Well, I’m on the last chapter of a very great book. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug: A common sense approach to web usability. This book is thin, but completely full of good information. It kept me hanging on every word. I am currently reading 4 books consecutively so I will review those as well. This book has been great. It’s approach is quite simple. DON’T MAKE YOUR USERS THINK!

Don’t Make Me Think discusses how even make your users think for a fraction of a second will add to the frustration total and make them leave your site. Some areas of interest are:

• User patterns
• Designing for scanning
• Wise use of copy
• Navigation design
• Home page layout
• Usability testing

The section about how to conduct your own cheap usability tests on your own site is quite informative. It’s amazing how a slight change to the title, tagline, architecture, or positioning of your site can affect your users taking a call-to-action or making a purchase on your site. I highly recommend this book to ANYONE involved in web design, web development, or search engine optimization. Usability and SEO really go hand-in-hand. What’s the point of all the traffic if you aren’t making you users happy and guiding them to action on your site?

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In order to stay ahead of the game as a web designer it takes constant study and research. A career in web development is not like many other careers, once you have your degree and you have your foot in the door your good to go. In web development it’s a constant race, it’s either get in and really get in or get out. There’s allot of dead end web design companies out there that settle for last place and do not wish to or do not have the dedication to advance. Those type of web design companies end up getting buried in the end or try to catch up in the end and constantly trip and fall on their face.

In order to become a good web designer and stay a good web designer it is important to be fluent with all the new standards and innovations of the web. Web design and development is constantly and rapidly advancing, it’s not easy “staying ahead of the game”. With constant and consistent hard work, study and research Wiwork’s advanced web design and development team has managed to “stay ahead of the game”.

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When considering your target demographic, for you or a client’s niche market, do you also consider people with disabilities. The 2000 U.S. Census shows us that 49.7 million people in the U. S. age 5 and over have a disability. If you’re designing and developing for large audience you really need to keep this in mind. Not only are you catering to the disable, but you’re showing other people, and search engines as well, that you care about your audience.

Here is a quick breakdown of a few things to consider for web accessibility:

• Alt Attribute - Often referred to as the “Alt Tag”, but it’s not a tag. This attribute is for images and describes to the disabled, using screen readers, what your images are about. It also tells search engines what your images are of as well.
• Access Keys - This helps the disabled navigate easily by using keys. These can be used with a combination of the ALT key and a letter of the alphabet that you assigned to a section of navigation.
• Color Scheme - Make sure your colors contrast. Color blind users need to be able to read text on a contrasting background color. There are many different types of color blindness. Check out Wikipedia to learn more.
• Font Size - Never keep your fonts at a fixed size, and use large fonts. If you’re using CSS, use “em”s or a percentage so users can be flexible in changing the font. Also, make sure it doesn’t break your layout if they do. Use the sliding doors technique for navigation.
• Navigation - Make sure you have your navigation in text and not images. If you must use images make sure your Alt attribute is descriptive.
• Jump To Content - Offer a link at the top for the user to click to jump the content through an anchor. This way screen readers don’t have to keep reading your navigation over and over to the user for each page they visit.
• Languages - Offer your site in different languages. You can achieve this by using Google to translate your page or Geo-targeting with IP addresses.

For more on accessibility check the government’s Section 508

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CSS is nothing new. Web designers have been using CSS to style text on their sites since the 90’s. So when a Web developer tells you they know CSS or has it listed on their resume. Do they really know CSS?

CSS now is used to separate style from content. What do I mean by this? Your CSS stylesheet should be used to specify all design elements within your Website, and your content should be displayed in your XHTML document.

