11 Quick Tips For More Usable Content

According to CWsites over at Mind Eye Web Design, 95% of web users do not read 80% of your content. With these statistics already working against you, how can you improve your content to ensure that readers are getting the best user experience from your site?

1. Break It Up

When you have large chunks of text that run the risk of blending together, break them into relevant paragraphs to make it easier on the eyes. When reading on a computer, it is very rare that your user is concentrating solely on what they are reading. They usually have IM clients running, blogs to look at, children screaming, you name it. By breaking your text into paragraphs you are making it easier for them to find their place again if they have to turn away from the screen.

Breaking your content into small chunks also makes it less intimidating and will appear to consume less time.

2. Use Sub Headings

Most people scan content looking for what is relevant to them. Sub headings can be a huge blessing for people short on time. Using them allows readers to scan through and find the section that they would find most interesting and/or helpful. Make sure your sub headings are relevant to the content below them.

3. Remove Anything That You Do Not Need

Overly flowery or verbose language, though great in poetry, is not advisable for web content.
Be specific, direct and write only what is needed.

For example:

“If you would like to be granted access to our fabulous area containing supportive information and advice, we request that you gently depress the button on your external mouse device”

4. Use Stephen King’s 10% Rule

Stephen King’s book “On Writing” is a wonderful resource for anyone looking to learn about writing. One of his best tips is that your “Second Draft = First Draft - 10%“. So after you have written your content, check your word count. Now go back through and eliminate 10% of what you have written. This will make it tighter and more concise.

5. Make Sure the Most Important Material Stands Out

If there is something within your content that you feel should be emphasized, take the time to bold, italicize, or pull it out into a sidebar. Make it incredibly easy for users to pull out the information that they need, using visual cues where possible. This, along with sub headings, is the key to creating content that users can scan.

6. Make Sure Your Font is Readable

Whereas ornate font may make you stand out, if your users are unable to read your content, there is no point having it. A good sans serif, like Helvetica, is easy on the eyes and won’t make your readers strain to decipher your information. Unique fonts work well in banners or graphics, but the actual content should be simple and not tiny.

7. Summarize and Conclude

This applies mostly to articles. It’s an old school essay trick, but it’s important to introduce people to a concept and then summarize it at the end. This allows readers to make sure they have discovered the right information, and then later to be sure they got the point. When summarizing, keep it short and to the point.

8. Use Links Within Your Content to Direct Advanced Users

If you’re covering something in your content that is initially simple, but has an advanced option, use links to direct your more advanced users rather than scaring off the more basic users with too much technical information. This also keeps your content from becoming too bulky. This also works as a way to draw advanced users deeper into your site.

9. Make Sure People Know Where to Ask Questions

Sometimes you can’t cover everything in your content. Just in case your content isn’t up to scratch, make sure you provide readers with a way that they can contact you for more information or clarification. Either have a link to a valid email address, or integrate a contact form into your site. For a great free contact form, try Wufoo.

10. Update Your Content Frequently

Make a point of regularly checking through your content to ensure that it is still relevant and hasn’t become stale. If you have changed any policies or procedures, or if you have timely information that is no longer relevant, be sure to edit as needed. I would advise checking your content at least once a month, depending on the nature of your site. This also gives you the opportunity to look at it another time and check for clarity.

10 Web Typography Rules Every Designer Should Know

When someone visits a website you’ve designed, the odds are that they don’t care much about the colors, images or sounds, they’re immediately looking at the text.

No matter how many bells and whistles you’ve built into a website, everyone relies on text to accomplish whatever they’re visiting the site to do.

That alone should make typography, the art of arranging type, a priority for any web designer.

In this article we take a look at 10 easy rules to keep in mind when designing your next web project.

1. Read through the text yourself

With a design like JonesingFor a designer without a great grasp of the text would have struggled to put together the typography that makes this site really work. As you tackle your own typography, you probably don’t have to worry about writing a site’s text — but you do have to read it!

Some web designers think that just copying and pasting out of a text file constitutes the total of their textual duties. But reading through the text provides at least a basic idea of how the text can be integrated into a website, avoiding the disconnect between the writing and the design of a website.

You can kick your typography up yet another notch, if you can read through the text once it’s in place in your design. Take special note of the space around the letters. Do you have any unusually big spaces that look odd? A little careful typography can eliminate those issues. You can also get an idea of lines that might be too long to easily read, awkward line breaks and similar issues.

