I definitely think it is not. Users need to be given more, need to put in front of something fun, extremely beautiful, and what counts most, totally unexpected.

As Donald Normal said: “It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people’s lives”.

How can a simple website accomplish and fulfill such ambitious aims?

Before getting to the possible answers we need a better understanding of the matter. Here is where Noriaky Kano’s model of customer satisfaction comes to help us. Most of the sites we come across today are able to satisfy users’ basic and performance needs, but just a small number of them can meet the excitement needs.

A basic need is something which is taken for granted by the user, like for example the fact that a site should not have broken links. A performance need is something that people expect, like the use of secure protocols for the online payments. An excitement need is way more than that, it’s something pleasantly unexpected, like for example the free wifi in a hotel.

Over time, things that were exciting yesterday will be expected tomorrow and things that are exciting today will be taken for granted tomorrow. That’s why we need to continue to innovate in order to make websites not just easy to use, but delightful to use.

Creatives and designers must fulfill excitements needs by adding those small things that people won’t notice, but if they do, they’ll surely tell their friends!

That’s what Paul Annett from Clearleft focused on during his smart presentation entitled “Oooh, that’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)“. Paul’s presentation was absolutely fantastic, one of the most wonderful talks of SXSW 09.

In his talk, Paul presents few examples of clever websites. Here you can find the most interesting ones. Most of them are done with a smart use of transparencies, flash apps and animated GIFs. Check them out! It’ll be fun…

Resize the browser and you’ll get a nice 3D effect with the leaves and clouds in the background. That’s done using PNGs as background images:

Silverback

Twequency

In the below sample you can see and browse the site in the different stages of the design process, from the wireframes to the final design:

dConstruct.org

Click on the small warm at the bottom of the page…

Kyanmedia

Scroll down the page and keep an eye on the logo. That’s done again using PNGs for the logo images:

Fatuus

Able

Econsultancy

The torch switches on as you run down the page. That’s done setting the torch image behind a semi-transparent blue gradient layer:

CSS Zen Ocean

Run down the page and you’ll see the paint drops creating gorgeous effects:

Webleeddesign

Change colours of your website using a one pixel animated GIF:

David Emery

A slick advertisement for WII and really clever ideas to break things using Flash:

Wii Experience

Hema

If you’re keen to read a bit more on the subject you can also take a peek at the following article where Michael Alexander presents two books about becoming a freelance designer: Being a Starving Artist Sucks and Verbal Kung Fu for Freelancers.

Ubiquity acts as a web service mashup, integrating a flexible yet powerful “natural language” command line to Firefox. That means you will be able to perform tasks using various web services in one place, quickly, simply and using normal language.

To invoke Ubiquity all you have to do is hit a key combination (Ctrl + Space) and a text field drops down, as you type command suggestions will appear.

Here’s a couple of easy examples to show you what this extension can do.

For example, you can insert a Google map into a new Gmail message (type “map (address)” in the Ubiquity panel); you can look up a topic on Wikipedia in-page without opening a new window or switching tabs; you can select a paragraph of text in a foreign language and translate it in-page or even select a text on a web page and transform it into a PDF document.

See these examples and more on the official site or check out the online tutorial. Version 0.1 is available for download now from Mozilla Labs here.

The number of sites offering RSS feeds, a format to regularly deliver up-to-date web content, is growing rapidly. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever is interested in it. As soon as you subscribe to a RSS feed you’ll get fresh updates in real time.

Recently, I searched online for free RSS icons that could be used to identify content in different languages. What did surprise me is that I couldn’t find any icon like that. I thought it could be useful to have a set of language RSS icons to be used on those sites that syndicate their content in different languages, so I decided to design my own set of icons and make it available to anyone who wants it.

I designed 5 icons for the following languages: English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Icons come in four sizes: 75×75 px, 50×50 px, 40×40 px and 25×25 px. All of them are in PNG format with transparent background, so you’ll be able to use them on every background you need.

In the zip file you’ll also find the Illustrator source file for each format, so you’ll be able to change colors, add new flags, and even resize the icons to better suit your needs, without lose in quality.

Language RSS Feed Icon Set is completely free for both personal and commercial projects in any way you like under the Creative Commons 3.0 License. We only ask you to respectfully link back to www.cssglance.com. You cannot offer them for download on your website, but you can write about them and link back to this post.

Download Language RSS Feed Icon Set (540KB – zip file)

• Important SEO Html Tags, Search Engine Indexing Limits
• Recommended Title Tag Syntax, Common Canonical Issues
• 301 Redirect, Important Search Engine Robot User-Agents
• Common Robot Traps to Avoid, Robots Meta Tag Syntax
• Robots.txt Syntax, Sitemap Syntax

The first idea was not our own. I think you can easily remember the great success made by what was called “The Million Dollar Homepage”. A simple page covered by a lot of mini banners which has led the owner to become millionaire and to leap to fame.

Quite a few websites adopted this useful way of making money. You can see good examples on CSS Remix and Italian Web Gallery.

In the most cases, you can get more information about the single banner by passing the mouse pointer over it. By doing this action, a small tooltip will appear, providing additional info as the name, the tagline or simply a link back to the website who bought the adv block.

This feature is often realized by using a small JavaScript. But what will happen to those users browsing a page without JavaScript enabled? The answer is simple. They won’t see the tooltip and the adv info. That means the content is not accessible.

So, what can we do to get the same nice tooltip feature and to improve accessibility? The solution is CSS. In fact, we can create pure CSS tooltips which are simple, useful and accessible, ‘cos they work even if the user browse the page without JavaScript enabled. This is the way we followed on CSSGlance.

This is what we’re looking for and now let’s go into details.

We just need a plain list of links. The XHTML code is something like this:

<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com"> <span>Google.com</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.yahoo.com"> <span>Yahoo.com</span></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.cssbeauty.com"> <span>CSSBeauty.com</span></a></li>
...
</ul>

Now we have to float the <li> elements in order to put side by side each block. Then we can add a relative position to the links, in order to allow the span element inside to position absolutely respect the parent link. The span have also a display:none property which is changed into a display:block one when the mouse pointer pass over the block. You can easily solve ie bug adding some z-index.

Here you have the basic CSS code:

#miniadv ul{margin:0;padding:0;list-style:none}
#miniadv ul li {float:left;margin:0 2px 2px 0}
#miniadv a{float:left;position:relative;z-index:5; width:18px;height:18px}
#miniadv a:hover{z-index:10}
#miniadv a span{display:none}
#miniadv a:hover span {display:block;position:absolute; bottom:2em;right:2em;width:135px}

Let’s take a look at the example! You can download this example (zip-9KB) and use it however you like, but please give a link back to CSSGlance.