So easy a baby...

When you put together all the pieces of a website--the text, the graphics, the functional components, navigation, and more--a website quickly becomes a mess. Before you know it, feature creep has hit the fan, and suddenly your website has become the 'swiss army knife' of websites. Whether your site aims to accomplish one task or many, having a highly usable website must always come first.

Many questions must be answered when building a website today. Is the navigation vertical on the left, horizontal on the top, or some combination of both? When a user logs into the site, where are they taken-- their home, their profile, or to a special page altogether different? When a user goes to your website for the first time, what do they immediately see without having to scroll; what's the most important feature of your website, and where should you place it? These questions, as simple as they seem, can make or break your site's usability. By breaking our design process down into two distinct phases (content/functionality and look/feel), we can ensure the two do not step on each other's toes.

Usability Highlights

Here are some suggestions to improve your website's usability.

• Separate your site design from your site structure (do not use inline CSS or HTML styling).

  This seemingly simple tip can make your website more flexible than you may imagine. By separating the style from the structure/content, you will essentially have a website that can have a different look and feel (color scheme, layout choice, etc.) without having to have the entire site redone from the ground up. This is cost effective, and it provides for a much more dynamic website.

• Avoid tables except when rendering data you would typically find in a spreadsheet.

  Gone are the days when tables were used to create columns and style the layout of a website. This is also useful for accessibility purposes (think screenreaders, for example). Use floats instead of tables to create columns.

• The year is 2009 - wisescreen is in.

  While all websites should be constructed to still support 4:3 resolution displays, a modern website should take advantage of the large percentage of users with widescreen capability. Instead of letting all that space go to waste, provide something extra for the user to look at: a fun graphic background is an easy example that can add a lot.

• Go out of your way to support variable font sizes.

  Except for a few niche groups, your website should be built around a vast audience of users. Ensure that your site design does not break outright, just because a user has a larger font-size selected for their browser of choice. No website will handle extreme font sizes, but modest variety is a must.