Archive for February, 2008

URHere Indicators

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

As a continuation of web usability, comes the topic of URHere indicators. They help give the user a sense of where they are and where they can go. Without these, It can become unclear where they are in your site and they may just hit the close button

This is exactly why URHere indicators are important, but those of you that use them know that they can become a pain to manually do on each page.

There is a solution. Using PHP you can limit the hassle caused by this convention. First you would need a PHP array that contains information about each of your links:
$pages = array('Home'=>'index.php','Results'=>'results.php');

Now you place a variable on each page such as:
$URHere = 'Home;
And then loop through each page in your array and check if the above variable matches the ‘Home’ part in the array. If it does then you assign a class of URHere and format that class using CSS, if it is anything else you create a link using the array with the text of ‘Home’ and link of ‘index.php’.

Using includes you can now change a link on your page, and it will affect all pages and all places it was used. Talk about a friendly way to do navigation.

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Web Usability

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Web Usability is one of those things that are usually missed in web design. We construct our pages in such a way that a user will carefully read each and every paragraph we write.

This indeed is not the proper way to design a site. A typical user does not read a website, but instead scans the page for anything that grabs its interest. It could be a particular word, a contrasting colour, or even a familiar convention such as a shopping cart icon. All these things are ways of getting the user to be interested in your site.

A great book on this topic is Steve Krug’s – Don’t Make Me Think. It deals with many problems with websites. One thing it suggests is to cut down half your words on every page, and then cut down another half. This reinforces the fact that users scan, and will not take time to read useless happy text.

Steve Krug also mentions something as simple as making your links obvious saves the user that fraction of a second needed to ask the question, Is this clickable?

SmashingMagazine.com also lists many important things to consider when making a website.

Now that we have looked at some of the issues when designing, we need to find out what the solution is. Well the answer is TEST, TEST, and TEST again. Once you have worked on a site for a long time, you eyes miss obvious things that hinder your end users experience and all it takes is a little time.

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