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Really? I'd like to know how to get tabs and multiple virtual desktops in IE. Bonus points if your method does not require installation of extra software. (And why should it? Redhat 7.3 includes mozilla by default.)

When you're done explaining the above, perhaps you'd like to go on and explain how to:

• Make IE block ads.
• Make IE block unrequested popups while allowing popups in response to a click.
• Make IE animate images but loop through them exactly once.
• Get decent font size control in IE (c.f. useit).
• Turn any of the above features on or off at any time with a single mouse click. Drilling down into a configuration dialog does not count as a single mouse click.

This post is not an idle flame -- if any or all of the above are possible with IE, I'd genuinely like to know how to accomplish it.

For those who are interested in usability, check out stuff from Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Tognazzini

Why, exactly, is any website _required_ to permit another page to link to it?

A site isn't required to permit linking, and that's the whole point here. Linking just happens, as does bookmarking, sending a URL to a friend, a colleague, or a mailing list, or URL guessing. If you put something on the Web, it will be used by people unknown to you in ways you can't anticipate. That's reality; Jakob Nielsen even considers the URL as UI.

Linking just means to tell each other about things one can do or find on the Web. Simple, isn't it? There really is no further meaning of a link. There could be, if we had a common system of link types, but we don't have that. So a link just says: It might be worthwhile to let your Web client software retrieve whatever it finds under address XYZ. (What will those lawyers say if somebody links to a non-existing page on a site that tries to forbid linking?)

Moreover, standard Web technology is built upon the idea of a worldwide hypertext system co-operatively created by independent entities. This is clearly expressed in the RFC, though not in typical disclaimer-style legalese. If one doesn't like that technology, one is free to choose something else.

Trying to forbid linking on the Web means trying to change reality without really changing it, somehow. Sure, lawyers could claim and courts could rule that Pi equals four, pigs can fly, and the moon is made of green cheese. They just have to accept that average people call them crazy, and ignore them. I think that's all this is about.

There are more important reasons for choosing a typeface than style, like usability.

Times New Roman is a serif typeface. Serif typefaces are easier to read on paper because of the subtle detail such as thick and thin lines, hooks and feet. On a computer screen with a much lower resolution than paper the subtleties of serifs degrade and san serifs can be easier on the eyes.

Usability studies show that people read san serif typefaces faster on the screen than serifs, the opposite of what happens on paper. That's why standard OS UI elements are nearly always in san serif, and books are nearly always in serif

I can't find any comments from Jakob Nielsen on the subject, but his site uses a san serif typeface.

"...extraneous filler words in the META tags or hidden at the bottom of the page."

I noticed the other day that self styled "King of Usability" and Benny Hill look-a-like, Jakob Nielsen uses this technique on his very own page.

Cheers
PD

Even proposing to take this guy and what he promotes for granted is so utterly bizare I can't help my self but laugh. Really, to me Cowboy Neal and Jacob Nielsen are on the same team.
I mean, look at his site!
Honestly now, chosing MySQL over Firebird on performance principles or stating that Linux is easier for a newbie than Windows is one thing, and pass if you are a slashdotter.
But calling this guy with his sad and sorry excuse for a website the king of web usability is so gawdforesaken lame you wouldn't believe it.

I very much believe Jacob Nielsen and David Siegel (the other king of the web - the guy who 'invented' (ROTFL) spacer gifs) came to fame very much the same way. They started out early enough with gathering minions around them which provided links to each other and back to them - the so called 'other very good web experts'. Sewing a rumor that fed itself to full size. Just like the Windows 95 craze in times of OS/2 ('it's good ... because lot's of people will use it so it's good ... because lots of... you get the point)

No folks, really, trust me, this is NOT your metier. Calling this guy a webdesigner with a clue is like calling Bill Gates a fair buisnesspartner and a supplier of good software. And makes anyone calling him that a greater clown than even this Nielsen guy himself.

"Exxxcellent!"

Uh huh, whatever Burnsy.

Frankly - and with due respect to engineers - it *just this attitude* that results in the impossible UI problems that consumers have been facing forever.

I think you mistake the attitude. UI disasters come from anyone who has no training in UI issues, and that's true of many software engineers, and basically all customers.

Keep the context in mind. Customers really can't sit down and tell you what they want. You have to help them work it out, explore alternatives, show them what's possible and what's not, and basically "elicit" the requirements. If the customers could do that stuff, they'd be the engineers.

