I am sorry to say that most of the projects I work on lack this very valuable step.  It is often weeks into a project where missing elements are found and I lament the day that it was decided that we ‘skip’ the wireframing step.  In fact it is happening right now.

I have only breezed through this article quickly, but it is bookmarked and ready to be revisited [as soon as I can squeeze it in].  In the meantime I really recommend you take a look yourself at Cameron Chapman’s Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing.

Special thanks to @boagworld for sending the tweet.

Thanks to Boagworld for tweeting this wonderful Pines Notify jQuery Plugin.

It seems to have a whole bunch of features I could employ [although a little too late] into a current project:

Timed hiding with visual effects.

Sticky (no automatic hiding) notices.

Optional hide button.

Supports dynamically updating text, title, icon, type…

Stacks allow notice sets to stack independently.

Control stack direction and push to top or bottom.

Supports HTML (including forms) in title and text.

Variable opacity.

Supports Pines icons/jQuery UI icons/any CSS based icons.

Supports custom classes for individual notice styling.

Standard and custom effects.

Optional drop shadows.

Callbacks for various events, which can cancel events.

History viewer allows user to review previous notices.

XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance.

I don’t have much experience with jQuery, but I am really liking a lot of the plugins that I have been seeing lately.

Here is a nice, short – and to the point – post about A/B testing and the results it yielded.

I know in most projects I have worked on recently A/B testing has not gone beyond internal back-and-forth.  Something I hope to change moving forward.  It we could only budget the time to do so.