Datasheet

Crowder c01.tex V3 - 05/26/2008 7:16pm Page 30
Part I Laying the Foundation
of three or more possible links actually contains the phone number they are so
desperately seeking.
■ Make fonts readable — Have high contrast with the background and, if you use them
at all, do not put significant amounts of light-colored fonts against dark backgrounds.
■ Be conscious of backgrounds — Consider white to be the background of choice.
Notice the use of white backgrounds in some very high-traffic sites such as Google,
Yahoo! and Drudge Report. White backgrounds make the content easier to read and
enable graphics to stand out.
■ Be conscious of your user’s screen resolution — Screen resolutions can run from
640 x 480 on up. Therefore, when developing sites, be sure to make table widths
flexible, not fixed.
■ Field-test the site using real, live, honest-to-goodness people who know nothing about
your business — Of course, people who designed the site or use it daily are not going
to find it user-unfriendly.
The following are some sources for good Web-site design, advice, and techniques:
■
www.webreference.com
■ websitesforgood.com
■ www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html
Top ways to have bad sites
On the other side of the coin, here are ways to develop customer-unfriendly (that is, bad) Web
sites:
■ Have links that don’t work.
■ Have messages that a Flash Macromedia advertisement is loading when you click
on a company’s URL and omit the Skip Intro button.
■ Have a form completely clear if a customer makes any mistake anywhere in inputting
information into the form.
■ Have shipping charges appear on the very last screen of an online order.
■ Do not specify the date, Social Security card, or phone number formats required for input.
■ Have rapid, repetitive animation or video shorts, and use lots of them.
■ Have short segments of loud annoying music — and loop them.
■ Use lots of different colors, themes, and unrelated images and motifs on your home
page and throughout the site.
■ Use font colors that are practically indistinguishable from the background.
■ Have your home page cluttered with countless links using different fonts and backgrounds.
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