First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users is a good article.

Customers are not to blame. Engineers listening too literally to the customers without applying expertise and training quite frequently are, however.

Taking it back into context, just because you watch lots of television does not qualify you to create a good television show, or know even how to describe one. Indeed, such a person is likely to fall directly into one of the most popular customer/engineer traps, which is to simply regurgitate designs/programming they've seen in the past and liked, even if it was decidedly sub-optimal. (How many people demand GUIs when they need command line interfaces, and how many people demand(ed) command line interfaces when they needed GUIs? If we let the mass-market customers decide what to program, how many more poor-quality copies of Friends would we end up with? Innovation is challenging!)

Herein lies an important tenet of usability testing, which is Jakob Nielsen's "First Rule of Usability:"

Don't Listen to Users

You may think the Windows interface is OK, but your saying so is no substitute for observing you in action. Chances are--and no offense intended--you probably don't get along as well as you think you do.

And you have to have something to compare it to. When compared with the Macintosh, the Windows GUI is much slower. Just, Ask Tog. Finally, as MaxVlast points out,

• the user shouldn't care or think about whether a program is running or not, he should simply use the right tool for the right job

The Americans appear to have beaten the aussies in this race.

link to darpa press release

Note to slashdot:
If I type http://http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:MKgyf6 -JQS0C: www.darpa.mil/body/NewsItems/pdf/hyfly.pdf , I want to link to the site, at least warn me it will not be posted as a link. Is there any way I can edit posts I made???

read all about it on useit.com

* note to the 3l33t ha80r who hacked my account, I have changed my password

Jakob Nielsen has been saying for almost five years that newspapers will have to use classified ads, not banner ads to make money.

The best thing I could think of was Hypercard for the Macintosh, it allowed games like The Manhole to be created with very little programming. Sure, it needed a significant amount of computer knowledge to create something enteretaining, but it was nothing like programming a game like Quake III in C.

My all-time favorite game construction kit was the Pinball Construction Kit. It came out in 1985, and it allowed for the creation of personalized pinball tables inside the game. The only problem is that the game required to play any pinball table you design.

Try searching google for game creation kit. It came up with a ton of results, and this one looks promising.

First of all, "point-and-drool?" I hate Frontpage as much as the next /. elitist, but is this really necessary? I'm not even sure what you mean by it. You imply that Frontpage is unstructered. In what sense?

Will [this] . . . really result in better web sites? . . . Most importantly, will there be any net gain in design and usability?

A net gain in design? Design of what? The web site? The maintainence tools? Usability? Of the tools? Of the site for visitors? What are you getting at?

I don't think this is at all the point of the book. Perhaps "point-and-drool" web designers (as you call them) should read Designing Web Usability

For instance, we should be able to send a browser to any page 'within' a site, but what about aggregating information or links in a way the designer of the website never intended, or publishing the information in a new media. Is there much difference between data mining a web site and publishing public comments on a site such as /. in dead tree form? I certainly do not know, but it seems to be a relevant question.

There are clearly limits to deep linking. Jakob Nielson gives the example of a quiz on his site. Going to anywhere but the first page of the quiz renders the process meaningless. It is true that in most cases you want as much help as possible to get a user to an 'inner' page, as this appears to one of the greatest impediment to usability, but do we really want people to pull, for example, images or frames from our sites and display them as their own content. As the previous NPR discussion illustated, there are times when this will unfairly transfer hosting costs

Let's hope that this doesn't mean that deep linking in itself becomes illegal. There may be a case where advertising revenue pages are bypassed or some other legitimate reason exists that the content publisher would rather users came via their front page.

However, it is well known that deep linking is good linking as far as users go.

I don't suppose there's any chance that publishers will come to a gentleman's agreement that it is improper to deep link if they explicitly ask not too (in the same way as it is considered "impolite" to provide direct links to files on others servers.

Finally, if DeCSS code can be considered "free speech", how can writing an URL not be subject to the same rational?

Goblin

My favorite usability book is Jakob Neilsen's Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. His basic point is the web should be FAST and easy to navigate. Most people have modems and many have poor monitors. See also his website useit.com.

• Jakob Neilson
• Usable Web
• Web Word
• Bruce Tognazzini
• User Interface Engineering
• Usability First
• Microsoft Usability

Other then porn, content isn't something people will pay for on the web, especially what are basically magazine articles.

