ReadWriteWeb

In its ongoing quest to help publishers and designers adapt print-style layouts to the Web across devices, Adobe has admittedly run into a few limitations. As powerful as HTML and CSS are, they don't yet offer the means to create layouts with unlimited flexibility like print designers can.

Not content to settle for what's possible, Adobe has recommended some specifications to the W3C that will allow CSS to create much more fluid, flexible layouts.

The web design feedback tool Notable has taken a dose of its own medicine, if you will, monitoring its customers' usage and feedback in order to roll out today what is a major redesign of this great app. Notable is a browser-based tool that lets you easily annotate and share feedback on website design and content.

We covered Notable when the app launched a few years ago, and raved about its simplicity. As Frederic Lardinois wrote at the time, "The service works without any hiccups, is easy to use, and clearly focused on giving a specific set of users the right tools to get the job done without being encumbered by lots of extra bells and whistles." Even so, the app is now more streamlined, with many of its feedback features easier to use.

Between LAUNCH and DEMO, this last week has seen more than its fair share of startups. Among these companies, we've seen a number of DIY mobile app creation tools throw their hat into the ring and promise a world where getting your company into someone's hands is as simple as dragging and dropping a couple of buttons.

With all of these democratizing, empowering tools hitting the market, there's just one question - are we about to relive the era of <blink> tag text and marquee side-scrolling banner ads?

If the vast majority of analysts and pundits are to be believed, 2011 will be the year of the tablet, and the popular adoption of the devices won't stop there. In a recent report, Forrester predicted that tablet sales could quadruple from 2010 to 2015, leading to a surge in tablet-based e-commerce and chipping away at the amount of Web traffic coming from PC's.

Many site owners are already seeing a huge uptick in users browsing from tablets, and that upward trend will continue. Is your company's Website ready for these visitors?

While the Web and the limitations of most browsers sometimes limit what designers can do online, one advantage of the Internet is that it allows them to easily test different ideas and instantly get feedback for how well a specific design performs. With Verify, interactive design firm ZURB is now giving designers an toolkit with eight different test for evaluating and comparing their ideas based on user feedback.

You've invested good money in your web design, but do you know what your customers actually remember about your site? Clue, a new tool from Bay Area interaction design and design strategy firm ZURB, lets you create a 5-second interactive memory test that you can use to test what people remember about your product. The tool is available for free and you don't even have to log in to use it.

I've posted a few times about how my unease at the way social media can help a marketing mentality shape our self-expression and online relationships. Obsessing over metrics and follower counts is the beginning; before you know it, you're thinking of romantic dinners and late-night liaisons as "conversions."

But give marketing - especially online marketing - its due. The same thing has happened with marketing that happened with video, audio and many other fields: tools that were priced far out of our reach only a few years ago are suddenly cheap (or even free) and readily available.

The social shopping site Blippy made a big splash in the tech blogosphere earlier this week with an unlikely feature: the most amazing 404 error page anybody had seen in awhile. The page features a rainbow and a cartoon unicorn who, when clicked, begins reenacting the now famous "Double Rainbow" meme as the rainbow on the screen expands into a double - and yes, almost triple - rainbow.

It might seem counter-intuitive to put so much effort into the page on your site that you want visitors to see the least, but a good 404 page can be a critical component of your site's user experience, so long as a few general pointers are followed.

One of my favorite blogs to peruse now and then for amazing advice on web design is Webdesigner Depot which produces excellent in depth guides for various design related issues. Monday they produced an excellent in depth post that provides a step-by-step breakdown of best practices for creating a screen-cast for a Web page, a feature many startups like to include on their homepage to familiarize new visitors with their product.

Three years ago we reviewed Martha Stewart's women's lifestyle website, marthastewart.com. At that time, April 2007, the site had just undergone a web 2.0 facelift. Martha Stewart 2.0 included more videos, blogging and general community features such as recipe swap functionality and message boards. It planned to add further personalization and community features over 2007.

We thought it would be interesting to take another look at Martha Stewart's website, to get an indication of how mainstream websites have evolved over the past 3 years.