Consistency in font, color and size matters. As visitors move through your Web site, they gather clues (unconsciously, perhaps) to the structure of each page. It helps them move to the meat faster. This is part of what makes a user feel comfortable on your site — it’s a good thing and you should...
Free Web Site Advice
Finding Links In Text
Pay attention to where and how you place hyperlinks in text on the screen. Here are guidelines, with dead-link examples : First, be sure your style makes the link look like a link. Use a distinct color. Nielsen and others advocate for keeping it the browser-default blue; I don’t see anyone getting confused by...
Linear Flow
In general, users prefer the “action” items on a Web page to follow some sort of understandable flow — I’ll propose a linear flow moving down and right. By action items, I mean buttons or links where I can do stuff — submit a form, click to a subtopic, etc. And as noted elsewhere,...
I'm back
…from a long hiatus, during which a difficult redesign, as well as a major application “crash,” sapped any energy I might have had for blogging. Lotsa changes around here, so stay tuned....
Minimal Design
Web design is comparative — since you’re one click away from the competition, comparison between your design and theirs is easy — and people do it, whether consciously or not. So what the competition is doing should matter to you. But just as important is what’s happening with Amazon, CNN, Yahoo and Google. For...
Building Without a Plan
I’m just finishing up Web work on a symposium that illustrates all that’s wrong with unplanned development: the people in charge kept coming up with new ideas after we’d started, and they kinda liked waiting until work was done on something before starting to think about it. So I (and others) would work to...
This Home Page Is Not a Blog … But It Looks Like One
I’ve been thinking about the next wave in Web design a lot lately, and this morning it hit me: it’s the blogs. Most blogs stand as silos — either unique by themselves or within a larger site but not really integrated into that site (beyond, possibly, standard headers and footers — see the LLS...
Testing 1,2,3
No, this isn’t a test — it’s a real post about a real problem. Testing, my friends, is getting short shrift. We’re in such a hurry to define, design, program and launch new functions that we’re glossing over the critical testing process. Trust me on this: later, when the app breaks and you’re losing...
TGIF
So, it’s Friday at 4:25 and I’m getting ready to go home. Which reminds me of the gap between the 24×7 expectations of the Web and most people’s 40-ish hour work week. IT folks have long struggled with extended hours (as have 911 operators, emergency personnel, etc.), and some of them wear their pagers/cell...
Front and Center
Try this: visit a Web page or two (ones you don’t regularly visit) and pay attention to the first thing you see on the page. I’ll bet it’s just above the center of the screen. ‘Course, if you’re on a slow modem, you’ll be looking at whatever loads first — unless you’re like me,...