A Short Story About “Back To Top” Links - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Often it is the close attention to small details that makes a design outstanding. During the development of a website, designers tend to quickly forget about small details and focus on major design elements, such as navigation, typography and layout. If done properly, the result is usually a solid, impressive and highly professional design that communicates information. However, it is not memorable. The reason is that such designs often do not have a memorable voice: they may look visually appealing, but they don’t provide a vivid anchor for users to remember a website after leaving it. In this way, little details are important because they can help the design stand out.
In this post, we showcase the design of “Back to top” links, a forgotten and rarely used link that helps users jump to the top of a given page. When “Back to Top” Links are Useful Unfortunately, this friendly service — letting users jump to the top of the page — is offered very rarely. <div id="footer"><! 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design - Smashing Magazine.
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. 1.
30 Usability Issues To Be Aware Of - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement You don’t have to agree upon everything. As a professional web developer you are the advocate of your visitors’ interests and needs; you have to protect your understanding of good user experience and make sure the visitors will find their way through (possibly) complex site architecture. And this means that you need to be able to protect your position and communicate your ideas effectively — in discussions with your clients and colleagues. In fact, it’s your job to compromise wrong ideas and misleading concepts instead of following them blindly. In this context nothing can support you more than the profound knowledge of fundamental issues related to your work. But even if you know most of them it’s important to know how to name these concepts and how to refer to them once they appear in the conversation.
In this article we present 30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood. Usability: Rules and Principles. 10 Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website | Tools. If you run or manage a website, you probably have experience with a web analytics package (like Google Analytics). These tools are great at answering the quantitative questions, the “what?” Questions that every good webmaster should ask themselves. Questions like, “How many visitors did I have last month?” , “How many conversions?” And so on. However, they aren’t so great at giving you qualitative insight, the “why?” Questions that are just as important. The list below represents a compilation of some of the best qualitative tools out there, all of which you can start using to improve your website today.
You may be interested in the following related articles as well. Feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts that our readers may find helpful. Don’t forget to and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates. Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website This list is certainly not comprehensive, nor is it meant to be. 01. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10. 90 Creative Back To Top Links and Best Practices. Userfly - instant web usability testing.
Website Usability Testing. 10 Easy Steps to a Horrible Ecommerce Site | eCommerce. As a frequent visitor to forums in which people ask for critiques of their new ecommerce sites, I have seen the best and the worst of small business Web development. For the first 1000 posts or so, I was helpful, kind, and supportive when gently pointing out each developer’s site issues and how he or she could make the site "the best it could be". Funny thing though: I found out that this approach doesn’t really work. Maybe the developers think their sites are somehow different, or that the basic rules of good online commerce don’t apply to them for some reason. Site after posted site, I see the same errors in judgment and design. The following 10 tips now represent my standard advice to every budding Website entrepreneur. 1.
Whatever shopping cart you use, the "stock" or default look is fine. You lack design talent? 2. Why would you want to speed up load times for slow connections, or make your product shots look better? 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Don’t describe your product at all. 9. 10. Dive Into Accessibility.