Search Engine Land: Must Read News About Search Marketing & Sear 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. 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. This article has been translated to Hebrew4. How do users think? 1. 2. 3.
mezzoblue § Home 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of - Smashing Magazine Advertisement Sometimes you just want to get the information you’re after, save it and move along. And you can’t. Nevermind what design you have, and nevermind which functionality you have to offer — if your visitors don’t understand how they can get from point A to point B they won’t use your site. a clear, self-explanatory navigation,precise text-presentation,search functionality andvisible and thought-out site structure. And that means that you simply have to folow the basic rules of usability and common sense. In this article we take a look at some of the usability nightmares you should avoid designing functional and usable web-sites. 1. Backpack2, 37signal’s one of the most usable organizational and project management tools out there, explains exactly what the tool can be used for, how one can use it and which features it has to offer. The “Log in”-link (hint: in the yellow box) should have a greater font-size — also icons would do the job. 2. 3. 4. 5. Often less is more. 6. 7. 8.
Colour Contrast Check - snook.ca Date created: January 11, 2005 Date last modified: March 30, 2009 The Colour Contrast Check Tool allows to specify a foreground and a background colour and determine if they provide enough of a contrast "when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen"[W3C]. The tool will indicate that the colours pass the test if both the colour difference and the brightness difference exceed their threshold. It will indicate that it sort of passes if only one of the two values exceed their threshold. The tool will also indicate if the colours pass the newer WCAG 2.0 contrast ratio formula. You can enter a three character value (eg: 036) and it'll automatically convert it to it's six character version.
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 this context nothing can support you more than the profound knowledge of fundamental issues related to your work. In this article we present 30 important usability issues, terms, rules and principles which are usually forgotten, ignored or misunderstood. Usability: Rules and Principles 7±2 PrincipleSince human brain has some limits on its capacity for processing information, it deals with complexity dividing information into chunks and units. SatisficingWeb users don’t prefer optimal ways to find the information they’re looking for.
CSS Design: Creating Custom Corners & Bo We’ve all heard the rap: Article Continues Below “Sites designed with CSS tend to be boxy and hard-edged. Where are the rounded corners?” Answer: the rounded corners are right here. In this article, we’ll show how customized borders and corners can be applied to fully fluid and flexible layouts with dynamic content, using sound and semantically logical markup. The markup#section2 In the example markup below, XHTML line breaks have been inserted to pad out dummy paragraphs: <h2>Article header</h2><p> A few paragraphs of article text. If we examine the markup, we’ll see that we have given ourselves at least five hooks, which is all we need to place customized graphics in each of the four corners (and left side) of our article. See Step 1 — primary markup. The design#section3 First let’s decide on some basic layout parameters. “I want the borders and corners to look something like this,” he said. “Could you leave that open, or make it so that it’s easy to change?” The process#section4
The 960 Grid System Made Easy By Joshua Johnson The first time I discovered the 960 Grid System, I was immediately excited about the possibilities of implementing complex layouts so easily. However, since I was fairly new to web design at the time, when I downloaded the files, I quickly became overwhelmed at how complicated the whole thing seemed. With all this code, how could this be the easy way to create a layout? This article is for web designers and front-end web developers who are interested in grid-based layout systems but are at a loss on how to decipher them. We’ll focus specifically on the 960 Grid System, but after reading this guide, you’ll find that most of the other grid systems out there are similar and will make much more sense after you understand a few basic principles. Grid-Based Design Before we get into the specifics of the 960 Grid System, let’s briefly discuss grid-based design in general. Our brains like to simplify things to make them readily understandable. Why Do I Need a Grid System? Typogridphy
Nifty Corners Update This is the original article. The technique has been improved with better browser support and a lot of new features. Rounded Corners with CSS are a hot topic in web design: I think that there are hundreds of articles on them. Stripe it to get it rounded The basic idea of Nifty Corners is to get some coulored lines to get the rounded effect. And here's it the basic CSS: You can see the final effect on this simple example. The technique works even on floated, absolute positioned or percentage-width elements. Known bugs are: text-indent won't work on the element that has been rounded in Opera, and IE (both Mac & version 6 PC) would mess up on floated elements without specific width. The support should be extended to all modern browsers: the technique has been tested with success in Internet Explorer 6, Opera 7.6, FireFox 1.0, Safari 1.1 Mac IE. Easy, isn't it? Looking forward with DOM In the example we saw how to get rounded corners without images, sparing about 6-8Kb of page weight.