Hiring The Internet

You do a search on web readability and you will come across Jakob Nielsen, the controversial “usability consultant.” Like that of many “Internet Gurus,” Nielsen’s philosophy for attracting and converting web visitors is simple: have worthwhile content and assume that the web reader is lazy and selfish.

But just one look at his site, and you wonder if anyone would bother navigating through his stuff. His content is noteworthy, as he’s one of the best known authorities on the differences between web and print reading.

The point about Nielsen is not that his site is ugly, but how that affects the readability of his site. Like a lot of online marketers who sell how-to seminars and books, he’s a not a “big picture” kind of guy.

Old Hollywood star Cary Grant said it best: “It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.” Although content is most important, other factors should be taken into consideration for a worthwhile site: design, layout, and branding.

There is one element in which content and design intersect: font choice.

Continue reading ‘Increase the Readability of Your Web Pages with the Right Font’

It happens every now and then. You may come across a page that is “Under Construction.” It used to be a common phenomenon, but the incidence has been dwindling steadily since its heyday back in the late 1990s. (There are more “Under Construction” search results than ever, but that is due to the much higher number of sites online.) Continue reading ‘Why Website Updates Are Important, Courtesy of “The Office”’

What is website accessibility all about you ask? Simply put, it is constructing your site in such a way that visitors with disabilities can access your web content. What happens when someone using a screen reader encounters that mind blowing graphical banner that your designer created? Is there an awkward pause, or does your page handle the situation gracefully and keep the conversation going? The checklists below offer a set of standards and best practices that will put you well on your way to ensuring that your site’s content is available to as wide an audience as possible. As an added bonus, making your site accessible helps improve SEO as well as the experience of users with mobile devices.

Accessibility Checklists:

A Basic Checklist

W3C- An Authoritative List

Sec. 508 Checklist- It’s actually law in some cases

When starting a new design, usually one of the first orders of business is establishing a basic color palette. Sometimes a client provides one as part of their branding guidelines, sometimes it’s up to the designer. Regardless of the situation, chances are you’re initially going to be spending a fair amount of time choosing colors.

That’s where colorlovers.com can make your life a little easier. In addition to lots of nice user submitted palettes, their Trend section uses a color slider to search for examples of color usage for both magazines and websites. With the web quickly becoming saturated with 2.0 widgets, it’s nice to stumble across sites like this that harness those tools to create something useful.

One caveat… the color search seems to work much better with magazine colors than websites for some reason.

Feeling limited by the same old handful of standard web fonts? The following pages have some useful statistics on fonts that are installed by default on various operating systems. You may be surprised by how many options there actually are. Just be sure to define safe fall-backs if you decide to venture off the beaten track.

Both of these sites have good lists, the first provides actual samples of the fonts and the second gives side by side stats showing the percentage of win, mac and linux machines that have them installed.
www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-CombinedResults.shtml
www.webspaceworks.com/resources/fonts-web-typography/48/