Now there’s a headline for you! Below’s an excerpt from Chapter 13 of Luke Wroblewski’s forthcoming book Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008). And the excerpt is an excellent read for what it’s worth.

I’ll just come out and say this: sign-up forms must die. In the introduction to this book I described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

Read the full article at A List Apart.

Hi! You will have noticed that I’ve made quite a few changes on the site over the last few days which has been in the pipeline for about three months now. Yes, it is actually version 16, which isn’t too many considering that the site is 13 years old!

New features, some that you can see, some that you can’t, including:

• A new coat of paint and CSS driven layout – a clean look to allow the you, the user to focus on the photography across the site
• Content management system upgrade – to Wordpress 2.3.3 (from 2.0.4)
• Improved search engine optimisation (SEO)
• XML sitemap capability – a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo
• Social bookmark “chicklets” – share the posts across your favourite social networking sites like Delicious, Facebook and Digg

There’s a few bugs and some further improvements to be introduced over coming weeks, but nothing that will stop you reading the content. So, let me know what you think!