I have created a number of websites for friends and family over the years using WordPress, and as these projects were all private websites I used Akismet to block spam. Akismet is without doubt the best comment spam prevention tool out there and I would really recommend it for any personal sites you may be building. Unfortunately Akismet carries a charge for commercial projects and not wanting to pass any additional cost on to my client I started to search for solutions.

I quickly discovered (and I must stress I am not an expert in this), that you can modify a servers .htaccess file to allow certain privileges dependant on IP address. Quite simply, if you are receiving WordPress spam you can take a note of the IP and deny it from hitting the server.

Here is how I am doing it…

<Limit GET POST PUT>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from 69.197.28.105
</Limit>

So every time I get more spam, I add the IP, like this…

<Limit GET POST PUT>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from 69.197.28.105
Deny from 65.55.3.211
</Limit>

Sounds pretty simply right! Well yeah it is, but be careful as the .htaccess controls the access to all parts of your website and one incorrect key-stroke could take a site down or parts of a site down completely. To be safe I would always take a copy of the original .htaccess and save it somewhere just in case!

Conclusion

I suppose there is always the potential that you could be blocking some legitimate users but so far I have only seen the spam to my sites improve while traffic stays the same, and hey it’s FREE!

Recently while proofing a design I had created a colleague of mine asked “Why do we not use blue links?”, to which my immediate response should have been ‘Why should we use blue links!”. However, to avoid an argument I let him speak about how users were used to the standard blue links shown on web pages and anything else could confuse, but does it and can it?

As a designer I try to understand aesthetics and usability in equal measure in an attempt to produce the best user experiences for the websites I create. Blue links as a standard however, leave me in an uncomfortable place; these have been the standard in web design since the beginning, but just because something has always been this way doesn’t mean it should never change, surely?

In my opinion there are three factors at work here, these are:-

• History
• Design
• Usability

So I feel I should touch on each separately…

History

As I mentioned above the blue link has been part of the modern web for as long as I can remember, which has created an expectation in some peoples minds as to how links should be represented online. Having understood this and accepted this concept it still doesn’t change the fact that blue link was conceved by someone technical, a logical thinker or programmer whose main objective was to keep plain text and active content immediately and visibly separate, in a world were web design hadn’t been born and where options were limited. Blue is naturally a vivid display colour so choosing this colour to highlight links was an easy choice. Yet things have changed massively since then, visual displays have improved, the addition of images and interactivity altered the web beyond all recognition, so surely we can move on and create new standards?!

Design

The history segment above can be argued with I’m sure, but here in design the blue link is the enemy! (Well in my mind it is anyway). Over exaggerated colours, animated gifs and cramped content are now becoming a thing of the past, or more accurately a remnant of the 1990′s. When the Internet was born it was the playground for technical geeks who communicated and shared, the interface that this occurred within was simply not important. Now however, users are born into the Internet, schools actively encourage very young children to play online and it all seems to come very naturally.

Every step of this modern learning is down to how the pages look and react; would children be as inclined to learn about web pages if they all looked and behaved the same. Is it not also interesting how as design has become part of the modern web the older generation embrassed the internet at a similar rate, and could this mean they are learning in the same way? The aesthetics of objects are tremedously important and dictate how we humans behave towards all sorts of things like magazines, advertising,  foods, books and even other people, but when the web was in its infancy the way the web looked was a relative low priority, with technical leaps being the main focus. Now however, the technology has slowed and people are now able to take a moment to look at the internet in a different way, with that slower pace comes an opportunity to start advancing the web in different other ways than just technical, shoudn’t now be the time where we can creatively improve the aethetics of the internet while at the same time improving users experiences, in the same way as we have seen with all other products over the years.

Usability

With this in mind I looked at the BBC Cbeebies website, here there are no blue links or at least very few. This is where my daughter took her first steps into the web and with no special guidance has been able to navigate this website and many sites since easily and instinctively since she was 2 years old. So how has she grasped this so easily? Well the BBC have used interactivity, anything that can be clicked moves or changes making its purpose really obvious to the user, and not a hint of blue or even plain text to be seen. This method moves away from the trusted blue links convention and assumes that users hover around a page, anything that looks different or interesting automatically makes a user gravitate towards it, once some activity is displayed, you click! – makes sense really. So if users are able to intuitively learn how a page works quickly and the design actively helps prioritise content either with colour, images, animation or activity then why shouldn’t it? Young children can grasp this without any direction so why shouldn’t everyone else, maybe we just need to have a little more faith?

Conclusion

Obviously there can be appropriate uses for blue links and I think search engines are a great example of this, I just feel that as long as links are obvious either with using colour or images that add to a design, or activity that emphasis the link we should be able to move forward away from this early method without causing any degradation of user experience.

Let me know what you think…

Some projects take days, other weeks and well some take a year!

Martyn Joseph is as you would expect with most musicians always touring, so this has stretched the website redesign out a little longer than most of my other projects.  I don’t think that has been a bad thing though, the extra time has meant that I could get the little things just right for Martyn before we opted to put it live.

So the .net site is live but there is still along way to go; with years of content to transfer from the old site I feel we will certainly be running these in tandem for a month or two at least.  Eventually though both martynjoseph.com and martynjoseph.net will have the same destination.

You can visit the new site at www.martynjoseph.net – Let me know what you think