Interactive Learning and Design |
These recommendations are based my experience of ways of creating web sites that make them as easy to use as possible. Easy of use is a quality you can test for informally - ask people about, see how long they stay on your site, how many come back, send you email - as well as measure formally..
The suggestions that follow I find work more often than not to make your site a better place to visit, and are worth considering and using, unless, and this is an important qualification, you have a really good reason not to.
- Keep the text on a single site below 1000 words - 250 to 500 are best - and if the piece of writing is longer, break it into parts and link them.
- Have white space around your text, that makes it much easier to read. This can be done using <blockquote>, a table or Cascading Style Sheets. The last is the most elegant and powerful, but not supported consistently enough to be counted on everywhere.
- Don't have more than ten links on a page - 7 or less is even better - that way the user isn't confused by too many possibilities (remember how paralyzing all those sites are in a search you haven't narrowed).
- If you are going to use an image file of any kind, make sure you need it and that it serves its purpose better than words would. Images take up so much more space than text and therefore take so much longer to download, especially on a modem connection. (Animated gifs annoy more often than they please, especially if they are on a loop.)
Here are some sites that give advice that I find worth considering:
Impact of Data Quality
on the Web User Experience
(Look at other entries in Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox
as well.)
Seven Deadly Sins of Information Design
