Best practices in web and user interface design
Random notes, opinions, advices, and articles. Please comment!
Categories. Tags. User-defined tags. How many ways does the content on a site need to be sliced?! A lot. The World Wide Web is a big place with a lot of information. Users need help in finding, classifying, and sorting that information. They have come to expect it, including on your site. That’s where tags come in. Think of categories and tags as pre-defined search parameters, allowing users to quickly find what they need.
Website banners—don’t make me scroll!
Posted in: Interface design | 0 Comment | Permalink
A common mistake for interface designers is to design website page banners that are too tall. Sure, they’re visually appealing and can have great impact. But they also drastically limit the depth of the content area, which forces the user, page after page, to have to hit the scroll bar. And that, ultimately, may frustrate them.
A website page should fit my browser
Posted in: Interface design | 1 Comment | Permalink
Before starting the design of a website, one of the first things to evaluate is what computer screen resolution our expected audience will be using when browsing the site. It is typical for first-time website designers to then design a website page to fit these dimensions exactly. This is a mistake.
I often work in collaboration with graphic designers who will often present a website’s look and feel to their clients without having analyzed what type of content their design is supposed to support. This has always been puzzling to me.
While designing a website, there will come a time when several design solutions will be proposed to you, the client. At that time I always stress that you should look at them as if you were a visitor to the website.
Have you ever found that sometimes you just don’t know what you can or can’t click on in a website page?
