Article Surfing Archive

1. Getting to know about audience members

You want a site that has personality and quality content based on your audience taste. You have to understand their color preferences, technical skills and any prevalence of special needs. Build your website layout at 780 by 600 to fit 800 by 600 screen resolution.

2. Make the interface simple and obvious

The more obvious the interface is, the less frustration the site visitor has to guess about how your site works. You want the audience to concentrate on the content, not the interface.

3. Readability

Make paragraph easy to read. Don't use small text for font size. Allow your website to resize on a site user's browser.

4. Make your page fast loading

Reduce the waiting time is a must if your page over 20KB.

5. Avoid hidden (rollover to reveal) navigation

It makes for a very clean design if all your navigation is hidden, but it may also mean that people won't know where to click to go somewhere.

6. Get user feedback

Find out what works and what doesn't.

7. Study site visitor performance

How long does it take to performance a given task? The time it takes to do thing has got to be reasonable. If it's not reasonable, improve user interaction wherever possible.

8. Help section (site map, 404)

A 404 and site map page considers an usability aid tool. If you remove a page from the server, build a 404 page to direct them to see a different page. This is good for search engine spiders and site users.

9. Check HTML codes

Test your code for bugs on web browsers. Test the interface for usability. Ask your friends and colleagues for in depth and valuable feedback. Most people do not realize this, invalid codes cause more problems they realize it. This can hurt your site users and search engine rankings. Use HTML tool to check your HTML tags at http://validator.w3.org/ for valid and current tags.