First, I tried a frosting spray. At €12 a pop from MRCB Paints in Christchurch, a little expensive, particular as I needed two cans if you have a big window.

The spray was extremely difficult to get on evenly. Once it dried, it came up really patchy. Perhaps it would work better on really small panes.

It had to come off.

Next, we tried the self adhesive. Despite early promise, this was a bot of a disaster as air bubbles became trapped in it and were very difficult to remove. When they were removed, they left stretchmarks.

Again, had to peel it off.

The last solution was the static one. Simply spray a little soapy water on your window place it on, move it around and it stays put very evenly. Wish I had tried this first!

‘Screen resolution’ is essentially a meaningless figure as many visitors will not have the full browser open. In fact, they may have many browser windows open, in addition to many other application windows open. So, regardless of what type of website you have, a review website or a usability company, you may have less space to offer your visitors than you think. The trouble is, you’d have no way of knowing. Until now.

Foldspy, currently in beta, is the brainchild of Dublin web designer, Eoghan McCabe. With a simple JavaScript include you can be up and running in seconds and have a clear view of what your visitors actually see and what they miss.

Although quite a small app, its got a big heart and could deliver measurable value to online advertisers         

“I’m smelling Cindy Lauper and tasting Christina Aguilera!”.

Gary Vaynerchuk, the bold, brash and lovable rogue behind the Wine Library TV has started a wine revolution from his video wine review website.

If you’re into wine, then check out his site. In no time, you’ll be counting yourself as one of the legions of “Vayniacs”.

This review originally appeared on the iQ Blog, the blog of usability company, iQ Content 

There’s some really great design elements on the new Independent website.

This will be familiar to readers of the New York Times, but the addition of tabs under which content has already loaded is a nice feature. The Breaking News box on the homepage uses tabs with some underlying AJAX or plain old JavaScript/DHTML. This means that a click doesn’t force a full reload, meaning faster access to content. Nice touch.

There’s also a nice sliding news interface element which is quite cool. It allows you to skip through headlines, again without forcing a page reload

So far, these elements certainly have a WOW factor, but what is the point?

In my view, designing for a content-rich site like a newspaper website can be a tough job. The challenge is lots and lots of content, all vying to be “above the fold” but with very little screen real estate particularly before we start to include advertising. What normally happens then is content and advertising compete for the user’s attention. So here’s the main benefit: better access to content

There’s also some great content in its own right, the Editor’s Choice, the Most Popular (a self-fulfilling prophecy?).

Again, another example of well thought out navigation is with the World News section on the homepage. Main headline and the top stories, but also links to region-specific world news. Other improvements to the navigation throughout are the “Related articles” and “Also in this section”.

With Boo.com relaunching over the last couple of weeks, there’s a lot of Web 2.0 in the air. The Indo have taken some of the best elements and the ones we’re getting most used to from the world of blogging.

There are RSS feeds for every section.

Indeed, not just an RSS feed for every section, but for subsections too. For example, I’m not too interested in soccer or the Gaelic games but that’s okay, I can just subscribe to the Rugby feed (RSS).

Along with “Web2.0″, “user generated content” is being mentioned ad nauseum but while the Indo haven’t gone down the blog route per se, they have opened some of their articles up to reader comments.

In the previous incarnation of the website I think advertising often won out at the expense of the reader’s experience (remember those sly overlay ads jumping out at you over the article you were trying to read?).

It’s great to see this recognised and addressed in the new design and it’s an obvious point worth mentioning explicitly: you can’t focus on advertising revenue at the expense of the user experience.

So, for me the real benefit of the new design is reader-friendly access to content.

My score? 4/5