Friendship [and a web site] can be like a bowl of wax fruit: beautiful until you bite into it [try to use it.] Web site visitors can be divided into multiple camps: buyers vs browsers; students vs teachers; readers vs. watchers and on and on. Critical to web site success is the division between USERS…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC “All the talk of getting my words out of mere electricity and onto sturdy disks had lulled me into the notion that the disks were actually sturdy. Now they suddenly seemed quite fragile.” – William Zinsser “Writing with Word Processor” While not the sexiest and certainly not the…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC 1. Backup at the same frequency as changes 2. Finding the “Contact Us” Button This is another seemingly unimportant and often neglected web site concern. While a web site is an asynchronous communication device, it can still facilitate dialog. “Asynchronous” because the message sending and receiving is not…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Backup at the same frequency as changes A Contact Us form with multiple recipients A responsive “mobile” design Responsive web design (RWD) is a web development approach that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website, depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Backup at the same frequency as changes Finding the Contact Us Button A responsive “mobile” design Website Logistics Life’s about logistics. With the right support systems, you can do anything. – Mark S. Burgess In the military, according to Wikipedia, a quartermaster is ”generally a relatively senior soldier…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. – Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean Well-lighted Place” In Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”, we listen in on three men in different stages of their lives from young to middle age to old. Hemingway’s sparse prose and clipped…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Taking a break at the midpoint on my series, Top 10 Website Features I thought I’d keep track and write about a day in the life of a website architect here at Page Mountain LLC, staff of one. I usually hit the desk, coffee in hand, between 6am…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC When was the last time you went into your kitchen for a drink of water and the water glass went from empty to full instantaneously? Have you ever had a vegetable garden as depicted on the 60’s cartoon The Jetsons where you threw a seed into a pot…

by Mark S. Burgess, Page Mountain LLC Who wrote what’s on your website? When was the last time you read through it? As mentioned in earlier editions of this series, human beings in the West, read. They read top-to-bottom, left-to-right; see faces before objects; objects before colors; colors before text and finally text…where they spend…

For the final three parts of this ten part series, you get my client Revelation Worksheet.  Developed over years of building sites for clients, this list helps turn end-of-project surprises into meaningful discussion to catch issues at the beginning. The checklist comes in four parts: Branding and Purpose Website Logistics Presentation Project Management We’ll start…

Website presentation addresses the physical interaction of the site with its visitors