I have finally read the report and I have to say that it is the most entertaining white paper I have looked at and I am not just saying this as a sarcastic Englishman. The report clearly and concisely names and shames culprits of bad practice. It also gives credit where it is due. Here are a few of the highlights:

• The average score was 57 percent.
• Marks and Spencer topped the survey, scoring 81 percent.
• Clinton Cards was bottom of the heap, scoring only 25 percent. It did not put prices next to selected items so customers did not know how much the order cost them until they reached the checkout.
• Next confuses online shoppers by putting the search bar in different places throughout the site.
• The report accused web designers of vanity when it said visited links nearly always do not change colour except M&S. (This blog is guilty of that mistake too.)
• Debenhams provides clear categories, whereas Game buries them into a cluttered page.
• Navigation between pages is often unclear or incomplete. For example, The Body Shop almost hides its proceed to checkout button in the footer.
• Early Learning Centre has a clear progress indicator telling customers how many steps they will have before the transaction is complete.
• Accessorize does not provide alternative product suggestions in case a customer looks at an item and does not want it.
• Boots estmates the customers’ delivery costs right from the outset.

Following my post about Webcredible’s useability comic, I am very impressed with this agency’s clarity and methodical approach. I expect all the retailers studied will modify their e-commerce sites to make them more user friendly and they will probably make more money as a result. The framework of this study should be built into all e-commerce projects and web design education starting from key stage 3. Non commercial websites will need to use slightly different frameworks. Anyway, technology tends to move much quicker than curricula.

Webcredible is a design consultancy that seek to make websites more useable and accessible. They have produced some great little online comic strips to get the message across, which are fun and easy to follow. My year 8 students have just finished a web design project and I will definitely use this next time around to help them think about these important design issues.

WordPress offers many different themes to change the look and feel of a blog. It is all based on CSS, but some of the newer themes offer support for ajax and javascript sidebar widgets.

I wanted something that was minimal and could be easily tailored without too much CSS pain. After experimentation with hemmednoajax and barthelme I found the WP Andreas theme. So the credit goes to Andreas Viklund. I replaced the banner image with a Shanghai skyline and decluttered the sidebars, setting up widgets to display the logo, links and previous posts.

I wanted my logo to be a fun, line drawing of a cat. I found a few examples from the Internet and Miss Gao produced some images for me to choose from. I chose the one above, but asked her to add the famous Pearl Tower as the cat’s tail. She drew the logo on paper, which I scanned and then edited using Fireworks, Freehand and Paint.net. The scanned image was a bitmap, but I wanted to simplify it by using the trace tool in Freehand. I saved the image as a png file to preserve its transparancy. The trouble with png files is that the file sizes are large and IE 6 does not render the transparency. I had to use Paint.net to fix this by adding a background and converting it into a jpeg. I displayed the logo in a text widget by writing html.

Now my blog has a theme I am not ashamed of, including a logo.