2. Dump Lorem ipsum as soon as possible

Do you think you could have designed Jesus Rodriguez Velasco’s website without the actual text? The site is heavily dependent on the written word — and very specific words too. Even the body text got special attention with a drop cap and some other tweaking that just wouldn’t have been possible with Lorem ipsum.

Unless the text of your website is actually Lorem ipsum, dummy text will bear no similarity to the real thing. That means that any tweak you might make to the text — or the design surrounding it — will have to wait until you get the real thing. Asking for (and getting) text from your client as early as possible in the process will give you the ability to match your overall design and your typography.

3. Show a clear hierarchy

When you arrive at Rik Cat Industries, you know immediately where you should start reading. Even though there are a few links at the top of the page, Rik’s welcome catches your eye first. It’s much bigger, using typography to establish a clear hierarchy.

Every site needs a well developed hierarchy: indicators of where to start to start reading and how to proceed. Your typography can provide that hierarchy — just as Rik’s does — as long as you know your hierarchical order ahead of time. By thinking about size and typefaces, you can highlight a piece of text as a headline in a way that different placement in the design just can’t provide.

Your design’s hierarchy goes beyond just the typography you employ, of course, but since users almost always start with the text, it makes sense for designers to do the same.

4. Pay attention to both macro and micro typography

Relying entirely on typography for their front page, the Crowley Webb and Associate’s website was designed with two factors in mind: both macro and micro typography.

Macro typography is the overall structure of your type, how it appears in the context of your design and its aesthetic when you consider your text as a block on its own.

Micro typography is more concerned with the details of spacing, the issues that determine whether words are easy to read. Micro typography is an absolute necessity when it comes to putting together a block of text: if it isn’t legible, there’s no point in proceeding. Crowley Webb and Associates addressed this question through both careful writing and spacing out those words that the site would highlight.

But macro-typography provides you with the opportunity to make your text more than well-spaced: it’s the chance to make it look appealing and a part of your whole design. The choice of typefaces and colors on this website create a viable whole. Ignoring either facet of typography is detrimental.

5. Take care with type colors

It would be so easy to lose text in the background of ArtofElan, especially the bright red on dark red combination used by the designer. When a web designer works with colored type, care is absolutely necessary, there’s no guarantee that a red on red combination, or even a yellow on red combination will be visible. After all, everyone has visited a website where the text seemed to be only one shade off from the background color and gotten a case of eye strain when they tried to read it.

The easiest fix for this situation is to make sure that the color of your type is drastically different from that of your background. Black and white work so well because they are as drastically different as you can get, but there are some color combos that work well: something along the lines of a dark blue on a light pink will get the job done. Reversed out text is pretty tricky… while you can work with light pink text on a dark blue background, you’re more likely to get a complaint about it.

6. Get serious about your CSS

If your CSS is solid, you can move between pages of your website seamlessly, just as the different versions of Hutchouse.com rely on different stylesheets to create some impressive effects. Even if you don’t take things as far as Hutchhouse, CSS can help eliminate amateur typography issues like changing up typefaces and sizes between pages.

CSS can provide easy consistency between your typography across the entirety of a website. If you are consistent in how you use type, however, breaking that consistency even a small amount can make whatever you wish to highlight truly stand out, just like establishing and then breaking a grid can make for an effective design. In web typography, keeping your fonts consistent can be a simple matter of CSS.

7. Ditch the centered text

Choosing an alternative to centered text can make a website design easy to read, just like DesignCanChange.org. Opting for centered text, especially on a page like this, would make for a problematic page: the jagged edges centering creates on each side make it much harder to read and there are plenty of opportunities for perfectly centered text to wind up distorting the rest of your designs on different displays.

In some circles, centered type is only one step up from using Comic Sans in a website design. You might consider it for a headline, but in general, aligning your text to the left will make your readers much more comfortable, unless they read from right to left.

8. Deal with smart quotes and other symbols

When someone visits a website you’ve designed, the odds are that they don’t care much about the colors, images or sounds, they’re immediately looking at the text.

No matter how many bells and whistles you’ve built into a website, everyone relies on text to accomplish whatever they’re visiting the site to do.

That alone should make typography, the art of arranging type, a priority for any web designer.

