There’s no generally accepted correct answer to this… both are fine.

However, here’s what it usually gravitate to:

• Left hand side for sub-topics of a current page (e.g. if you had a product page which had sub-pages about each particular feature of that product)
• Right hand side for unorganized navigation (e.g. on a blog where the right hand side bar has links to categories, ads, archives, text snippets, etc)

Or summarized: people generally look to the left for more detail about what they are on, and look to the right for options about where else to go.

If you are stuck with this, answer is: don’t worry too much about it. Often the design itself will look better (more usable) one way than the other, in that case go with it.

Justification is a personal preference. It is well alive today and the original use of justified text comes from none other than designers themselves.

Perhaps you’ve been hearing that justified text can cause readability issues because excessive gaps between words produces ‘rivers’ inside the paragraph. This is most likely happen to narrow paragraphs. So the real issue is badly justified text, not justification itself. The risk can be reduced by using hyphenation but in web/UI design it’s very rare for designers to have such granular level of control.

Avoiding justified text won’t automatically make the text readable either. To significantly improve readability, designers need to pay attention to line length (also known as measure), text size and  line height.

It’s OK to consider justified text if:

• The paragraph has a comfortable measure (typically 45 -75 characters)
• The paragraph is narrow but the designer have full control over the text copy
• Achieving geometric shape on the paragraph is critical

Don’t justify text if:

• You don’t have control over text measure.
• You don’t intend to hyphenate

Focusing on our main goal to provide a nice experience for website users, I’d like to point out the importance of effective copy writing for web audience.

Writing for web requires a different approach to writing for a print material or spoken words considering:

• Users don’t read, they scan (read http://www.sensible.com/chapter.html)
• Web users are active, not passive
• Reading on computer screens is about 25% slower than reading on paper
• The longer the text, the less likely they are to read it – and the faster they’ll skim it.
• Web users don’t believe hype, thus promotional writing has little to no effect on users.
• Users choose the first reasonable option, not the best option.

Examples

As general guidelines:

• Keep most copy short
  Write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication. Don’t add long copy to any page where your visitors aren’t looking for it.
• Keep short copy simple
  The complexity of the copy matters as much as its length. Typically, you can convey one key idea effectively in one or two lines. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project.
• Write for scannability
  Users tend not to read streams of text fully. Instead, users scan text and pick out keywords, sentences, and paragraphs of interest while skipping over those parts of the text they care less about. Skimming instead of reading is a fact of the Web and has been confirmed by countless usability studies.
• Organize longer copy effectively
  Don’t assume readers will read longer pieces of text in their entirety — write the copy so that readers can skim it and read only the parts they’re interested in.
• Make it lively
  Write vividly and aim for a light, unassuming tone of voice. It takes a little while for boring or overbearing copy to affect a reader, but once it does, practically nothing you say with it will get through. Promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts.

More information can be found in Jacob Nielsen’s Usability articles on writing for the web. My favorites are:

• How Users Read on the Web
• Writing Style for Print vs Web
• How Little Do Users read

<SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="SmallSearchInputBox" />

You will also notice that the actual icon is not specified so you won’t be able to change it there.

Designers are tempted change the base image files on the server and replacing them with your own custom ones. Overwriting the base images is bad, because you might need them on other project using the same server. Alternatively, you can use only CSS to achieve the same custom design on your SharePoint application.

All you have to do is to upload your custom image to the folder where you place the other images you call via CSS and add the following code on your stylesheet:

td.ms-sbgo {
background-color: transparent;
padding: 0 3px;
border: none;
}
td.ms-sbgo a {
padding: 0 !important;
margin: 0 !important;
}
td.ms-sbgo a img{
visibility: hidden;
}

This will remove the default image. Now you need to add yours as a background:

td.ms-sbgo a{
background-image: url(/_layouts/images/yourfolder/yourimage.gif);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: top left;
width: 17px;
height: 17px;
display: block;
}

You will just need to change the folder and image names, and the height and width of the image to be specific to you and you will have a nice looking customized search icon.

One of the many nice things Adam Cogan taught me is the importance of consistency. And the way he does that is by creating rules on pretty much everything developers/designers can do wrong.
Microsoft guys, here is the rule you should follow in this case: Do you use underlines only on links?

I naturally expected the underlines to be click-able.

The lesson: Don’t underline texts that aren’t hyperlinks.

Sounds contradictory, but the same newsletter creator got it right on their actual links, by making it stand out from the rest of the text, as you can see above on the blue underlined text: Anyone can clearly identify it is a hyperlink, what is not true for the other underlined texts.

Going further on this, I would say that the whole sentence “Go to your Space” should be the link, but this is another story…

Anyway, I am sure it is great news for the ones that do use Windows Live Space, that their team will help them migrating to WordPress.

I quote here the reason this is happening:

Our customers have asked for richer blog functionality including an integrated statistics system, continuous saving of drafts and improvements to spam-fighting technology. To deliver the best possible blogging experience, we are collaborating with WordPress.com to provide their free service to you. For those of you that already have a blog on Windows Live Spaces, we will make it easier for you to get started while helping you move what you’ve already built up on Spaces.

Windows Live Space migrate to WordPress newsletter screenshot

They say people would be able to easily migrate pretty much everything from Live Space, apart from gadgets, guestbook, lists, notes and draft posts. I am sure those who complete this migration will have a complete new experience in blogging.

If you know a little about Search Engine Optimization, you know the weight page titles have on searches. It is also known that search engines give more importance to the first part of the title, so it is a waste to use that valuable few words repeating the name of your blog on page after page. More than that, browsers and web services like Delicious use the title tag to figure out how to name your page/post once you have saved it.

SEO Title Tag lets you create title tags within WordPress that are completely different from your post titles. This is important because the role played by your post title is sometimes in conflict with the goal of a title tag. Of course you won’t need to customize every single post title, but I suggest to do so on each page.

The plugin is free and easy to install as usual when talking about WordPress. A really nice tool for blog entries where you want a special post title for readers and most important, a powerful keyword-rich title tag provider for search engines.