One of my favorite blogs is Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki, author of Art of the Start.
In a recent post, Guy included a link to what he considers the best photo storytelling blog entry that really shows "the power of the medium." Be sure to take a look at The Amateur Gourmet.
Here's a simple set of guidelines to check from the Web Credibility Project at Stanford University.
The Government Domain column in LLRX.com "The Cream of the Federal Web Site Crop" by Peggy Garvin discusses the best of them and why usability is so important to having a good website. She ends the column with a site recommendation "that may restore your faith in government websites."
Usability.gov from the Department of Health and Human Services is a "resource for designing usable, useful, and accessible web sites and user interfaces." The site began as a project of the National Cancer Institute to find evidence-based usability guidelines so that they could make cancer information easily available to the public. The product, Usability.gov, is available to the public as well as federal web developers. Several of the World Usability Day panelists remarked that a plus to working in government is that they can "steal," or adapt, the work of their federal colleagues for their own projects, and agencies actively share their solutions within the federal community.
Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen asked his Alertbox readers to nominate the usability problems they found the most irritating. He says none of the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005 nominated by his readers are new and makes the point that because these continue to be so common, it makes sense that people continue to complain about them the most.
The Typetester is an online tool that can be pretty useful when you need to check on or choose a typeface for your web project. It allows you to compare fonts for the browser screen. JavaScript needs to be on to use this application.
If you've ever wondered what colors are safe on all browsers for your website, take a look at 4096 Color Wheel. Just move your mouse over the wheel to get the web safe colors and over the square for the hues.
Excellent information in Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents from usability expert Jakob Nielsen on how to present PDF and other non-web documents on your website. Think of all those times people lost their places because they accidentally closed the browser window or confused the print button on the web browser with the one on the adobe acrobat reader window inside the browser window and want to know why it won't print. Send this one to whoever does your library's web pages.
A librarian in Ohio (Laura Solomon, Webmaster, Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library) decided to see if the public libraries in Ohio were serving their communities well via their library's website and did a usability survey based on user-friendliness expert Jakob Nielsen's criteria. Sinking Or Swimming: The State of Web Sites in Ohio's Public Libraries (PDF) is the result. Read it for the tips for simple ways to increase your website's usefulness to your community.
From the article:
Why Do a Study?
Surfing other Ohio library websites, I noticed that there seemed
to be huge discrepancies in how libraries handled the look and feel of
their respective websites. It was relatively easy to tell which libraries
viewed their websites as an important component of their overall
business and which had a site because they thought it was something
they were just supposed to have.What is Usability?
Usability refers to those aspects of a site’s design that enable it
to be user-friendly.
Lori Ayre wrote extensively about the Web developer extension over at Mentat, but I wanted to emphasize that it's a tool anyone interested in the user-friendliness of their website should be using. It installs as a toolbar in Firefox or Mozilla browsers and lets you, with a click of a drop-down menu, validate your site's coding against the usability standards.
Lori Ayre has reported on her weblog that:
Steven Faulkner of Accessible Information Solutions, a division of the National Information Library Services (NILS) in Australia has made the Web Accessibility Toolbar available for non-commercial use.Even though it only works with IE, it is a significant contribution to anyone interested in keeping their website accessible for a wide range of visitors and compliant with current standards.
"Lower-literacy users exhibit very different reading behaviors than higher-literacy users: they plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view."This article (that prints to 5 pages) should be must reading for all library web designers. Written by web usability expert Jakob Nielsen and part of his Alertbox series. Alertbox is not yet available via RSS but you can sign up to get an email notification when a new article goes online.