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Web Design & Development

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Why You Should Not Use “Click Here” For Links

Click Here

Using “Click Here” on a link can affect how users experience your interface.

“Click” Puts Too Much Focus on Mouse Mechanics

Using the word “click” on your links takes the user’s attention away from your interface and on to their mouse. Users know what a link is and how to use a mouse. It’s unnecessary to call attention to the mechanics when clicking a link. Doing so diminishes their experience of your interface because it momentarily takes their focus away from it. Instead of focusing on the interface and its content, “click here” diverts their attention to the user and their mouse. Not to mention, you can also make them feel dumb by suggesting that they don’t know what a link is or how to use a mouse.

Instead of using the word “click”, look for a different verb you can use that relates to the user’s task. There’s always a better and more relevant verb to use than “click”. “Click” makes users think of their mouse. But a task-related verb makes users think of their task. It keeps users engaged with the content and focused on using the interface, not their mouse.

“Here” Conceals What Users are Clicking

Some links don’t use the word “click”, but instead they use the word “here”. The problem with using “here” in a link is that it conceals what the user is clicking. You may have text around the link that explains what they’re clicking, but when users read the link itself they won’t have a clue. This means that users have to read the text all around the link to understand the context of the link. This impedes users from taking the quick and short route of clicking the link directly because they have to read the surrounding text first. If there’s a lot of text, this could slow users down a lot.

Not only that, but If you have multiple links that say “here”, “here” and “here”. the user is going to have trouble differentiating between each link. The user has to open each of them to see how they’re different. If they want to refer back to a particular source, they have to remember which “here” link it belongs to. This forces them to have to use recall over simple recognition. What you should do instead is label your links with something that describes what the user is clicking so that it makes different links easier to distinguish.

Read more and see examples at https://uxmovement.com/content/why-your-links-should-never-say-click-here//

The new, larger version of the Internet: IPv6

The next version of the Internet begins rolling out today.

The problem is that the current Internet addressing system, IPv4, only has room for about 4 billion addresses. The internet needs more IP addresses. IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol and expands the number of available addresses to a virtually limitless amount–340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.

Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites

social-media-icons

Check to see if your desired username or vanity url is still available at dozens of popular Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites. Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites.

5 Free Tools To Look For Username Availability On Multiple Social Networks:

 

STOP SOPA – Web Goes On Strike

SOPA Strike

January 18th, 2012 is the largest online protest in history, to stop the internet censorship bills, SOPA & PIPA. Join in by blacking out your site and urging everyone you can reach to contact Congress now.

See how other websites protest against SOPA

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

Watch SOPA video to learn more

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

SOPA is an anti-piracy bill working its way through Congress…

House Judiciary Committee Chair and Texas Republican Lamar Smith, along with 12 co-sponsors, introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act on October 26th of last year. Debate on H.R. 3261, as it’s formally known, has consisted of one hearing on November 16th and a “mark-up period” on December 15th, which was designed to make the bill more agreeable to both parties. Its counterpart in the Senate is the Protect IP Act (S. 968).

The language in SOPA implies that it’s aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that’s why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly.

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate are backed by the movie and music industries as a means to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods by non-U.S. websites. Hollywood studios want lawmakers to ensure that Internet companies such as Google share responsibility for curbing the distribution of pirated material.

A legislative push led by the Washington-based Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business-lobbying group, has run into a backlash from Web companies that say the bills would saddle them with new liabilities and technology mandates.

SOPA is, objectively, an unfeasible trainwreck of a bill, one that willfully misunderstands the nature of the internet and portends huge financial and cultural losses. The White House has come out strongly against it. As have hundreds of venture capitalists and dozens of the men and women who helped build the internet in the first place. In spite of all this, it remains popular in the House of Representatives.

Some of the internet’s most influential sites—Reddit and Wikipedia among them—are going dark to protest the much-maligned anti-piracy bill.

Google SOPA strike

Google SOPA Strike

Wikipedia SOPA strike

Wikipedia SOPA Strike

Learn More about SOPA

  • Information on H.R.3261 – Stop Online Piracy Act at OpenCongress.org
  • Information on S.968 PROTECT IP Act at OpenCongress
  • Read more about SOPA web strike

Best Social Media Icon Sets

Collection of Social Media Icon Sets

Clean Black And White Social Media Icon Set
A great simple clean black and white social media icon set perfect to be used within minimalism designs. The icon set is available to be used within commercial and non commercial design projects to enjoy.

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A Free Mini Simple Social Media Icon Set
A great free simple minj social media icon set perfect for minimalistic website designs, each icon within the set is 64 pixel by 64 pixels.

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SocialMate: 28 Free Social Media Icons
SocialMate is a free, exclusive set of 28 social media icons for your website and design projects. These icons come in 2 variations for use on dark and light backgrounds.

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Mini Social Icon Set
Mini Social Icon Set, 25 Layered Social Icons In PNG JPG & PSD Format.

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16 Free Blueprint Social Media Icons
Blueprint Social is a set of 16 free icons for major social. In this version it features Facebook, Twitter, Google, Delicious, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Design float, WordPress, RSS, Furl, Mixx, Blogger, DeviantArt, Linkedin, Vimeo.

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Wooden Social: Free Icon Set
This free icon set, by WordPressThemeShock, consisting of 10 icons for social media sites, as well as common content-sharing icons like an RSS feed icon and an email icon.

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LinkDeck, Icon Pack
The LinkDeck icon pack can be used in both personal and commercial projects. Available sizes: 256×256, 128×128, 64×64, 32×32 and 16×16

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Free Icons Set: Social Media

This Set includes 50 beautifully designed icons for popular social websites.

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Circle Social Media Icons

This set contains some outstanding Circle Social Media Icons.

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IC Minimal Icon Set
IC Minimal Icon Set with original PSD file included.

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A Clean Noise Social Media Icon Set

This is a great icon set which we created playing with the Photoshop blending options and filters. The icon set is available to be used in commercial and non commercial design projects, therefore I hope you are able to put these icons to good use.

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Say No to SOPA

STOP SOPAUnited States H.R.3261 AKA the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an ill-conceived lobbyist-driven piece of legislation that is technically impossible to enforce, cripplingly burdensome to support, and would, without hyperbole, destroy the internet as we know it.

Opponents of the bill now before the U.S. House of Representatives include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Yahoo!, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Tumblr, Etsy, Reddit, Techdirt, Wikimedia Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The bill is supporters include Hollywood, media firms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and their lobbyists, who have spent over $91 million to push this new law through.

Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) brought SOPA to the U.S. House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. The bill expands the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.

If passed, SOPA will allow corporations to block the domains of websites that are “capable of” or “seem to encourage” copyright infringement. Once a domain is blocked, nobody can access it, unless they’ve memorized the I.P. address.

For example if you post a link to the story on your Facebook wall. Under SOPA, all of Facebook can be blocked. To avoid this fate, Facebook would be responsible for policing the copyright status of every piece of content its users post. The same happens with search engines, which to avoid being shut down, Google and Bing would be responsible for policing the copyright ownership of every piece of content they index. [Read more…] about Say No to SOPA