Web usability guidelines
Here are some points taken from Designing Web Usability, by Jakob Nielsen.
General points:
- follow widespread user expectations
- keeps things simple and fast
- keep download times as short as possible; enabling zip compression on your server is almost always a good idea
- don't hard-code font size
- don't disable the browser's ability to change font size
- don't hard-code absolute pixel sizes
- rendering must be reasonable for a wide range of screen resolutions
- if layout is based on tables, use several tables instead of one large one - the first table will be rendered while the others are still downloading
- if using tables, use the COLGROUP and COL tags to define both the number of columns and their relative percentage widths - this allows a smart browser to start rendering a single table before it has received all of its content
- include width and height for images - allows faster rendering
- include ALT text for images
- break up blocks of text with lots of white space
- use standard colours for links
- avoid horizontal scrolling
- don't use frames
- half the users will go directly to the search box, without examining the structure of the site in any way
- store the text entered by users into the search box, for later examination
- the attention of many users will initially go to the center of a page, not the top
- high quality page titles and metadata are important for bookmarks and search engines
See Also :
Would you use this technique?