50 Tips To A User Friendly Website
Here is a list of 50 things that I keep in mind on every website that I build. Some of these are secrets I have acquired from the best designers in the world, and some of them are standard every day practices. Either way, these tips will improve your visitors experience on your website.
Blurry, Colorblind and Brilliant
“Design is in the details.” - We hear it every day and it is absolutely true. However, details without a blueprint to tie things together can lead to problems. We are passionate about details, perfect grid alignment, perfect color combinations, gradients, reflections and textures. These visual details have a major aesthetic impact on the website, but they can’t replace the content – The reason the website exists in the first place.
Embedded Fonts – A Bad Idea
Embedding fonts in your website through CSS has been a widely anticipated feature. A recent post at A List Apart has brought more light to this issue recently. The excitement behind this revolves mostly around removing creative limitations and improving readability through better typography.
However, I anticipate the use of embedded fonts will make things much worse, before they get better. Stephen Coles and I are in much agreement on the issue.
Typography on the Web
Typography is fundamental to clean design, and paramount to content. Bad typography will drive users away from your content, while good typography will keep things legible and draw your readers eye to important sections. Your content should be easy to skim for those in a rush, and also easy to read more deeply.
Typography on the web should stem from print media. People are used to reading newspapers, paperbacks, and other paper documents. Study these and keep your web pages consistent with these.
Search
Popular Posts
- My Favorite Pomodoro Timers
- How to build a Gantt Chart with the Google Charts API
- Why Flash is Mostly Bad
- Sharing the Grid
- Why You Should Outsource Usability Testing
- 10 Tips to Better Google Wave Conversations
- The difference between User Research and Usability Testing?
- How to Label Submit Buttons
- Our New Development Process
- Paper Prototyping vs. Balsamiq Mockups
Latest Comments
- Robert → “ I have to agree with the design of the site being great. I am more interested in how the website got ranked so high and some keywords land first page in searches when the page it lands on has no page rank.…”
- Etienne Segonzac → “ Hello everyone ! I would love to have a chat with other Pomodoro users (and the mailing list is quite slow). The thing is for me the main takeaways of the technique are the rhythm + the motivation of visualizing my progress. BTW, the Navel Labs app is quite gorgeous (and the compliment is coming from a concurrent…”
- some guy → “ Nice work! Thanks...…”
- sirber → “ Is there a limit to the URL size? What if I want to create a massive chart?…”
- Randy Martin → “ I have used the classic 12 column grid for all my design tasks for nearly 15 years. 12 column grids came out of print, allowing one to set type full page, half page, quarter page, third page, sixth page, etc., extremely easy. More than that, keeping things on the grid puts elements in balance and…”