My brain is whirring over the content of my site. Wondering what I should include...what I should leave out. Best thing I have read on this (about a year ago so mostly forgotten) is Steve Krug's 'Don't Make me Think!' which is mostly about usability. Does usability alone make a good website?? A website might be easy to use and be 'fit for purpose', but it could still potentially look awful and beneath the 'surface' have streams of messy, illicit, non-standard code (but nonetheless functional in terms of the user experience - I assume it's possible to do both?).
So tomorrow night, in an attempt to achieve even a flimsy grasp of 'Good Website Design', I shall be doing a lot of reading and notetaking to get an idea of some sensible topics to cover on my site. This will hopefully point towards some sort of structure/hierarchy for my site (which is currently 'homepage/stuff/more stuff.html') .
I suggest we make a website about how to make a cracking cup of tea. I know all about that :0)
2 comments:
Don't make me think! is a great text. Usability is very important for the web. Design is important but usability should drive design and not the other way around. Jakob Nielsen is recognised as an expert in web usability. Take a lot at this site and then rethink.
Now I'm now designer by any length but I do have a good understanding of usability and have refused to implement a 'cool' design because it had poor usability.
Having standards compliance is a usability issue as the way people access the web can vary in terms of browsers. If people accessed your website from your browser and monitor then they would have the same experience as you.
So how about the hundreds of millions of people using the web come over to yours to surf and enjoy that cracking cup of tea? ;)
take away: Usability is vital, and web standards in part, can support it
Thanks Nick - I will look at the site you suggested.
So, this standards compliance business - does this purely refer to coding? (ie as per the validator we were running our code through on Weds?). Who sets the standards? Is it the 'W3 Ninja Council'?? Can you provide a link?
Are there set standards for design too? Or would a mention (on my website) of standards compliance purely come under the Coding section, if there was one?
Yours,
Class Nuisance
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