Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Open Source Firewall Appliance Round 2
A few years ago I blogged about using the Untangle firewall to replace a Sonicwall or similar firewall appliance.
Since then, Untangle has come a long way. I would like to revisit the untangle appliance as it has undergone numerous improvements, and in my opinion is now a fully capable replacement for an off-the-shelf firewall appliance.
Getting control of your DNS
DNS is one of those things that everybody uses and nobody thinks about. We all just assume that when we type our website in the address bar and it comes up, then everything is OK.
In reality, the way your business’s DNS is handled can be a gift or a curse. I can’t think of a technology that has been under more security scrutiny lately than DNS. Years after our typical DNS system was thought to be safe, huge exploits have been found having the potential to wreak havoc on large portions of the internet.
Newegg.com’s Usability Blunder
I buy a ton of the computers and IT products for my company through newegg.com. They have always had great prices and rock solid policies.
I tried to make a purchase from them this morning, and much to my astonishment, I couldn’t log into my account. I was sent into an infinite loop between their image verification and log-in scripts. After some investigating, I concluded they are now requiring Firefox users to have network.http.sendRefererHeader set to 1. Many Firefox users, myself and every computer in my company included, set this value to zero, which prevents websites from seeing where you came from. To me this is simply a privacy concern, as it’s nobody else’s business but my own to know the last website I visited. Some anti-spyware software automatically set this value as well, so you may not even know if your is set to zero.
7. If you are using Firefox, type “about:config” in the address bar. Set the “network.http.sendRefererHeader” value to 1.
By requiring the value, newegg is completely preventing a huge number of Firefox users from using their site, and subsequently becoming customers. Not only is this unneeded and is most likely due to some corporate idiot that thinks they can add to the bottom line by tracking users better, but this is an unacceptable coding practice. They have currently lost me as a customer (I can honestly say that it is a sizable loss).
If you own an ecommerce site, don’t ever make changes and requirements that force your customers to lower their privacy standards or lower their browser security. I promise that you will lose customers as a result of making changes like this. This is completely fixable, but at the expense of your own privacy. I’m surprised that newegg would do this given that a huge number of their customers, if not the majority, are tech savvy shoppers who are likely to also block referrers.
Book Review – Prioritizing Web Usability
In the world of web usability, one name comes to mind above all others: Jakob Nielson. His recent book in conjunction with Hoa Loranger is titled Prioritizing Web Usability.
Jakob Nielson runs the website useit.com and holds a Ph.D. in user interface design/computer science from the Technical University of Denmark.
Amazon.com Description:
In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web—Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling usability guru is back and has revisited his classic guide, joined forces with Web usability consultant Hoa Loranger, and created an updated companion book that covers the essential changes to the Web and usability today. Prioritizing Web Usability is the guide for anyone who wants to take their Web site(s) to next level and make usability a priority! Through the authors’ wisdom, experience, and hundreds of real-world user tests and contemporary Web site critiques, you’ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design and layout, content design, and more!
Prioritizing Web Usability, is easy to follow and can help website owners to improve the usability of just about any site in existence. Although it is a book, it works as a guide giving specific examples of what works and what doesn’t. You never have to read from front to back to get useful information. It is interesting enough that it would be easy to read from front to back, but it is easy to use the book only on the specific areas of your website that you want to work on.
This book is an excellent compliment to Jakob’s earlier book, Designing Web Usability, which is also a must read for anyone involved in web design, SEO, online marketing and other related fields.
While this book is very thorough and detailed about usability on a site level, it goes beyond simple usability on a website. Topics such as optimizing and pricing pay per click ads, ad placement click rates, actual reasons to improve a website, writing content, detecting and using specific information such as user connection speed, and hundreds of other topics.
Everything topic in the book is thoroughly explained, and backed with specific examples and statistics where appropriate. Overall, this could be the only resource a savvy website owner needs to make their website very usable.
How to apply this book to your website:
Starting from the area that plays a top three role in importance on most websites, formatting submission forms on your website. The books explains exactly how your forms should look and be formatted, so that they are easy to use and well understood.
Next moving to the actual products that you sell, you can see specific examples of the best way to lay out categories and individual products on your site. You will learn how to write good product descriptions, and while you are writing content, Jakob tells you how to write good content for the rest of your site.
Now, you can clean up your global navigation, and optimize your search function on your website.
After standardizing your links, and making your text more readable, you can get rid of that extra flash that you really don’t need, as well as those pop-up windows that really don’t do anything for you.
Finally, after checking through the usability killers that Jakob outlines, you have a usable, cleanly formatted and professional website. You can now go out and focus on your marketing and driving traffic to your site, knowing that if you don’t have any sales, it’s not the fault of your website’s usability.
A Personal Note:
What I really like about Jakob’s beliefs and standards is that he bashes the heavy use of graphics and media that is commonly seen on websites. While I often take criticism from people by following his advice and not using a lot of images in the layout of my sites, the results truly speak for themselves.
Other Books I Highly Recommend:
Designing Web Usability
Don’t Make Me Think
The Big Red Fez
Bulletproof Web Design
Defensive Design For The Web