An article from jakob nielsen on doing a usability study on the cheap, then some stuff on setting a vitrualhost with the CFMX web server and heap of links about CFCs, then a few more usability articles on why it’s important and how to design pages for people entering the site by not using the homepage.

1. Jakob Nielsen has put together an article on putting together a $200 usability study for a client. The process follows the full blown approach, i.e. review the customer’s needs, review the initial design according to usability guidelines, test the prototype (by making use of the paper based prototyping method) and improve the search visibility. The approach does make a few assumptions, i.e. that the person conducting the study is a already a good usability professional. Secondly that he is aware of the principles (spelt out in his book) and that you don’t spend hours debating the results, i.e. trust your findings and roll with it. It all helps bring quality and cut the cost of development for the client.
2. Time for some ColdFusion again. First how to create a virtual mapping in CFMX for the built in web server. (CFMX)
3. Some good introductory articles to CFCs, can be found here, here and here.
4. An interesting article on the principles behind building an OO User Interface in ColdFusion
5. At this location you can find a PDF file on the new methodology of building ColdFusion applications: Components
6. And this link shoots you off to a complete application Blue Print (a Pet store) using many of the Macromedia products.
7. I found this article on why usability matters, which looked at digital design on the whole and also had related it back to iTV. Interesting in that a lot of projects relating to web tv tend to attempt to mirror a web site, when as the author points out the TV remote is nothing like a mouse and hence web based navigation doesn’t seem entirely appropriate
8. I loved this quote: ”most visitors break a window and crawl in from the backyard, putting a hole in the bathroom wall in the process from an article about designing for users who didn’t enter the site through the homepage. Jeff Lash provides three steps to consider entry pages and their design:
   1. Figure out which pages are accessed most from external sources (to improve referral from external sources he points to this article)
   2. Then optimise these new popular entry points and turn them into a mini homepage. Describe the site and the functions that can be performed. Allow for additional entry page specific related information. He points to another article that can further help analysing your navigation in this context. [The aforementioned article incidentally provides some great questions that you can ask yourself about the navigation, well worth a read]
   3. Finally review your changes (and their impact on other sections) and keep on optimising.