7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website's Usability. The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off.
Writing content for web users has its challenges. Chief among them is the ease with which your content is read and understood by your visitors (i.e. its readability). When your content is highly readable, your audience is able to quickly digest the information you share with them — a worthy goal to have for your website, whether you run a blog, an e-store or your company's domain. Below are a handful of dead-simple tips and techniques for enhancing the usability and readability of your website's content. These tips are based on research findings and suggestions by well-regarded usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen. This list is not exhaustive, and is meant merely to arm you with a few ideas that you can implement right away.
Guidelines for homepage usability (not journalism, but still) Topics Author Recent Articles Popular Articles Subscribe to: While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high.
Even small changes to homepages can have drastic effects. While we encourage you to use these guidelines as a checklist when designing your homepage, recognize that they are written in an abbreviated manner here. All said, these are just guidelines, not axioms. What's Not in These Guidelines In an effort to limit the focus specifically to homepage guidelines, there are several important issues we do not address. Determining Homepage Content One of the most important design decisions for any homepage is determining what content merits homepage coverage.
There are several usability methods that can identify and prioritize users' needs based on real data and observation. How to Optimize Your Headlines for Google and Humans. Jonathan Rick is a director at Levick Strategic Communications.
He contributes to Levick’s Bulletproof Blog. Follow him @jrick. Why do search engines always rank certain websites so highly? Sure, their content might be great, but their search engine optimization is definitely awesome. Indeed, for many sites, the search-engine spiders that crawl the web deliver a third or more of their traffic. So crafting key parts of a page, like a headline, is critical. In protest, writers for publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Atlantic each took turns slugging the SEO punching bag. Why many college newspaper websites are ugly / WP Journo: WordPress & Journalism. College student newspaper adviser Michael Koretzky had a post over at The Huffington Post today that turned me into a troll.
I commented. In fact, I commented harshly. Why? Koretzky’s post, headlined “College Journalists Are Good at Consuming Multimedia but Bad at Making It. Why? It all starts with Koretzky explaining that he judged a college newspaper website competition and was aghast at how bad all the entries were. But he’s wrong. Advisers, journalism professors and programs In fact, one of the top reasons why college media websites (and even multimedia pieces like web videos, podcasts and photos with audio) are weak is because of advisers and journalism professors just like Koretzky.
This has never been more apparent to me than when I attended the College Media Advisers Spring Convention in New York City. If you think about it, though, it makes sense. The cost of print. 3 good WordPress.com themes for student newspapers. 3 good WordPress.com themes for student newspapers When I worked at Pacific Lutheran University’s student newspaper The Mooring Mast, one of our main challenges was finding a way to have a good-looking website that was easy to maintain.
You’d think WordPress.com would have been an easy contender, since it’s very easy to both create a website and publish new content. But all the designs we had to choose from back then looked…well…too blog-like. We needed something that would at least make us look like a news site, so we ended up going with a different solution. However, WordPress has kept building its library of paid themes over the past five years, and some of their new ones would actually look alright for an online news site. 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design. Advertisement Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site.
Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist. We aren’t going to discuss the implementation details (e.g. where the search box should be placed) as it has already been done in a number of articles; instead we focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design — approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information. Please notice that you might be interested in the usability-related articles about 10 Usability Nightmares1 and 30 Usability Issues2 we’ve published before,we’ll cover more principles of effective design in our following posts. Codeacademy.com.