All posts by Brightadmin

UX, Web Development

Is User Experience an ‘added extra’?

I remember a boss of mind telling me, “I know you’re in to the whole UX Design thing, but it’s just not what we do as company, we aren’t geared up for it”.

If you are any kind of web development-aware person, you are probably think, really? Hard to believe, that in this day and age, people believe UX Design is some kind of luxury, some sort of add on, like DAB Radio for a car. That success can be achieved without this new fancy fad.

Ah well that depends on your idea of success, doesn’t it? Bashing out a good looking site in as quick a time as possible is many peoples goals. sadly these people are misguided. You see the web has matured, as has it’s users. We are no longer a generation that is sucked in by cheap promises and sites which drama s much info as possible in front of the user.

A generation has grown up learning how to block off certain signals on websites and applications. They know the setup of the average site and use these common factors to navigate their way across the web. Old, cheap tricks no longer have an effect. The biggest indicator of this is how SEO has been forced to grow up and get smarter but the all knowing Google. Having switched on to the fact SEO specialists were finding holes in the search algorithm and exploiting them for search rankings, Google have stepped up its intelligence in finding and indexing pages with correct practice. Including proper syntax, context and content. The ‘field of dreams’ idea is over (if you build it they will come… You haven’t seen Field of Dreams? Loser).

Well… Not entirely, it would read something more like, if you build it intelligently, they will come. What I mean is, once upon a time, you would build a site and then consider SEO and usability as separate areas. Today they have to be seen as one and be thought of from the word go.

For instance, Google is now paying attention to how long a user is spending on your site. A well structured site, that is easy to use = attention and retention. A site that makes no sense and doesn’t have any targets or aims will fall flat.

User experience is in fact at the very heart of a Website.

Research the user, understand their needs, set some goals, set information priority and set a pathway that achieves this in the most painless way as possible. Better to have an aesthetically challenged site that was easy for the user to use then a good looking site that doesn’t hit its aims and objectives.

And you see thats normally where I find Designers and Web guys that care about UX differ. A designer thinks a good looking site is what matters, when in reality it goes:
1) Content
2) User Experience
3) Aesthetics

Design is last on the list! How a user interacts with your site is most important. I’ve lost count of the times a designer has wanted to add something to my wireframe because he “saw it on another site and it looks cool”.

For a website, user experience is everything. With the user a site useless. It is core to every site.

Web Development

Underrated WordPress Plugins

Long have gone the days when WordPress was seen as a lightweight CMS, it took many years for people to believe they could do more then just with a WordPress install. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you those days are long gone. With the 3.8 update, the core of WordPress has pushed itself once again, forward and (and this is my opinion) has given a definitive answer to the age old debate ‘which CMS is best?’.

There are fanboys of each CMS of course and having spent many years in Joomla (and still do) I have found myself in the last few years preferring WordPress. Why? Well Joomla is a good CMS solution, and it has many decent pre built solutions to use with its core.

So why do I prefer WordPress? Partly personal preference but also because the core allows for a lot of adding in functionality and being able to bend it how you see fit. Which turns a run of the mill site into, well whatever you want your site to be.

To help extend WordPress here are four plugins I’ve found very helpful in some of the complex sites I have built in the past, but perhaps haven’t had the spotlight like the more glamorous plugins.

Advanced Custom Fields
It isn’t often that I will build a WordPress site with whats supplied. It carries the basics but more often then not your custom posts or pages need extra info on them. ACF is brilliant at easily adding whatever extra options are needed on the backend for a post. For instance you could create member profiles. There are also great extras like ‘conditions’. Which is handy for revealing extra options depending on a previous selection, for instance in a member profile, for finding a current town of residence. You could start with which country, which when selected would bring up a selection of cities in the next option.

CPT-onomies
Another great plugin that adds dynamic options on the backend. You can turn a designated custom post into another custom posts taxonomies allowing for dynamic relationships on the fly. For instance, if in creating our member profiles we had a need to add departments, but those departments might change. You can add a ‘department’ custom post, create a department and it would automatically show up on a profiles department selection option.

Posts to Posts
Again another relationship plugin, this one has a slightly different flavour. With this you can basically add a relationship between two posts. Allowing for a ‘related products’ style link but with the option to select specific posts to relate. So you could have a ‘related members’ section at the bottom of our members profile.

Yoast SEO
I think this SEO plugin has become a staple in most peoples builds. It basically is an all singing all dancing SEO solution, allowing for specifics on each post and page as well as some of the standard, site map generation and content analysis insight. Don’t leave home without it.

Add a couple of these plugins together and you can make WordPress do whatever you like.