This chapter is excerpted from SitePoint’s HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, Second Edition, which provides a complete introduction to CSS and shows you how to build rock-solid CSS-based web sites from scratch. By the end of the book’s 12 chapters, you’ll understand the ins and outs of CSS, and you’ll be able to create robust, standards-compliant site designs that degrade gracefully in older browsers and are easy to maintain. You can download this chapter in PDF format, along with the first three chapters of the book, if you’d prefer to read it offline. We now have some sound theory under our belts. This chapter will start with the creation of a simple two-column layout. While the layout we’ll create in this chapter is a relatively simple one, it’s a structure that’s used by many web sites; the layout we’ll develop here could easily form the basis for a production site. The Layout Many web site designs start life as mock-ups in a graphics program. Figure 8.1. Figure 8.2. <!
Home Page Design Guidelines (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) Summary: A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment. Homepages are the most valuable real estate in the world. Each year, companies and individuals funnel millions of dollars through a space that's not even a square foot in size. For good reason. The homepage is the most important page on most websites, and gets more page views than any other page. Following are ten things you can do to increase the usability of your homepage and thus enhance your website's business value. Make the Site's Purpose Clear: Explain Who You Are and What You Do 1. Start the page with a tagline that summarizes what the site or company does, especially if you're new or less than famous. 2. Begin the TITLE tag with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site. 3. Help Users Find What They Need 4.
User Experience Design June 21, 2004 I've been practicing information architecture since 1994, and from Gopher to Google have seen dramatic changes in the landscape of organization, search and retrieval. Through these ten tempestuous years, I've found the infamous three circle diagram to be a great tool for explaining how and why we must strike a unique balance on each project between business goals and context, user needs and behavior, and the available mix of content. Figure 1. While this diagram was conceived with IA in mind, it's equally useful for explaining UX. Facets of the User Experience When I broadened my interest from IA to UX, I found the need for a new diagram to illustrate the facets of user experience - especially to help clients understand why they must move beyond usability - and so with a little help from my friends developed the user experience honeycomb. Figure 2. Here's how I explain each facet or quality of the user experience: Useful. A Different Way of Seeing A Big Hive
Don Norman's jnd.org / Simplicity Is Highly Overrated Column written for Interactions, volume 14, issue 3. © CACM, 2007. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included. Comment: This is one of the most misunderstood of all my columns. So after you finish, read the "Addendum" before you Slashdot or otherwise flame me. "Why can't products be simpler?" But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacked what they considered to be "critical" features. I recently toured a department store in South Korea. I found the traditional "white goods" most interesting: Refrigerators and washing machines. Once upon a time, a toaster had one knob to control how much the bread was to be toasted and that was all. Why such expensive toasters? Why is this? Answer: Because the people want the features. The complex expensive toaster?