Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website.

Read the full article…

Ask any high school kid — soaring popularity loses some of its luster if more than half of your new friends ditch you after the first month.

And that’s the problem that Twitter Inc. executives are facing.

It seems that while people are joining the micro-blogging site in droves, a whole lot of them don’t sticking around for long. A Nielsen Co. report released yesterday shows that 60% of Twitter users do not return to the microblogging site the next month. And for the 12 months prior to Oprah Winfrey joining Twitter this month with great media fanfare, the site had a retention rate of less than 30%.

Twitter has grown exponentially, no one could dispute this. However, the company’s inability to monetize, combined with a retention rate under 40%, is troubling news for fans of Twitter.

This article better explains why I felt the need to create the Digg Bar Killer WordPress Plugin.

In summary:

• Digg has gone to great lengths to not affect the SEO rankings of the original content (yay Digg!)

• The Digg Bar contains javascript that provides additional analytics to Digg. In other words- Digg.com is using the Digg Bar to track your off-site activity (boo Digg!)

• It appears that Digg intends to add advertisements to the Digg Bar (boo Digg!)

Disable the Digg Bar on your WordPress site, and then read the full article here.