Navigation: It’s everywhere in our lives. We have it in our cars, phones, malls, grocery stores, street signs and our own homes. After all, if you didn’t know how to navigate anything, it would be impossible to get anywhere. The same is true for websites.

When building a website, it’s easy to get caught up in the design or Flashiness or functionality of it all. It’s easy to fall for the allure of magically animated graphics or dueling 3d avatars on various pages of your site. But all the Flashiness and awesome functionality won’t do you any good if no one knows how to find it.

Site architecture is a vital ingredient to web development. It’s the GPS for your website. And even though you may not always use it, your GPS helps you find your way when you get lost.

There are 2 key elements to keep in mind when creating the architecture of your site: Organization and Labels. Sounds simple enough, but the effects can be detrimental if you ignore them.

Organization

Organizing your site content might seem like a big task, but it’s not as daunting if you approach it the right way. Think of it in terms of navigating a grocery store: the better your directions, the quicker you will find what you’re looking for. A website can be divided into first, second and third levels, just like a grocery store. Here’s how we break it down:

Grocery Store:

• First Level -  Produce, Dairy, Pharmacy, Frozen
• Second Level – Veggies, Fruits; Milk, Eggs; Frozen dinners, Ice cream
• Third Level – Mushrooms, Lettuce; Borden, Eggland’s Best; Lean Cuisine, Freschetta; Dreyer’s, Ben & Jerry’s

Your website:

• Primary (Main) Navigation – About Us, Services, Portfolio, Books/Movies
• Second Level Navigation – Our Company, Our Mission; Flash animation, Content management Integration; Our clients, Our Projects; Textbooks or Fiction, DVDs or On Demand
• Third Level Navigation – you might not always need this level for your site, but it would consist of specifics like the brand names above, such as themes for WordPress, Textbooks by subject, DVD genres, and so on.

Keeping your site content well-organized gives the user a clear-cut path through your website and makes them more likely to return. Think about your own web user experience. If you go to a website and can’t find what you’re looking for or figure out how the site is organized, are you going to stick around? You’re probably going to leave and not come back.

Labels

Labeling your content is just as important as organizing it. After all, if something is labeled incorrectly, you’re more likely to get confused and off-track. Think of it in terms of driving in a new city – if the street/hwy signs aren’t clearly labeled or easy to spot, then you’re probably going to get lost, even with GPS.

Just as you need to know what street you’re on so you can spot a potential left turn up ahead, users need to know where they’re going on your website. When users can pay less attention to figuring out where they are on your site, they have more time to devote to actually using your site by looking at products, purchasing products, finding contact numbers and more. It also helps to keep your first, second and third-level navigation titles consistent with page titles (i.e., if you click on “About Us” in the Main nav, then the next page should be entitled “About Us”).

If you have trouble seeing the big picture of your site, try drawing a map or diagram. Having your own road map of site usability can help you find potential errors or mistakes.

Pixeldust worked with Nice Monster and Ampersand Agency to develop the microsite and help Gatti’s Pizza update their jingle with a public jingle contest that featured a $10,000 grand prize.

Pixeldust built a CakePHP/MySQL based application that allows users and musicians to upload their own audio or video versions of the long-time Gatti’s jingle. Pixeldust designed a clean user interface with a “musician’s flyer” feel and created a custom Flash hero piece for the home page. Users can also listen to the entries, make comments, rate and vote for their favorite entries. Entries can be “shared” across most social media sites and mobile devices. The application also features an administrative area that provides moderation tools for entries, voting, comments and registration.

The Austin Humane Society is Austin’s largest no kill, non-profit animal adoption shelter dedicated to saving Austin’s homeless cats and dogs by educating our community about responsible pet ownership and reducing pet overpopulation. As an Austin institution, Pixeldust is honored to work with an organization that’s so dedicated to helping the local animal population. We are also excited to be working with an agency as talented and creative as Door Number 3.

Door Number 3 is a full-service indie advertising, branding and media agency in Austin, TX. They provide creative solutions with integrated capabilities to influence consumer behavior.

Appboy is a fresh social network for mobile app lovers, developers and users. It’s basically your own personal app store where you can add, share, comment, vote, socialize, submit app ideas, and get discovered. Appboy lets users post creative app ideas to a community that votes for their favorites in order to get developers to convert the idea to code. Winning apps get $250.

Apps are listed for an assortment of mobile platforms, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Palm Pre. Users can comment and rate apps and create their own custom app stores with apps they like. Any sales originating from their store earns the user a 5% commission. For developers, Appboy offers another way to promote their product and gain more attention. Developers can add their own apps to the store for additional promotion and users can submit ideas for future applications.

Appboy is a good idea because it provides a neutral ground for developers and regular users with all the added social networking benefits. It’s only potential problem is growth. After all, a social networking site can’t really stay afloat without any networkers. However, with over 280 million downloads in December, the app industry certainly isn’t fading any time soon. Let’s hope that app lovers everywhere start showing some love to Appboy.

* Flexible themes, including default Apple and jQTouch custom themes.
* Callback functions throughout, including swipe and orientation change detection.
* Page history management and CSS3 page transitions, including 3d flip.
* Easily allow apps to run in full screen mode with custom icons and start up screens.
* The power of jQuery to build AJAX applications.
* Native WebKit Animations.

jQTouch is initialized with one function that writes all the meta tags needed to create an iPhone web app.

JavaScript:

1.
2. $(document).jQTouch({
3.icon: ‘jqtouch.png’,
4.statusBar: ‘black-translucent’
5.});
6.