In this article we take a look at 10 easy rules to keep in mind when designing your next web project.

9. Plan for your text to get larger

When you increase the size of the text on Veerle Pieters’ website, it’s not quite as pretty than if you use the font size she picked out. However, you can still read everything, locate links and so forth, something that is true of very few websites.

That’s because, in part, many designers make sure to layout text in 10 point font or even smaller. Most people are comfortable reading such fonts, but Baby Boomers make up a huge section of the web-browsing population and a lot of those aging web surfers are going to have their browsers set to display type as large as they can. Your text, as well as your design, needs to be able to adapt to that fact.

It’s also worth taking into account the fact that browser size can vary dramatically, moving text around to unexpected locations if you aren’t careful. If bumping the size up a point creates problems, that older demographic is going to move on to the next website in a hurry. Having to scroll forever over to the side will have a similar result.

10. Show a preference for sans serif

If you look at the A List Apart’s website, pretty much every big block of text is set in a sans serif typeface, making it much easier to read. Headlines and other smaller blocks of text are laid out in serifed fonts, creating a balance between the two.

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

CSS isn’t always easy to deal with. Depending on your skills and your experience, CSS coding can sometimes become a nightmare, particularly if you aren’t sure which selectors are actually being applied to document elements. An easy way to minimize the complexity of the code is as useful as not-so-well-known CSS attributes and properties you can use to create a semantically correct markup.

We’ve taken a close look at some of the most useful CSS tricks, tips, ideas, methods, techniques and coding solutions and listed them below. We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing, but which are hard to find once you need them.

And what has come out of it is an overview of over 70 expert CSS ideas which can improve your efficiency of CSS coding. You might be willing to check out the list of references and related articles in the end of this post.

We’d like to express sincere gratitude to all designers who shared their ideas, techniques, methods, knowledge and experience with their readers. Thank you, we, coders, designers, developers, information architects - you name it - really appreciate it.

You might be interested in reading our article 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without, which should provide you with a basic toolbox for CSS-based techniques you might use in your next projects.

Update (29/05/2007): Brazilian-Portuguese translation of the article is also available. Thanks to Maurício Samy Silva.

1.1. Workflow: Getting Started

• After you have a design, start with a blank page of content. “Include your headers, your navigation, a sample of the content, and your footer. Then start adding your html markup. Then start adding your CSS. It works out much better.” [CSSing]
• Use a master stylesheet. “One of the most common mistakes I see beginners and intermediates fall victim to when it comes to CSS is not removing the default browser styling. This leads to inconsistencies in the appearance of your design across browsers, and ultimately leaves a lot of designers blaming the browser. It is a misplaced blame, of course. Before you do anything else when coding a website, you should reset the styling.” [Master Stylesheet: The Most Useful CSS Technique], [Ryan Parr]

  master.css
  @import url("reset.css");
  @import url("global.css");
  
  @import url("flash.css");
  @import url("structure.css");
  

• Reset your CSS-styles first. “You can often eliminate the need to specify a value for a property by taking advantage of that property’s default value. Some people like doing a Global white space reset by zeroing both margin and padding for all elements at the top of their stylesheets. [Roger Johansson]
• Keep a library of helpful CSS classes. Useful for debugging, but should be avoided in the release version (separate markup and presentation). Since you can use multiple class names (i.e.

  ...

  ), make use of them debugging your markup. (updated) [Richard K. Miller]

  CSS:
  .width100 { width: 100%; }
  .width75 { width: 75%; }
  .width50 { width: 50%; }
  .floatLeft { float: left; }
  .floatRight { float: right; }
  .alignLeft { text-align: left; }
  .alignRight { text-align: right; }
  

• Eric Meyer’s Global Reset, Christian Montoya’s initial CSS file, Mike Rundle’s initial CSS file, Ping Mag’s initial CSS file.

Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design

Communication is one of the foundational elements of a good website. It is essential for a positive user experience and for a successful website that truly benefits its owners. All types of websites are affected by the need for good communication in one way or another. Regardless of whether the website in question is an e-commerce website, a blog, a portfolio website, an information website for a service company, a government website or any other type of website, there is a significant need to communicate effectively with visitors.

Because of the significance of communication with visitors, it is an essential consideration for every designer and website owner and the responsibility of both. Unfortunately, communication is sometimes overlooked and takes a backseat to the visual attractiveness of a website. Ideally, the design and other elements that do the communicating work together to create a clear, unified message to visitors.

