Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox has a new article that answers that old question “what screen resolution should I design for?”

The headline, one-sentence answer is:

“Optimise web pages for 1024×768, but use a liquid layout that stretches well for any resolution, from 800×600 to 1280×1024″

Nielsen’s advice is generally sound. He does makes some odd comments, most notably “anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution” - based on what, Mr. Nielsen? Most people would agree that additional screen real estate is an aid to productivity, and as such makes financial sense, but the same applies to anybody regardless of income. Based on this logic, should those earning in excess of $250,000 per year have a five monitor rig? If not, are they failing to maximise their potential, from a productivity or earning perspective? He then admits “Apple and Microsoft have both published reports that attempt to quantify the productivity gains from bigger monitors. Sadly, the studies don’t provide credible numbers because of various methodological weaknesses.”

Jackob Nielsen’s writing is often provocative, sometimes downright wrong, but he does conclude the article with a great piece of advice: “optimise for 1024×768, but don’t design solely for this size. Your pages should work at any resolution, from 800×600 to 1280×1024 and beyond.”

With viewing figures for our most recent email marketing campaign hot off the server, all indications point to it being a success.

Carried out on behalf of FremantleMedia’s Archive Sales division, the drive aimed to raise awareness of the division’s presence at the Sunny Side of the Doc international film market and targeted a database of over 1200 industry professionals. The campaign encouraged recipients to arrange an appointment during the festival to speak with one of Archive Sales’ representatives. It represented the first time the division had commissioned the design and production of a tracked HTML marketing email.

“Our sales representatives attending Sunny Side this year enjoyed their busiest schedule in years” said Business Development Executive Sam Partner. He continued “We’re very pleased with the results of our first fully-featured email marketing campaign and look forward to developing a long-term partnership with Include Digital.”

The mailout was administered by Include Digital’s bespoke email sending and tracking tool. The tool automatically inserts unique tracking links into the HTML, sends the email and logs user interaction. The usage figures were collated into a final campaign report.

Adobe have revealed that a new version of Director will be released in the first half of 2007. No new features have been confirmed, which suggests that the emphasis will be on bug fixing and platform compatibility.

It’s great to hear that Adobe have finally made a commitment to one of Macromedia’s most long-standing products. Director has been been overshadowed by Flash in recent years, but the application still has a number of uses, and it remains the most powerful solution for CD-ROM development and web-based 3D.

On that note, I’d like to see the Shockwave 3D engine updated: it hasn’t really changed at all since its launch around 5-6 years ago. Shockwave 3D is still arguably the best cross-platform solution for delivering interactive 3D content and games on the web, but if Adobe don’t update the feature set it’s likely to fall in popularity, particularly amongst the all-important development community.

Director stalwart and all-round Macromedia legend Tom Higgins gives more information on Director’s future in his interview at Digital Media Designer, confirming that the next release will offer native support for Intel Mac’s and Windows Vista.

SitePoint have published “The Ultimate SEO Guide” – a comprehensive article covering the fundamentals of search engine optimisation, written by Shirley Kaiser.

The guide includes valuable, common-sense strategies for improving traffic and search engine rankings. From site build guidelines to copy suggestions, the article provides a thorough grounding in the basic principles of SEO.

It’s well worth a read if you’re new to SEO: it’s a little light on SEM (search engine marketing) and details on paid-for search engine rankings, but otherwise it comes highly recommended.

Yahoo! have launched a radical overhaul of their site this week. The emphasis seems to be on usability and speed of navigation: the homepage still features a large amount of information, but it now appears in a more user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing format.

Disappointingly, the homepage does not validate, but it functions very well with no page styling. I appreciate that Yahoo! are at the mercy of advertisers, and their site needs to display a tremendous quantity of information, but one would hope they’d take a positive lead with accessibility and W3C standards.

New features of the Yahoo! site include:

• Searching can now be narrowed to a specific area by clicking on tabs for images, video, audio etc. (similar to Google’s homepage which shows images, Google Groups, Froogle and so on).
• Favourite items, information and searches can be stored in the navigation, accompanied by reasonably pleasing little icons.
• A “Yahoo! Personal Assistant” can provide you with a quick, at-a-glance view of what’s happening in your (Yahoo!-orientated) world.

The Omni Group, creators of the popular graphing and charting application OmniGraffle, will release a public beta of their new project management tool OmniPlan on Wednesday.

Details on OmniPlan are few and far between, but if it’s as user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing as The Omni Group’s other applications it’s likely to be very popular indeed.

The popular SitePoint author Matt Mickiewicz has interviewed Jakob Nielsen, the usability evangelist (or usability fetishist, depending upon your perspective), on AJAX (deemed “irrelevant”), contextual text links (described as “disgusting”) and other related web technologies.

The full article can be viewed here, and it’s well worth a read. Nielsen is as provocative and opinionated as ever, but he does make some very valid points.

This website demonstrates the features of the KIA Rio using an innovative, 3D rollercoaster ride.

Featuring lots of pre-rendered Flash animation and bold, primary colours, it makes a welcome change from the image-heavy car sites we’ve grown accustomed to.

The results of a survey conducted by Click Forensics suggests that more than 1 in 10 clicks on online ads is fraudulent. The latest figure of 14.1% is an increase on the previous estimated figure of 13.7 percent three months ago.

These figures are certain to alarm online advertisers, who spend countless millions building brands online. Whilst most major search engines are willing to refund those who can verify that bogus click-throughs have occurred, the burden of proof lies with the advertisers.

ClickTale is an intriguing website statistics and monitoring service which creates movies of users’ individual browsing session. Every mouse movement, click and keystroke is recorded for future playback.

This service will be of great value to many websites, particularly online retailers: seeing how customers browse and interact with their stores will enable them to maximise revenues by making site optimisations based on user behaviour. ClickTale also promises to revolutionise accessibility testing: rather than blindly applying best practise methods and hoping for the best, developers will be able to analyse user sessions to identify usability issues.

Of course, like every good web2.0 service, ClickTale is running a closed beta, but if it does deliver as promised it’s sure to win many admirers.