Textures are one of the most used resources in making great designs. They can accentuate your images to better portray the feel of the design you’re aiming for. Vintage textures, for instance, can add a classic or nostalgic touch to your work.

Go check them out >

I’ve never used IE6 for anything other than “making sure something looks OK in it.” Therein lies my point. It’s fine to state “Death to IE6” and I fully support not supporting Internet Explorer 6, but that’s not a realistic option for most of the web designers out there. Myself included. When was the last time someone said, “You know, I don’t really care if my website looks different in other browsers.” It’s never happened to me. Never. And it probably never will, because website owners do not want to risk ostracizing their users. Who can blame them?

Are there alternatives that you can use to ensures that your IE6 users, no matter how few or many, will get a similar experience as the rest of your more standards-based browser users? Yes. Web designers have figured out plenty of options to serve up style sheets for Internet Explorer versions that are less standards-capable. I prefer the conditional comments solution.

In a perfect world could you neglect outdated Internet Explorer versions? Of course. However, the reality is enough users still use the outdated browsers that just completely neglecting them would mean cutting a percentage of traffic that you may not be able to afford to lose. Can you serve up a stripped down version for outdated browsers? Sure. If your website will still function properly for those users, you should not be afraid to give them a simpler design with less ‘bells and whistles’ in place. If the design and site still look and function how they’d expect then they will never know they are missing out unless you tell them.

Continue reading at A List Apart

The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was Forgot Password.

We may have all seen this sort of form on any number of e-commerce sites. It’s there to help returning customers checkout quicker and direct new customers to sign-up to speed along future purchases. Seems harmless right?

I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.

New users often resent having to register for your site just to make a purchase. When you enter a brick-and-mortar store they don’t force you to register for their mailing lists before you can complete your transaction. Of course they ask – that’s to be expected.

Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.

Because many of the returning customers could not remember their email addresses and passwords used when originally signing up they resorted to creating a new account which in turn artificially inflated the database of users. Even many of the customers that requested their passwords did not go on to make a purchase presumably out of frustration with the process.

The Solution?

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

Such a simple solution with the added benefit of eliminating a needless button.

And the results

The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

So $300,000,000 from realigning the way your form worked to cause less headache for your users. Are there any places on your site that might be costing you money? Not sure? User testing and asking your customers would be a great way to find out.

Read the whole story

I’ve even added the ability to update your RSS and email subscription options using FeedBurner. You can check out more details at the ThemeForest website or by going to www.thebetterblogger.com