Why not just put it together in a XHTML table-based layout? Many reasons! For starters:

• If you want to change an styled element on your site. Just change in in your CSS stylesheet and it will change in every instance it’s in across your whole entire Website.
• A browser only has to render your stylesheet once to use on every page as opposed to table-based layouts where it has to redownload the style of the page for each page it visits. This means quicker load times and a better text to code ratio. A good text to good ratio is especially good for Google AdSense becaue AdSense bases relevant ads to your topic on your content and when all the content it’s scraping is mainly table structured code then it lowers your relevance. Also, a quicker load times means better search engine rankings because it proves better usability and bots can crawl the code quicker and get right to the content easily without sifting through nested tables. After all CONTENT IS KING!
• Everybody’s doing it! All profressional Web designers knows that tables are out the door. They only should be used for displaying data. So hop on board or get left in the dust.

Unfortunately, Internet Exploder’s browser support has been very weak for CSS, and yes, even with the improvements of IE7. There are CSS hacks to get around all that though. CSS layouts take a bit more time to put together due having to hack them to be cross-browser compatiable, but the benefits are worth it.

Here’s a few CSS layout sites we’ve done:

http://www.utah-realtor.net

http://www.utahwebdesign.ws

http://www.parkcitysbestlistings.com

http://www.pistachionuts.net

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When designing a web site it is important to keep the web site’s conversion rate (the number of visitors that become subscribers, buyers or members) in mind. There are many design elements that have a large impact on conversion rates. Some of the things that a web designer can do to help improve a web site’s conversion rate is:

• Minimize the amount of options you give your users - Through extensive research many web developers have found that the more options a web site has the less click through’s and conversion rate there is. Breaking your web site down into 3 - 6 main categories can improve a web sites conversion rate a significant amount.
• Keep a clean and clutter free design - Clutter tends to confuse and irritate the majority of users, dropping conversion rates dramatically.
• Make sure you have a good color scheme - When designing a web site it is important that you choose a color scheme that is easy on the eyes. Web sites that use color schemes that are to dark, to bright or just do not match at all tend to have a low conversion rate.
• Use the most known and common terms in your web site navigation - If there are any options in your web site navigation that maybe questionable to any of your users do what you can to come up with a more common and known term that relates or exclude that option.
• Direct your users - When designing your web site you want to make sure that your signup buttons, member login, free quote buttons etc. are positioned properly and have the most dominate color in your color scheme. Make sure you always give your users a place to go, it’s surprising how many dead end web pages there are on the web.
• Do not use scrolling or flashing text adds and banners - Flashing and scrolling text adds and banners tend to look like spam and irritate users. The “in your face” type of advertising tends to drop conversion rates dramatically.

Some of the smallest things can make or break your web sites conversion rates. The best way to come up with what works best for your web site is to analyze your traffic with a good web analytics program. WI Works, Inc. uses some of the web’s most advanced and reliable web analytic programs available and have many years of experience in improving conversion rates.

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Some people believe that Search Engine Optimization comes into play after a web site has been designed and developed. Search Engine Optimization should be a part of every web operation from start to finish. The way a web designer and developer designs and develops a web site plays a crucial role in Search Engine Optimization. When designing and developing a web site the web designer and developer should keep the following four things in mind:

• Structure - How is your web site structured? Does the most relevant and important elements come first and are they higher up on the page (in the header or navigation)? Are all of the sections of your web site broken down into well organized categories and subcategories? Are the majority of your web pages less then 4 clicks away from your home page?
• Usability - Is the navigation easy to understand? Is it easy to find the navigation on the web site and how hard will it be for inexperienced users to navigate through the web site? Does all your images have descriptive alt text for screen readers and text browsers?
• Crawlability - Can search engines easily crawl and follow all of the links on the web site, including the navigation? Can the search engines easily crawl the web pages in the web site, is there anything in the web site that may slow down or even stop search engine bots?
• Load Time - How long will it take for a user with a 14k connection to load your web site? Is it possible to reduce the file size of the images used on your web site? Can you replace some of your images with CSS and text? Did you use the most efficient HTML and CSS code?

A large percentage of web designers and developers do not know how to properly design and develop a web site for search engines. Here at Wiworks all of our web designers and developers are up-to-date with all of the major search engine’s algorithms and how to properly design and develop a web site for optimum search engine placement.

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