In this space you will find some tricks, tips, and advice to make a site perform at its best and to give it a more professional appearance.
Frames, those not so recommended
Try to avoid using frames (the borders that allow independent Web pages to be placed in portions of other pages) in your pages or limit their use to the absolute minimum. The well-known usability guru, Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com), states in fact: if you insist on using frames, at least create an alternative version without frames for many users who don’t want to use them or for browsers (nowadays only really prehistoric ones or text-based ones) that do not recognize them.
Images, few but good
An element that could slow down your Web pages is too many graphic elements, especially animated ones which are heavy and ineffective. Try not to overload your site too much and insert only meaningful images on your pages. Remember that at the beginning the Web was text only.
Alt and title, yes please
Your images should always be annotated. They should have, that is, a comment text inserted via the alt attribute: To an image of the Sistine Chapel present inside one of your Web pages you should add something like alt=”the Sistine Chapel”. At the same time, links should be accompanied by the title element (similar to the alt attribute for images) and inserted in the same way in the HTML code. The title of links is very important so users can understand what they will find by clicking there.
Only links should be underlined
Try never to use underlined format within the Web pages of your site. It can easily confuse the visitor who expects to find a link there. Usually, in fact, it is exactly the links that are underlined.
Text on the site
Try to use text that is clearly visible compared to the background. Avoid, in short, using blue text on a black background or yellow text on a light green background: only a few (those with Superman’s super vision) would be able to read the text on your site. Also try to use fonts that are not too small and suitable for the Web. For example: the Verdana font is one (which was created specifically for the Web) which is very clear and pleasant to read for news sites with not very long texts. If instead you have to insert long pages of text (but it’s better to avoid) use the Times font (or Times New Roman which is identical) which is suitable for digital reading of large amounts of text.
Assign a color to links
Assign a color to links so they stand out from the rest of the text. Jakob Nielsen recommends blue for unvisited links and red (or similar) for those already visited. However, other usability experts for websites disagree with the guru and prefer to use other colors. Avoid, of course, colors that are too similar to each other for visited and unvisited links. Use style sheets When designing your site it is highly recommended to use style sheets (also known as CSS or Cascading Style Sheets). This way you can give consistency to the various paragraphs of text present on the website, assigning the same style to all paragraphs with the same importance; if you want, you can then change the settings to vary the text format across the entire site. In the style sheets you create, try not to use too many fonts to avoid creating confusion or giving an impression of low professionalism. Also, fonts should be structured so that they do not have an absolute size but rather a percentage. This way it can be enlarged or reduced according to user requests.
Content, these essentials
When writing for the Web, know that your user will not spend much time reading what you wrote. Therefore, try to use a simple and fluent style while being concise just enough. Some suggest that 1800 characters (or keystrokes as called in journalistic jargon) are more than enough for a page (or topic), some even set the limit at 1000 characters and others indicate a maximum ceiling of 2500 characters. Don’t fixate on the numbers but try not to be too lengthy. Reading times on digital media are very short. Remember that!
Pubblicato in Digital Tools
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