CSS3, Pagerank, and UX Analytics – The Monday March 21st Roundup

Well that was an eventful week. With the help of PublicInsite and Webshare we’re now offering a variety of new services and that means a redesign of the Monday Roundup. For those who are new to this, the Monday Roundup is exactly what it sounds like: a roundup of posts from the previous week. (or so) I conglomerate these together into four categories: creating content, attracting visitors, analyzing usage, and optimizing for action.

This week we have a host of posts ranging from using CSS3 pragmatically to pagerank to UX Analytics.

Create

• We start the week with a post from an old favorite of mine: Smashing Magazine. This one is on styling elements with glyphs, sprites and pseudo-elements. “Glyphs? Sprites? What kind of Celtic fantasy mumbo-jumbo is this?” you say. Glyphs are special characters which are included within unicode. They take very little bandwidth, scale evenly, which is great. However, changing fonts may change the image. More interesting is his use of javascript, content, and pseudo-elements to create CSS sprites. Very clever and compatible.
• Following up on that, Six Revisions has a guide to embracing and using CSS3 pragmatically. This includes progressive enhancement, using site data to make decisions and more.

Attract

• Bronto Blog has a post on CAN-SPAM vs. best practices. The gist is that, regardless of the law, ISP’s will start blocking your email if their users are saying that it is spam. You know, they’re right. CAN-SPAM sets a MINIMUM legal precedent, you still have to be responsible to your readers.
• SEO by the Sea has a post comparing the original Page Rank patent to the latest. Of particular note is a passage in the new patent talking about annotating links with their page rank. Cool.

Analyze

• So the big Google news last week was that Google Analytics V. 5 was announced. Hit up the link to sign up for the GA V5 Beta.
• Our friends over at Get Elastic have a great post on how to measure your site performance. Included are competitive intelligence tools, backlink performance tools and more.

Optimize

• UX Matters, ever the dry-yet-useful blog, has an ever dry-yet-useful post on “UX Analytics”, or the combination of right brained empathic research with left brained analytical research. Some really great stuff in here, including advice on integrating hard data into your soft studies.
• Vandelay Design blog has a post on increasing conversion rates. Tips include dealing with customers, designing contact forms, giving better quotes, and more.