Key Tips for Better Website Usability Ron Jones | October 3, 2011 | 1 Comment inShare30 How you can fortify your website and fix usability issues. So you have a great website that is loaded with great content but is it not converting and most of your visitors leave your site within the first 60 seconds. If this is the situation you are in, you might have a site that isn't friendly enough to your users. In other words, it isn't easy to navigate and find information within your site. Website usability is a common concept among web designers. It is generally known that people visit your website with a specific task in mind. Use Keyword Phrases That Your Audience Is Searching On One of the first things site visitors look for are some visual clues that help them feel they have landed on a site that will help them solve their problem. Armed with your researched and targeted keywords, you should make sure they are prominently placed on the landing page. Consistent and Intuitive Site Navigation Menus. Optimized Content Strategy
How to Perform the World's Greatest SEO Audit The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Now that tax season is over, it's once again safe to say my favorite A-word... audit! That's right. My name is Steve, and I'm an SEO audit junkie. Like any good junkie, I've read every audit-related article; I've written thousands of lines of audit-related code, and I've performed audits for friends, clients, and pretty much everyone else I know with a website. All of this research and experience has helped me create an insanely thorough SEO audit process. This is designed to be a comprehensive guide for performing a technical SEO audit. SEO Audit Preparation When performing an audit, most people want to dive right into the analysis. A thorough audit requires at least a little planning to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Crawl Before You Walk Before we can diagnose problems with the site, we have to know exactly what we're dealing with. Crawling Tools
113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group) 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. General Web Design Vertical Industry Segments We cannot provide a set of generic vertical guidelines.
Content Inventory Project Management (4) A project plan takes into account the approach the team will take and helps the team and stakeholders document decisions made regarding the objective, scope, schedule, resources, and... Creating an interdisciplinary team with the right mix of skills is vital to the smooth and successful execution of any project. Team members may be able to cover multiple roles or there may... Use your kick-off meeting to discuss the business case related to the site, the vision and mission based on user and organizational goals, and the vision for the site moving forward. Website requirements are a list of necessary functions, capabilities, or characteristics related to your website and the plans for creating it. User Research (14) When reporting results from a usability test, you should focus primarily on your findings and recommendations that are differentiated by levels of severity. Usability Evaluation (14) Information Architecture (4) User Interface Design (4)
10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines - Smashing UX Design Advertisement Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. 1. A study by UX Matters found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. Tumblr features a simple and elegant sign-up form that adheres to UX Matter’s recommendation. Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels? 2. People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study. And now the baby is looking at the content. Here’s an eye-tracking study that demonstrates this. 3. 4. Basecamp makes great use of space. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Twitter Search, Monitoring, & Analytics | Topsy.com With iOS 9, Search lets you look for content from the web, your contacts, apps, nearby places, and more. Powered by Siri, Search offers suggestions and updates results as you type. There are two ways to use Search on your iOS device. Quick Search Drag down from the middle of the Home screen and type what you're looking for. Siri Suggestions Drag right from the Home screen to show Search and get Siri Suggestions. Get Siri Suggestions Siri Suggestions include apps and contacts that you might be interested in. You can use Siri Suggestions with iPhone 5 and later, iPad Pro, iPad (4th generation) and later, iPad mini (2nd generation) and later, and iPod touch (6th generation). Change search settings Go to Settings > General > Spotlight Search. From here, you can turn Siri Suggestions on or off and choose which apps to include in your searches. If you don’t want Siri or Spotlight to suggest nearby locations, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. Last Modified:
Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues Introduction Let’s first define some terms to make it easier to understand the following sections (taken from the book XML Internationalization and Localization). See also the introductory WIKI page on i18n. A character is the smallest component of written language that has a semantic value. Examples of characters are letters, ideographs (e.g. Chinese characters), punctuation marks, digits etc. A character set is a group of characters without associated numerical values. Coded character sets are character sets in which each character is associated with a scalar value: a code point. In many cases, the encoding is just a direct projection of the scalar values, and there is no real distinction between the coded character set and its serialized representation. Unicode and its encodings For Unicode (also called Universal Character Set or UCS), a coded character set developed by the Unicode consortium, there a several possible encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. PHP and character sets if ( !
8 Web Usability and Best Practices for Beginners As a web designer when you are coding and designing website, it is your job to make sure that the site is user intuitive, friendly and easy to navigate. Although these are basic work ethics for every web designer sometime you might miss out a little things here and there, that might get under front end-user skin. Nevertheless, maybe you are starting your way into web design. Here are eight web usability and practical tips for beginner web designer. Some Commenting method: HTML/XML/XHTML – <! 2. Sometimes when web designer’s are creating website they forget to properly title or leave it blank. 3. Changing your links color or background is must for user visual experience and usability. 4. Although this sounds like dumb tip you would be surprised to see how many websites do not link their header or logo. 5. Following standard layout refers to introducing the viewers to familiar interface and layouts on the web. 6. 7. Color is very important factor when designing sites. 8.