On the TechSmith site I used SlideShow Pro on the homepage and man does that look great. On the Camtasia Studio and Camtasia Relay site’s Nick and I used HighSlide and have been getting great feedback on how it works, especially for video.

I am looking to use both on the upcoming MidoriRideShop.com site and maybe if I have a second, I will push these beauties on to my own site.

What tools have you found have added sizzle to your site? I’d love to hear your comments.

A quick video walk-through of the site that I will be adding sound and narration to soon.

Heat map results for the initial 5000 visits, via a CrazyEgg test.

Check out the Flickr pics.

Summary of the conference.
All speakers centered their conversations around Design, Code, User Experience or Inspiration. Most covered a couple.

Zeldman: “Have empathy.” Jeffery states that a great designer must have empathy for the audience and be a great communicator. “Know your audience and know yourself” he says.

Now that I can, checking my designs on a mobile platform is key.

Are you checking your sites one a mobile platform?

Check out the video.

So after (re)launch, I went ahead and posted to a couple of CSS/design galleries. My hope was to generate some traffic so that I could see the strengths and weaknesses of the design and content. There have been a few surprises, and for revealing those, I am grateful to those that have taken the time to look at my site.

Google Analytics = time black hole.

Googles Analytics is a massively powerful tool. You can track just about anything, but there are a couple standouts in this application. These are just my favorites… deciding which are the most useful would be tough to call. I think it depends on what you want to know.

Content by Title

I like this because it lets me quickly understand what content visitors are looking at, the only drawback is if you have not made your title unique… I do and that had really helped me get a quick picture of my visitors experience.

Navigation Summary

I always have a tough time finding this in the UI, but the hunt is worth it. Being able to see how visitors are moving through the site lets me focus on improving that experience.

Map Overlay

Google calls this the “Geolocation visualization” and it is one of my first stops. Who is looking at your site? California? Sure. New York, why not? China… um wow.

CrazyEgg… very pretty

CrazyEgg is one of my favorite tools. Knowing where a user clicks is an amazing advantage. You can see what is working and what is not. I use CrazyEgg at work to test homepages and landing pages. Showing our stakeholders what is working (or not) in a beautiful, visual method pays off. People “get” this tools visual approach.

One of the surprises for me was revealed by CrazyEgg. This surprise was on my portfolio page. I could not believe how may people clicked on the URLs link. And that’s the thing about CrazyEgg. You set up the test thinking you understand how the page will work… and at the end you realize that people are interested in what they want, not always what you expect.

CrazyEggs visual tools make this tool something that will always be in my bag of tricks. The recent(ish) addition of the Confetti view is the most interesting to play with, though I wish I could save the data out as a self-contained SWF (hint).

Check out CrazyEgg and Google Analytics.

* This is harder than you might imagine, I am perhaps the worst client I’ve ever had.

I am curious about how it works and why it is better than other concepts.

Brainstorming is by far the most widely used tool to stimulate creative thinking. It was developed in the 1940s by the American advertising executive Alex Osborn who believed that anyone could learn to generate creative solutions for a wide variety of problems. Following Osborn’s beliefs, below are some tips that will help you have brainstorming sessions that generate results.

1. When scheduling the meeting, be sure to include a brief explanation of the problem and its history. This will help participants prepare mentally for the session and focus on the particular issue. The more specific and focused a session, the better the results will be.
2. When inviting individuals to the session, consider people with different backgrounds and degrees of expertise. Sometimes a fresh outlook comes from someone who isn’t considered an expert or close to the problem. However, be careful about mixing management levels. Often in the presence of a senior-level manager, people either will be reluctant to participate or will completely overdo it.
3. Distribute a copy of the rules of brainstorming before the session begins. The rules are:
   • Criticism of ideas isn’t allowed
   • All ideas, no matter how wild, are encouraged
   • The more ideas, the better
   • Every participant should try to build on or combine the ideas of others
4. When scheduling the brainstorming session, the meeting shouldn’t last longer than 30 or 40 minutes. Brainstorming sessions can be tiring and if you haven’t discovered a satisfactory idea after 40 minutes then it’s best to adjourn the meeting. Let the participants leave with the understanding that there will be another session. They can think about the problem because great ideas can come anytime and anywhere – in the shower, in the car or in the park.
5. At the beginning of the session, explain the meaning of Killer Phrases and emphasize that they won’t be permitted. You might provide two cards for each participant as they enter the room. One has a green circle on it, the other a red circle. Like traffic lights, when the flow of ideas is positive, participants hold up the green cards. If someone mentions a Killer Phrase, all of the other participants must hold up the red cards. This helps the group identify its “killer” behavior and lets participants know when they should be more supportive of others’ input.
6. If more than ten participants have been invited to the session, break the group into teams of five or six people and have each team brainstorm the issue. Smaller teams remove some of the formality and make people more at ease. And feeling comfortable means sharing more ideas.
7. Write the objective of the session where everyone in the room can see it. Put it in a question form, starting with either “How can we…?” or “What can be done to…?” For example, “How can we better understand the needs of our customers?” or “What can be done to improve the quality of this product?”
8. Be sure to capture all of the group’s ideas. An interactive whiteboard is ideal for brainstorming since ideas are displayed on the whiteboard surface (which can stimulate additional ideas), easily edited and saved to a computer file. Whichever tool you use to record your ideas, be sure that they’re saved for future reference. After all, what good is generating ideas if nobody remembers them after the session ends?
9. If the flow of ideas begins to fizzle, the leader should step in. Some ideas:
   • Re-read every third idea. This may spark additional ideas.
   • Ask a participant to select an idea and give reasons why he likes it. This will generate conversation around the idea and provide an opportunity to build on it.
   • If you’re the session leader, keep an idea or two to yourself. When the conversation dies, share these ideas to initiate more discussion.

After the session, edit the brainstorming notes, arrange the ideas in related groups and send a copy to each participant as soon as possible. Ask each participant to select the five ideas he thinks are best. Request that he also explain why these ideas are most promising and how he would implement them. Be sure to include a deadline for when you’d like the ideas returned.

Ray Bradbury, US Science-Fiction Writer

The other thing that I would like is a way to have your personal dictionary accessible in every application from any computer you are using. Imagine, your own dictionary in the “cloud”. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that I only had to click “Add to Personal” once for Flickr, my lastname – Moulton, my friend Tomania or any of the countless other words, names or preferences that I have?  I would be gleeful the day I could I log into myclouddictionary.com/davidrmoulton and the squiggly red lines all disappeared no matter what program I was using.

BTW is it website or web site?