I disagree. I think people are not willing to pay the subscription on a regular basis in seamingly large amounts (even $5 a month per site is too much). But if it was a few cents here and there for an article or for a page of posts, people would be much more willing to pay. We need micropayments, and we need them bad. What I don't understand is why they still haven't appeared and spread, the market for them should be huge. The only explanation for it that I've seen makes me sad...

I work as a web developer, so my main need for .DOC files exists in creating proposals, contracts, letters and similar for correspondence with my clients. Like many other Windows users, I've been using the various Word products for as long as I've been using computers.

I've always found Word to be one of the least-intuitive, poorly-supported applications that I've ever had the displeasure of working with. To say that I hate Word with a passion would not be an understatement. To make matters worse, with each new release, the number of Word's "features" seems to expand nearly geometrically, while my ability to use nearly ANY feature decreases by some sort of evil inverse proportion. Microsoft needs to hire Jacob Nielsen to conduct some usability studies on the app, seriously.

So for me, ANYTHING that can help me to escape from the grasp of Word sounds good. I've got the 1.0 release of OpenOffice and I love it. Sure, it's got bugs vis-a-vis opening and saving Word files perfectly, and the bulleted list thing is really annoying (although some Windows people think they look really cool! LOL), but since most of my documents need to be created for hardcopy printing only, I'm learning to love OpenOffice.

As a web designer, I found that Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and HTML: The Complete Reference are both vital references, and, of course the aforementioned Design of Everyday Things has always been one of my favorite reads.

Yah, and before you flame me, I put my amazon associates code in the links, so gimme some $$$.

;P

Seems to me unsophisticated users aren't able to set up a kde3 box but they are sure able to use one.

Even relatively unsophisticated users can help out with routine maintenance. Plan to be able to allow an automated method (net or CD) to restore default files and configurations or to do a fresh install. This allows people with relatively few technical skills to restore machines or put the icons back.

Don't forget to put a password on the bootloader and / or BIOS so that it's less easy to fiddle with the machine. You want it to boot up normally from the HD or net each time, but not allow custom kernel parameters or booting from the CD, floppy, or unintended places on the net. You may also want to mount some or all of the local file systems read only, to slow the rate of decay. Suse, RedHat, and Mandrake are better each time, but all still have a lot of extra (troublesome) packages mixed in with the default installation. Keep user profiles and home directories on the file server(s).

Find out what the students will be doing and pick relevant packages (Mozilla, Opera, XMMS, xpdf) and be sure to pick out relevant default settings. A lot of the principles listed on Jakob Nielsens's web site are relevant for a desktop as well.

One university I saw last fall in Norway had all of their "MS-Windows" machines running Linux with Metaframe or Wine or something, so that's a good work around for legacy apps like MS-Excel. The University of Michigan has one of the better computing environments I've seen.

In one particular instance, the Japanese market seemed far more demanding of functionality which dealt with quality issues. I am trying to find good books or other resources which address this issue. Are there any out there? What other areas of computing are impacted by cultural considerations? Should I consider these differences when building UIs, for example?"

<sarcasm>
I don't believe it. According to Jakob Nielsen's "exhaustive" usability studies of 4 Japanese senior citizens and 16 Israeli children, there are no cultural differences regarding usability.
</sarcasm>

In a more serious vein, one place to start might be the Interface Hall of Shame which as a section on "globalization" issues including some tips and recommendations. (Ironically, the site uses frames which means that I can't provide a direct link to the i18n section.)

Another possible source is Microsoft. For better or for worse, they spend a lot of usability and I wouldn't be surprised if that includes i18n.

In one particular instance, the Japanese market seemed far more demanding of functionality which dealt with quality issues. I am trying to find good books or other resources which address this issue. Are there any out there? What other areas of computing are impacted by cultural considerations? Should I consider these differences when building UIs, for example?"

<sarcasm>
I don't believe it. According to Jakob Nielsen's "exhaustive" usability studies of 4 Japanese senior citizens and 16 Israeli children, there are no cultural differences regarding usability.
</sarcasm>

In a more serious vein, one place to start might be the Interface Hall of Shame which as a section on "globalization" issues including some tips and recommendations. (Ironically, the site uses frames which means that I can't provide a direct link to the i18n section.)

Another possible source is Microsoft. For better or for worse, they spend a lot of usability and I wouldn't be surprised if that includes i18n.

Get good ol' Jakob Nielson on your defense, he says Deep Linking is Good Linking. And I totally agree.

