Yahoo Small Business – If you have a single web minded person in your company do them a favor and DO NOT use yahoo small business. Their backend panel is an absolute mess.

I’m pretty savy with DNS, .htacess, and server side redirects; some of the people working in the tech center trying to guide me through their backend are definitely not.

I’ve got two domains, one is on Yahoo as a merchant account, and the other is on go daddy. We want to mask forward the godaddy account to yahoo. No problem. The problem starts when I want to forward the yahoo url to the same name as the account on go daddy. With another mask forward we create an infinity loop. No good.

My next thought was to mask forward godaddy to yahoo and create a .htaccess file for both URLS to be forwarded to a directory in the root folder say /siteName/. BUT yahoo does not support .htaccess. I asked about IS redirects, but was told this is not a good solution as it does not always work.

The third solution I came up with was to transfer the domain to yahoo and work the files and DNS from there. Not that I thought this would help, as anything I can do from one registrar I ought to be able to do on the next with the right DNS/cname/aname settings. NO DICE! Yahoo cannot accept incoming transfer domains until later this year.

So in closing, wtf do I do to get the client’s website displaying correctly with the proper url in the address bar? The only solution left it to cancel the yahoo account and start again on a new server. This has got to be the worst option available as it means data entry, a second host account, and a waste of my client’s money due to yahoos inability to support effective DNS management.

If anyone has a solution to this issue – I am all ears.
Thank you in advance.

I recently updated the main page of my website with a website for the Art History Department at the University of Hartford. I’m linking to the final mockup I did for them over 3 years ago because the current design is quite different. Actually it’s almost nothing like what I delivered to them. I think its time that I request that they strip the footer of my name where I take credit for the site.

But I do like the original design, though the code is overly complicated, and it uses iframes so for SEO purposes it’s a terrible website. Im going to keep this site on my page as examples of sites that look good (or at least alright), but are really quite terrible for search engines, and usability.

And I won’t feel bad about ragging on the coder in my blogs because the guy who made it was some kid in Massachusetts on summer break 2 years ago, me.

Recently, a client of mine asked me why I have the navigation on the right side of the page on all of my sites, except one. The answers have everything to do with usability. Not to mention the designer in me thinks most sites look better if the navigation is on the right but personal aesthetics should always be secondary to usability, as is the case with the exception to my above rule.

While I was in college I figured that most people are right handed and that having the navigation on the right would feel more natural. It would also reduce the time people spend moving the mouse from navigation to scroll bar and back to navigation to click. It doesn’t take much to push part of the navigation “below the fold” because most people still use a resolution of 800×600. Since that time only two real arguments have surfaced in my five years of web design against this hypothesis.

The first was from old school designers who maintained that navigation on the left is a web standard. They said not to touch it because you’ll only confuse people. I dismissed this as rubbish. A well designed list of links that says thing like home, site map, contact, etc anywhere on the page will be understood to be a navigation bar, be it horizontal or vertical, right or left.

The second argument against a right navigation column centers on the back button being the most used button in most people’s browser (I’ve set my mouse’s thumb button to do it). The argument says that placing the most used buttons (nav bar) on the site next to the most used button on the browser (back button) makes the most sense. Again, I dismiss this as rubbish. A competently built site will have links on every page to the home (if not several) and other navigational aids such as breadcrumb links, anchor tags, a search bar and/or a link to a complete site map on every page. With so many ways to go, why would anyone use the back button to see the same content that they just clicked out of? If they still haven’t found what they were looking for then give them every opportunity to find it as quickly as possible. The back button simply isn’t necessary in a well designed site. Besides, all these other options are on the site which makes them closer to the curser then the back button.

And there are other reasons too. Most people are right handed and their hand naturally is said to move their cursor to the right when they are idle or when they are reading. Another somewhat obscure benefit to putting the nav on the right is to make all of your pages printer friendly. Depending on your printer model it will print the left most 630 – 650 pixels. On left aligned sites this is the nav and the right ¾ of the body. On a right aligned nav page this column is the content and the navigation would get chopped instead.

For a case study on the speed of usability see this article: http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v04/i01/Kalbach/#5. Rarely do I see comprehensive a case study released. It has to do with this little known car company’s website: www.Audi.com.

All this being said, there is still one site I designed with the navigation on the left. The CEO in company didn’t use the internet very much and when I showed him the mockups with he got stuck on the fact that he usually sees navigation on the left. Needless to say the job was completed with the nav on the left as he wanted, and the site works fine. In reality it doesn’t seem to make much difference with most people. So long as the navigation is well thought-out and designed (buttons look like buttons). People will adapt.