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Normally in WP there will be one title throughout your blog, even on individual post pages it will only show the blog title as the title of the page. This is not good for Search Engines.

As usual there is a fix for it, and it’s pretty simple to implement. It’s not a plugin, you just have to replace the existing “title” tag with the “new code” that will make this all happen.

This code will display: 1) The blog_name on the main page 2) the post title on individual post pages and 3) the blog_name + category_name for category pages. Just copy it and replace your existing title tag in the header.php (Your title tag might be in different php file, depending on the theme that you are using).

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ - ‘ ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();}
else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>

Thanks to DailyBlogs for coming up with this solution. I believe this should be integrated to original WordPress themes.

Long awaited Optimus keyboard by Russian designer - Artem Lebedev is taking pre-orders now. The thing that makes this keyboard totally different from others is that, every key has its own display (screen) on top, where you can practically display (assign) any image you want. You can put your own image if you want (try for delete button ;)

Some keys are too far for your fingers? No problem, you can re-assign any letter to any key on the keyboard, making it your special keyboard. Playing games and having hard time to remember shortcut keys? Placing images on the shortcut keys without the confusing letters (as seen on the screenshot) will help you play better HalfLife or your other favorite game.

It’s a great keyboard, but comes with a great price too. It costs approximately USD 1,564! This year about 200 keyboards will be sold, if you pre-order now you will get it at the end of the year (Dec, 2007).

Other Great Features

In Optimus, pressing CapsLock does capitalize all the letters on the keyboard. Isn’t that great? And pressing NumLock replaces the Arrows, Home, End buttons with Numbers (see screenshot below). If you want to see it in action, here is a demo that is done in flash, click here.

Conclusion
It’s great keyboard, but it’s expensive. Nevertheless it’s in my Wish List, I hope next year they can go mass production and achieve some economies of scale and then, it’s my hope that the price will come down.

If you want to know more about Optimus, check their FAQ here. You can pre-order it here.

P.S I have ordered his book on design, called Kodovstvo. It’s a very comprehensive book not only for web design, but for everything, it’s full of tips for designers. (Language: Russian only).

For a normal webdesigner testing the user interface (UI) of the website or the usability of the site is very difficult. Because it costs a lot. First of all you need a lab with at least few PCs, and then you need to find people to test your newly designed site. And you need additional people to observe/record every user’s mouse movements and eye tracking. All these will cost you money.

Fortunately, there is a tool that can do this for free (at least for 7 days). After which the basic account will cost you $8/month. It can’t do the eye tracking, but it can record the users mouse movements while he/she is on your site. It will also show (ripple effects) when the mouse is clicked.

Yesterday I signed up and installed it in my blog, tracked for one day and went through few of the recorded sessions. I should say, it was pretty boring. ;) Since it’s a blog, there is nothing much going on. People are just reading and scrolling the page - not much of clicking or mouse activity is going on.

This will be good to implement in websites (not blogs), and especially eCommerce sites. Because you want to see where the users will click first (you want to test if your promo banner is attracting users attention or not). You want to test the User Interface - to test if the users are clicking on where you want them to click (intended design).

TapeFailure will allow you to record 1 out of every 2, 3, 4 and 10 users. This will allow you to get sampled data, if you have a high traffic site.

You can play the recorded sessions directly inside your account or download them for later viewing. Player allows you to speed up or slow down the viewing. You can also specify your own (or other) IPs from being tracked in the members area.

This was not a paid review. I just thought it could be useful to many of you out there, so I reviewed it. I am sure it will be useful for myself on my other projects.