Seriously though, who is actually losing in this situation? Not having direct (deep) linking on your site confuses the users.

I mean, it would be highly impractical if I posted a link to a week old article on Slashdot on my website, and merely linked to slashdot.com. How exactly is the end user suppost to find that article? Sure, he/she could search Slashdot.. but why should they. It only wastes bandwidth and [more importantly] time for the person trying to find information. Why make it harder for them? It's a person asking "Where is the closest supermarket?" "Oh, it's in San Francisco!"

Not only is it bad for users, but it's bad for the other website - where they may never return because information is so hard to find.

Once you have put a page on the Web, you need to keep it there indefinitely. Read more. Slow news day, eh?

Response time is very important to a user.

But, you must supply the same information in an accessible format, and that is not Flash, especially for the audience your site will have. Go ahead and use Flash, but make sure you supply the same information in an accessible format. Navigation and interactivity must be usable from both keyboard and mouse. All the text must be readable by text readers. Users must be able to have the ability to stop the animation and be given an unlimited amount of time to interact with the information (e.g. automatic slideshow should have a "manual" option).

I don't know if you've taken all this into consideration, but here are some links that will help you address accessibility issues:

• W3C WAI: Web Accessibility Initiative
• Section 508: Government Accessibility Laws and Guidelines
• UseIt.com: Jakob Neilsen's Usability Site
• Usable Web: Links about Web Usability

I'm a geek. I think Flash rocks (I don't use it myself). Sometimes the browser I am using is not the latest greatest Mozilla/Netscape/IE/Opera -- it's Lynx.

That's a different person. It's not an uncommon name. The Jakob Neilsen we're talking about publishes his web site at: http://www.useit.com

Only Masochists use Vi to edit, everyone else uses EMACS, or Textpad et al if they're using Windows.

Show Vi to Nielsen and the poor guy would probaly have a heart attack.

I bet you've been brain washed by evil student hating teachers into liking Vi.

We all know Vi how users are cultists, the techie equivilent of Dianetics.

Drop-Down Menus: Use Sparingly

Summary:
"Drop-down menus are often more trouble than they are worth and can be confusing because Web designers use them for several different purposes. Also, scrolling menus reduce usability when they prevent users from seeing all their options in a single glance."

And I really agree with them. Don't use menus at all. Save your end users' valuable time (and time is money) by just hiring someone sane to develop a simple page. Like Google's page -- everyone can use it :)

Passwords often have to be at least 6 characters long which is just about the largest thing that people will be able to memorise. Often, drachonian admins force people to change their passwords every few months forcing users to commit yet another password to memory so they end up using things that they already know well as passwords. At least the people wern't writing them down on post it notes (even if they were doing the next worst thing). Jakob Nielsen wrote a bit about this in Security and Human Factors.

I remember reading about how one of the most popular passwords in the 80s was fred because it was easy to remember and all four keys were close together.

From Jakob Neilsen's UseIt column on usability and the Internet, comes this column on Security and Human Factors. His summary:

A big lie of computer security is that security improves as password complexity increases. In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable. Security is better increased by designing for how people actually behave.

You and half the rest of the net's users http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9707b.html quote: "half of all users are search-dominant, about a fifth of the users are link-dominant, and the rest exhibit mixed behavior."

So [difficulty in navigating a 3D UI] is why nobody plays Q3A?

Quake III: Arena (original levels, no mods) is mostly 2 1/2 dimensional. In terms of actual gameplay, it's really no more 3D than Doom. Descent and friends, on the other hand, are 3D, but they're quite a bit less popular.

Besides, 3D is for games, which are supposed to be a challenge. Finding information on the Internet is not supposed to be a challenge. You really shouldn't be using 3D unless you're trying to represent a solid object, and even then use it sparingly. Even Q3A uses a 2D menu interface.

There is quite a bit of research out there that suggests that most people find 3d navigation imposssibly hard to understand/use. Here are some relevant links:

Summary of book on Web Usability

Why 3-D navigation is bad (People aren't frogs)

Not to mention how to you display such things to a reader who is blind or has any other type of disability... the list goes on. Beautiful idea, but not very good in practice.

An interesting study of why ads don't work on the web.

Note: It's dated September, 1st 1997.

Take it from the expert, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, October 29, 2000 - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html

Jakob Nielsen would say the spelling hurts the usability of Jef's name because it goes against our conditioning. Everywhere he goes, he must bear the burden of correcting people who misspell his name.

