fail to notice it. What’s bad is if we fail to notice that our own site has a bad user experience. Because you are so intimately involved with it, it seems easy to you. This is where a great site will help you enormously.

I rarely order from online ordering sites because of the hoops I have to jump through, but one exception is a popular rotisserie chicken restaurant we have in Ontario called Swiss Chalet. This site is incredibly satisfying to use. Now if I were designing my own restaurant ordering system I would have something to compare it too. I can see why things are not working on other sites, because this site has done it right. We are more likely to notice and remember a bad user experience, but the sites you do like are the ones you keep going back too.

Putting it all together

You have to be careful not to get carried away. You don’t want to end up ripping off someones site, and just because you like a site doesn’t mean you can’t do better. Take a lot of idea’s from as many sites as possible, this will diversify your site. You can see this happening all over the web. There is a natural progression of people innovating and adding new idea’s which soon become standard practice on whatever particular demographic you are looking at.

There are also countless online resources on usability, things that are no-brainers and standard practices. Things like underlined text should always be a link, or a link should be readable out of context to the surrounding text (see my article called “Click Here!”). Accessibility and SEO also all benefit from good usability. Always pay attention to what annoys you and what works, because while you browse the web, you are a perfect usability tester and can gain a wealth of knowledge.

Related:

• Usability — the date is very important
• Click Here!