CSS3 Tricks

Web Design – Coolest Recent CSS3 Tricks

We haven’t been showing enough love to CSS3 lately. There is a fundamental shift in web design happening right now, between the end of the Flash era, beginning of the HTML5 era, and the advent of (at last!) working CSS3. Here’s a roundup list of pretty and/or cool tricks in CSS3 that just make you go “Awesome!”

 

Pop-Ups

Are You Driving Users Away? Also, What’s Up With Pop-Ups?

We loved these “8 user experience gaffs that annoy your prospective customers” – it reminds us of the old days of Vincent Flanders. But this post is just a few days old, and yet not much has changed in what not to do in the world of internet marketing.

Some things that bear analysis are asking why users can’t stand a certain element. For instance, why do users hate pop-ups? Well, it’s because you were trying to read this web page, and all of a sudden a new box appears in front of it. What it’s doing is, it’s interrupting your mind, like shouting over the top of someone who’s talking. Can you imagine if you sit down to watch television, and just then someone comes running in with a painting and sticks it between your eyes and the TV screen right when the news gets back from commercial?

Things like that – they seem to be hard to explain to some web owners. Even if that element makes some sales, you have to look at how many people are getting frustrated and going away.

 

Wolfram Alpha

Is Wolfram Alpha What People Really Want

The World Wide Web is absolutely riddled with forgotten, abandoned search engines that seemed like great ideas on paper and performed like a dead skunk in reality. But what about an “answer engine?” That’s what Wolfram Alpha claims to be. We’re kind of surprised to see Wolfram Alpha still pulling blog news, like this announcement on Read/Write Web. This is about how you can embed a fun little Wolfram Alpha widget on your site.

Really, an answer engine does sound like it’d be handy. Like talking to the HAL 9000, right? You ask a question and it answers. But reviews around the web at first ran to something like, well, this AskReaMaor guy really put it through its paces.