I'd say Jef is either quite angry with his parents' creative streak or there's something inconsistent about his behavior.

Web site design needs a lot of different things, Information architecture & usability, HTML & XHTML, CSS & implementation bugs, search engine ideas and keyword research, Web server techniques & content management, deeziner discussion & tech discussion, good practices & sucky practices.

I could go on. My point is that you can either be a half-hearted jack-of-all-trades, or do the Web a favour and pick something, learn to understand it and collaborate with people who have complimentary skills.

Of course a Web site is no use if no one visits it. A link from the /. home page is a good start.

Calum

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Not to say you shouldn't try, of course. But bear in mind that different purposes, feature sets, and demographics are going to require different things. Consider what you want the site to be and do, and what your target users will expect and know.

There are some good books on Web design in particular, including Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability and Flanders and Willis' Web Pages that Suck. You might also check out more general books on Human Factors and HCI, including Tufte's books on information design and Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (these examples are just a few). You might also check out Jakob Nielsen's Web site at useit.com, both for the articles and for the links to other material. asktog.com is also sometimes helpful.

And if you want to hire a web designer, ask them what they think of Jakob Nielsen, and don't touch them if they make a face. "Designers" hate him because he wants them to put their toys away and do their job.

He's got a new book out that's pretty good: Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed. As is his previous book: Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity

Jakob Nielsen's schtick is that his opinions are actually based on useability studies. Everyone else is just guessing, Jakob Nielsen knows.

Yikes - what about this

Jakob Nielsen has written TONS of material on this subject. Following his words will result in a good website, most of the time. Check out his site at Useit.com.

I think the thing most website designers forget to do is place useability before aesthetics.

Yes, but would you take style advice from this man?

I've never understood the cult of Nielson. "Pretentious" is the word that comes first to mind. "Pompous" is another, when he rips into a site he dislikes.

For values of "cool" equaling "a waste of time and a duplication of effort"...

Sorry - I have to disagree. I'm currently re-working our company web-site and have decided to build two sites. One with Java, CSS, tables, etc... The other is text-based with limited product graphics. (This one is under construction, so please don't flame me for broken links, missing content, etc..)

I'm starting with the text first. The layout is almost finished with more content to be added. I won't start any whiz-bang stuff until I'm finished catering to the 28.8 connected, Lynx-only crowd. They are all potential customers, and worth the effort, in my opinion. Then again, I work for a fairly small manufacturing company, not a Fortune 500 that can discard customers without caring...

I do get your point that you can't be all things to all people. I just think it's worth the effort to cover as many bases as possible.

As far as web-site usability, I subscribe to Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox newsletter. This guy is right on with his assessments of what the web should be, IMHO.

Go to http://www.greenspun.com, http://photo.net, and http://www.arsdigita.com. Philip will teach you the way...

In case you don't wander across it, read Philip's book about web design.

Also, some other related reading would be Nielsen Norman Group, Nielson's own site www.useit.com, and their friend tog.

Make it work first, make it pretty last. User interface is key.

All you have to do is to look at the most popular sites on the web. And they are popular for a reason. Good content, easy user interface, quick navigation etc etc etc.

The best way to do this might very well be the W3C standard described here. Renowned usability guru Jakob Nielsen's site. He has TONS of information on how to design a site effectively. And maybe the most obvious thing to look at is the comaprisons between the top 10 sites on the net including yahoo, msn, google, disney etc (sorry, slashdot is not on the list). It compares the most basic parts of a website (colours, links, navigation bar etc). This gist of it all is, keep is as simple, clean and easy to use as you can possibly make it.

Is second only to content in terms of importance.

The best place to start:

www.useit.com

Also, check out Jakob's book Designing Web Usability . The importance of usability cannot be overstated. If the website is not immediately useful to surfers, they have millions of other pages to choose from.

I'd suggest reading Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox on web design, not only the current columns but past ones, too. Some columns like The Top Ten New Mistakes of Web Design are definitely worth reading. It's a couple years old, but people still make those same mistakes.

Besides not falling into the trap of flash without substance (pun intended; Flash is frequently useless for most web sites), keep in mind that people have come to expect certain things from how web pages work. It's nice to have an inovative design, but if it's so far outside the norm that no one can figure it out, people aren't going to use it.

For example, for web commerce, you may not like Amazon, but their site has become the standard for how people expect to shop on the web.