In this article, we’ll take a broad look at the subject of clear communication in Web design. We’ll start with a discussion of the primary methods of communication for websites and typical challenges that designers face. From there, we’ll move on to look at what specifically should be communicated to visitors and tips for implementing this in your own work. At the end, we’ll look at some of the goals that should be established in terms of communication when developing websites, as well as some of the results of having a website that communicates effectively.

1. Methods of Communication

Websites communicate with visitors in a number of different ways. Not all websites take the same approach, but almost every website will use at least a few common methods of communication. To get started, let’s first look at some of the basic ways that websites communicate with visitors before going into more depth on the subject.

1.1. Text

Text is, of course, the most obvious form of communication that takes place online. Whether the text is in the main body content of the page or a headline, most website visitors rely on text to understand the basic messages of a website. Depending on the type of the website, text may be extremely critical to communication, as in the case of blogs.

The approach taken with text will depend on the purpose of the website. For example, sales copy on an e-commerce or membership website will differ from article content on an informational website.

1.2. Images

We’ve all heard the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Photos and images are excellent resources not only for creating an attractive and interesting design, but also for communication purposes. Images can often communicate a message faster, more clearly and more emphatically than text. The designer needs to be aware of the messages being communicated via images and ensure they work in harmony with the rest of the website’s communication.

1.3. Titles and Headers

Whether you’re examining Web design, magazine layout, newspaper design, etc., titles and headers are critical to effective communication. Human nature is to want to know something quickly, and especially when on the Web. Titles and headers help to communicate major points and ideas to visitors, and they tell visitors what to expect from the rest of the content.

1.4. Icons

One of the reasons icons are so useful in Web design is that they communicate messages without any text being used. A visitor may see a familiar icon, such as a house that represents a link to the home page, and immediately know what the item represents and what to do.

1.5. Design Styles

The style of a website’s design may also communicate a message to visitors. Certain design styles are common in particular industries, and other styles may not be an appropriate fit for a specific type of website. The style can, in these cases, indicate to visitors something about your website and how it fits their needs. For example, a website that sells skateboards would likely feature a grunge style design. This is a style that most visitors in the target market would appreciate, and by seeing this type of style, visitors in that target market will likely feel comfortable with the website and feel an association with it. In this case, the design style helps communicate to visitors that this is where they belong and that the website was created for them.

Recession Tips For Web Designers

For web designers, there are four keys to surviving bad economic times: do good work, charge a fair price, lower your overhead, and be sure you are communicating with your client. As a reader of 24 ways, you already do good work, so let’s focus on the rest.

I know something about surviving bad times, having started my agency, Happy Cog, at the dawn of the dot-com bust. Of course, the recession we’re in now may end up making the dot-com bust look like the years of bling and gravy. But the bust was rough enough at the time.

Bad times are hard on overweight companies and over-leveraged start-ups, but can be kind to freelancers and small agencies. Clients who once had money to burn and big agencies to help them burn it suddenly consider the quality of work more important than the marquee value of the business card. Fancy offices and ten people at every meeting are out. A close relationship with an individual or small team that listens is in.

Thin is in:

If you were good in client meetings when you were an employee, print business cards and pick a name for your new agency. Once some cash rolls in, see an accountant.

If the one-person entrepreneur model isn’t you, it’s no problem. Form a virtual agency with colleagues who complement your creative, technical, and business skills. Athletics is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary “art and design collective.” Talk about low overhead: they don’t have a president, a payroll, or a pension plan. But that hasn’t stopped clients like adidas, Nike, MTV, HBO, Disney, DKNY, and Sundance Channel from knocking on their (virtual) doors.

Running a traditional business is like securing a political position in Chicago: it costs a fortune. That’s why bad times crush so many companies. But you are a creature of the internets. You don’t need an office to do great work. I ran Happy Cog out of my apartment for far longer than anyone realized. My clients, when they learned my secret, didn’t care.

Keep it lean: if you can budget your incoming freelance money, you don’t have to pay yourself a traditional salary. Removing the overhead associated with payroll means more of the budget stays in your pocket, enabling you to price your projects competitively, while still within industry norms. (Underpricing is uncool, and clients who knowingly choose below-market-rate vendors tend not to treat those vendors with respect.)