from an interview with ole jakob nielsen called time for a redesign, a short list of his pet peeves about site design: "1. Fail to include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does, 2. Neglect to use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the home page size, 3. Don't use color to distinguish visited and unvisited links. 4. Use graphics to decorate, rather than illustrate real content. 5. Give an active link to the home page on the home page." while i don't feel these necessarily apply to all sites (e.g. macktez), we do do pretty well with that list. i think we avoid 1. (it's the big bold text), 2. (this is a pet peeve of mine too), 4. (the only graphics on our pages are the navigation elements at the top and they all have alts), and 5. (the logo on every page, including the first one, links to the root of the site). we do not do 3, though, and that is because i find that the "visited" vs "not visited" state of a link provides minimal if any value to readers; if the site and link itself can't effectively convey where you're going to go when you click, what value is a diff color?

0 Comments
Leave Comment...