Do you have a hard time underlining some text while posting in your blog? Do you have to always change to “source view” to add your own custom tags? Well maybe after this you don’t have to. Because there is a second set of WYSIWYG features that are hidden from users in WordPress 2.1. And you can enable them by just pressing the following short-cuts:

• Firefox: Alt+Shift+V (Firefox)
• Internet Explorer: Alt+V (Internet Explorer)
• Mac OS X Firefox: Ctrl+V

Advanced Toolbar will reveal more buttons and enable the following features:

• Text styles
• Underline
• Full paragaph alignment
• Text coloring
• Two varieties of paste (text and Word)
• Formatting removal
• Code cleanup
• Custom character insertion
• Undo/redo

I think, WP coders wanted to show only the most used features (buttons) on the toolbar. However they could have added “show more features” button or link instead of hiding the rest of the features. Many users don’t even know that these features exist and can be enabled in WordPress 2.1.

I have not tested WP 2.2, so I am not sure if this is already fixed or if 2.2 has improved toolbar. I read that many users are experiencing some bugs. So I think I will wait until there is a stable version before I upgrade my blog.

Some blogs use “more” or “continue reading” links for reading the rest of the post. And some blogs (including mine) post everything on the main page, without the more link.

When the blogs use “more” links, the position of the “comments” link is not that crucial. However when the blogs do not use “more” links, the position of the “comments” link becomes very important. Putting the comments link at the beginning of the post, and not having any links to comments section at the end of the post is very inconvenient for the readers.

Imagine that you read a very long post on some blog, once you reached the end of the post you wanted to comment. You look here, you look there… cannot find the “comments” link. You scroll all the way up to the beginning of the post, and when you find it (sitting nicely just below the post title) you don’t feel like commenting anymore.

Suggestion
If you post full posts in your blogs, please make sure that you provide a “comments” link at the end of the post. Because you don’t want your readers to go up and down just to post a comment. Instead you should try your best to make posting comments as convenient as possible. And make the design of your blog comments-friendly.

What do you think? Have you encountered similar difficulties in any blogs while wanting to post comments?

Sometimes you will read users telling in the discussion forums that they didn’t click on their own banners and still their account was terminated. Here is one possible explanation for that: Bad Usability!

Looking at the above screenshot, you can sense that users might accidentally click on the ads while trying to click on the menu. Regarding this kind of placement, Google says that while it’s not against their program policies (to place ads under menus) but it’s not desirable to do so. Because due to accidental clicks which will be regarded as invalid clicks, your account might get terminated. So review your AdSense ad placements once again to avoid unnecessary problems with Google.

Read the article at Inside AdSense Blog.

Numerous eye-tracking studies, done by multiple large research companies (many of which having been researching website usability for a while), have shown that, though humans are sometimes attracted to graphics, they also

• are first drawn to text (78%)
• spend way more attention on text (many times more, judging by the eyetracking heatmaps from the studies, linked to from this article)
• remember and can recall more textual information, than otherwise

Of course, all those thorough studies have many more points to add. Let’s look at them a bit more closely.

Read the full article at ImproveTheWeb.com

The article suggests that:

It’s better to use “23” than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.

Read the whole article here, very useful for bloggers.

Breadcrumbs have always been a secondary navigation aid. They share this humble status with site maps. To navigate, site visitors mainly use the primary menus and the search box, which are certainly more important for usability. But from time to time, people do turn to the site map or the breadcrumbs, particularly when the main navigation doesn’t quite meet their needs.

Despite their secondary status, I’ve recommended breadcrumbs since 1995 for a few simple reasons:

• Breadcrumbs show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
• Breadcrumbs afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.
• Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing: people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them.
• Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page.

So, despite the merely mid-sized benefits…. read full article here.

Do you like Apple’s product designs? When someone mentions Apple or iPod what comes to your mind? Is it these words: sleek, user friendly, cool, simple…? Well good thing is that Apple has made their User Experience Guides open to all developers. Now you too can develop more usable programs by simply following the Apple standards.

In the getting started section of the guides Apple says:

An application with a great user experience should:

• Embody user-friendly design principles
• Have a professional, consistent look, with quality icons and graphics
• Support alternative input devices for users with disabilities
• Offer a simple installation experience

Read the Guides at developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/index.html