The Mental Game of Debugging

10 suggestions for helping to find and fix bugs in software. Your results may vary, I’m still having trouble with pipchip.

Estimating software costs

If you can’t guess how much that next development project will cost, here’s an attempt to make it science.

Lighthouse - The doubts about Vignette

I love hearing stuff like this:

Vignette - and rivals like Interwoven TeamSite and Broadvision - still often run a poor second to the do-it-yourself solution. You see, the core content management task is relatively simple: create a database schema in a robust relational database, shove your content into it and whack on a front-end interface to manage elements such as workflow.

Hey, we do that!

Avoiding the Abandoned Shopping Cart

Mark Hurst takes issue with solving the problem of abandoned shopping carts by adding more technology, rather than making things simpler. A Wall Street Journal article instigated it. I’m with Mark.

I own an HP printer and CD-RW. The site sucked. They’ve [

improved the HP site a great deal.](http://www.hp.com/country/us/eng/prodserv.htm)

navigation evolution

A brief study of one successful site’s changes in the way they display (expose) product categories from the home page.

The Jakob Nielsen Drinking Game

Love him or hate him, you’ll get drunk playing this.

On interpreting access statistics

This article is pretty old, but does “hit” on the problems with using web server statistics to measure people, which is what everone wants to do.

Personalization so rarely works that it’s almost always a bad idea to attempt implementing it.

This article from lighthouse discusses this, and points to some Forrester Research studies which seem to support that fact.

Who Says Design Should Be Simple?

This newmedia.com article by Andy Ihnatko discusses some of the ideas behind/beneath Nielsen’s book. He’s right - everyone should read it. Not because it’s gospel, but because it will make you think a little more.