Default Settings:

JavaScript:

1.
2.fullScreen: true,
3.slideInSelector: ‘ul li a’,
4.backSelector: ‘.back’,
5.flipSelector: ‘.flip’,
6.slideUpSelector: ‘.slideup’,
7.statusBar: ‘default’, // options: black-translucent, black
8.icon: null,
9.iconIsGlossy: false,
10.fixedViewport: true
11.

With the built-in 3D capabilities, the WebKit provides functions to slide a page up and flip to a page. Animations appear in the page history. Use the back button to navigate.

You can also send preloaded images as an array.

JavaScript:

1.
2.$.preloadImages([
3.'themes/jqt/img/chevron_white.png',
4.'themes/jqt/img/bg_row_select.gif',
5.'themes/jqt/img/back_button.png'
6.]);
7.});
8.

We believe jQTouch is an excellent tool to help increase the realm of possibility for app development. The video below covers more beginner-level topics such as structure and styling with a little advanced Javascript/jQuery and Ajax mixed in. For a more in-depth introduction to jQTouch, see Jonathon Stark’s book Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Meet jQTouch from David Kaneda on Vimeo.

With everything Google has been doing to enhance website efficiency lately (read: Google Site Performance and Google Caffeine), it comes as no surprise that they’ve introduced another layer to the web performance fold. Launched yesterday, Google Browser Size aims to help web designers and developers get the most out of a website by showing the parts of a site a user can see without scrolling.

With all the various combinations of browser settings, screen resolutions and monitor sizes, it’s hard to know if every user can access important buttons or links on your site, such as “Download” or “Subscribe.” Google Browser Size helps you figure out if you need to adjust or move any key elements. It works by overlaying a transparent, colored DIV on top of a website to show the exact pixel height and width users will see your site without scrolling. The numbers at the top and left depict the length and width of the screen. The colored DIVs (or blocks) indicate the percentage of users that can see your page.

As much as we like Browser Size, it seems like Google could take it one step further by adding Analytics or a plugin that collects and analyzes statistical data. Then developers and designers could really make some magic happen.

-Record and replay live conversations. Google Wave records your entire sequence of communication, character by character. This also means your friends or co-workers will be able to see every character you type, as you type it.

-Embed it anywhere. Google Wave can be embedded in any blog or website.

-Share files. Just drag your file and drop it in Google Wave for everyone to have access.

-Spellchecker. Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling as you type. It even knows the difference between “there,” “their” and “they’re,” and “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate your text.

-Build Applications. Just like an iPhone or social media app, developers can build their own apps in Google Wave.

-Open Source. Google Wave code will be open source for developers to encourage innovation.

-Wiki functionality. Anything written in Google Wave can be edited by anyone because all conversations within the platform are shared. Users can correct information and comment on any developing conversation.

All in all, Google Wave has the potential to change the way we all communicate with each other indefinitely. We’ll be watching as more features develop and updates occur. In the meantime, check out the video we included below for more information on Google Wave.

Using a combination of platforms that include WordPress MU, BuddyPress, and BBPress, Pixeldust created a seamlessly integrated social network that is feature rich and hugely extensible. Pixeldust looks forward to building a community that shares the same values of healthy eating, kindness to animals and environmental awareness.

The main focus of a RSS feed is to save time. It’s an easy solution for busy readers who don’t have time to visit their favorite websites everyday. So how does it work? RSS feeds are read through software known as a “RSS feeder” or “aggregator.” Users click on the orange RSS icon on any site and are taken to a page where they can subscribe to the feed through the RSS reader or web browser. To check for new content, the RSS feed regularly scans the user’s subscribed feeds, downloads any new content and supplies a user interface for the user to read and monitor the feeds. According to PCMag.com’s list of Best Free Software of 2009, some of the most popular RSS readers include Google Reader, Netvibes, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, RSS bandit and Snarfer.

Although RSS feeds might seem more suited for bloggers and news headliners, there are ways for other companies to take advantage of it. For instance, when Pixeldust Interactive built Rottenneighbor.com, we implemented a RSS feature that alerted users each time a new post was made on their neighborhood. There are lots of creative ways to implement RSS into your site, so we’ve included a few here, along with a video that explains how to use a RSS feed.

Distribute news, information and product offers to customers and clients. RSS is a good way to reach out to your customers about daily product offers, new product releases, new blog posts and general company information or news. It can also be a useful channel to reach out to your marketing demographic that has shied away from any kind of social media (and there are people out there that have).

Communicate internally with employees. This option is good for companies that have national and global offices who need to communicate important announcements to employees. Use it to send updates on insider company information or changing conditions, call attention to any company issues or news, or direct employees to important announcements on your website. It’s a good way to keep remote employees in the loop without inundating them with irrelevant information.

View information anywhere. Since most RSS feeds contain only links, headlines or a brief paragraph of the new information, they can be viewed anywhere. Readers can check the feeds on any phone with internet or a computer.

Get notifications from social media when customers talk about your company. One of the easiest social media outlets to track customer chatter is Twitter search. Save your company search and sign up for alerts when users mention your company. This helps ensure you don’t miss out on your chance to directly chat with your customers. Plus, it’s a good way to find out what the public thinks about your company.

Use a tracking system to find out how many unique subscribers you have. There are tons of RSS tracking systems that provide you with information about your feed subscribers, including the number of unique subscribers, how many users access the feed, which bots visit your feeds, amount of revenue generated, etc. Tracking your RSS metrics will give you a better idea of your audience and allow you to tailor your content accordingly. After all, these are the people you’re writing for.

WordPress MU is the multi-user version of WordPress. WordPress MU is most famously used for WordPress.com where it serves tens of millions of hits on millions of blogs each day. BuddyPress adds a social networking layer to a new or existing installation of WordPress MU.

Below is a video presentation given by Andy Peatling this year at WordCamp in San Francisco.