Inside the Fold

Last week I began reading “Web Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski and I haven’t really put it down. It’s a thriller with great examples and well thought out and tested practices.

Everyone has had both the good, bad and ugly form experience. As a front end designer and developer I have had the pleasure of taking the shopping cart on Chroniclebooks.com site from painful to fluid and usable.

I spend the majority of my time on the computer and surfing the web. Hours come and go but when I have decided to make a purchase and it takes longer than 2 minutes I feel frustrated and I usually abandon the sale.

Last week I upgraded my personal site to WP 2.5 and also a site I recently developed on WP 2.3.3 called Backyard Birdsongs which I made for Chronicle Books.

I have to admit I feel a bit thick for not realizing this sooner but here is the only major “error” I came across and I feel it is 50% user error and 50% poor UI design.

Here is what happened:
After backing up my database and my wp-content folder as recommended by Wordpress.org I deleted the wp-includes and wp-admin directories and then copied over the new files (BTW: this is not meant to to be a tutorial on how to upgrade your WP).

After updating all the files the codex instructs you to type in this url to trigger the updating process from 2.3.3 to 2.5: