Nur Ahmad Furlong

Tag: Usability

  • Selling my Web, Strategy, Creativity, Productivity Books

    I’m not a big reader when it comes to novels and function in general, I just find the fantasy a bit of a waste of time to be honest. But when it comes to books covering practical knowledge on the stuff that matters to me, I’m a bit OCD.

    So i’ve been trying to clear out some of the books I haven’t been using in a while and I found a set of real gems from my Web, Strategy, Creativity, Productivity collection. Each of these books has played a major role in helping me get to grips with the range of subjects I need to keep myself informed on as a Web & Creative Professional.

    These books cover a wide range of subjects from Coding & Coding Standards, to Productivity, Time Management, Marketing & Communications Strategy, Web Strategy, Usability, Creative Thinking. The information contained in these books should be enough to get any web novice up to speed with the principles and methods needed to dive straight into the web industry. They’re also a great resource or reference for anyone working in this industry or teaching/presenting on these topics.

    1. The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World
    2. Six Thinking Hats – EDWARD DE BONO
    3. Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity – Edward De Bono
    4. The 4-Hour Work Week and Timothy Ferriss
    5. The Truth about Email Marketing – Jenkins
    6. rework – 37 Signals
    7. don’t make me think – Steve Krug – New Riders
    8. building findable websites – New Riders
    9. Introducing HTML5 – Lawson Sharp – New Riders
    10. Designing for Web Standards – Second Edition – Jeffrey Zeldman
    11. The Ultimate CSS Reference – Sitepoint
    12. A Designer’s Research Manual – Jenn + Ken Visocky O’Grady
    13. eMarketing eXellence – Chaffey Smith – Third Edition
    14. Starting & Running a Successful Consultancy – How To Books
    15. The Art & Science of CSS – Sitepoint
    16. Logo Lounge 2 – Rockport

    I’m planning on selling this entire stash to the highest bidder to make space for some new material.

  • A sniff at a nomad-one redesign

    Being snowed under for way too long as meant that some of the initial elements I wanted to add to the previous re-design of this site were left out. To be honest the design hadn’t lived up to my expectations form the very begining and has some serious usability problems as well. Having lived with version 4 of nomad-one.com for some time now I think a re-design is definitely way overdue. After pondering over where to start for a while I made a few notes ad a few sketches and dove straight into some look & feel mocks in Photoshop. This time I’m planning to develop something which interprets the nomad concept alot more literally, hopefully with a bit of a digital feel in part.

    picture-3

    I’m still at wireframe stage but would appreciate some feedback from anyone out there with regards to the little mockup above and also how you think I should improve on my site based on the current design & layout.

    So I need to know about:

    Colour, Graphic Elements, Layout, Usability, Readability, Functionality and last but not least, Content, the area I think probably needs to most focus.