"Design Checklists for Online Help
By Michelle Corbin
Online help systems have evolved over the past 20 years to meet the needs of our users. Designers must consider the content, format, presentation, navigation, and access methods of online help systems. A series of design checklists based on the past 20 years of research are presented in this paper, which summarizes a journal article currently being considered for publication. The latest trend in online help system design is embedded user assistance, which includes integrating information into the interface and including an embedded help pane within that interface to display a context-sensitive online help system."
http://www.winwriters.com/articles/checklist/index.html
There's an excellent entry from January on Brainstorms & Raves blog about standards for Web site organization and ways to create user-friendly URLs.
Excerpts:
This article is just as timely today as it was when it was written in 1998: A Standard for Site Organization, by Greg Knauss (with several brains and contributors) at Stating the Obvious. The example root level site structure makes a lot of sense for visitors and for developing and maintaining a website.
[...]
For more on friendly URLs, these posts also include links to helpful information and resources:
University of Utah Web Resources -- Best Practices for the Web
By Gerry McGovern
Universities, heed this finding: “Many university websites are poorly organized, and filled with out-of-date content that has been directly published from print. Delivering a better service to students and staff faces challenges because of decentralized management structures and concepts such as academic freedom.”
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_09_20_university_websites_less_is_more.htm
Special Needs Technologies: An Administrator's Guide
By Terry Lankutis The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires every school to provide its special needs students with whatever technologies are necessary for a "free and appropriate education." Yet many schools struggle with the task of identifying which technologies will actually work for this population of students. Outside consultants can provide technical knowledge and experience, but they may not know all the details of a particular student's needs, and parents or school personnel may feel a solution has been forced on them without their input. A better, and often less expensive, solution is for school leaders to develop a systematic process that considers the input of all stakeholders, calling upon the expertise of the entire Individual Education Plan team and outside expertise as needed. The following steps will help you implement a collaborative, long-term approach to selecting assistive technology, whether you are starting from scratch or analyzing the effectiveness of your current procedures.
For the complete article see:
http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=47204593
These web sites are identical -- or are they?
This survey compares 10 web sites through elements of their layout: styles, page construction and elements . . . The survey seeks similarities and differences between those well known web sites, built by famous, talented designers.
What can be observed is that those web sites agree on implicit, internalized layout and design norms, and that deviance from these rules is uncommon.
By Gerry McGovern
A style guide helps you quickly and cost-effectively publish content that is of a consistent quality. It is particularly important when there are lots of editors and authors involved in the publishing process. A good style guide takes a lot of time and effort to create. Unless its implementation is policed, it will not achieve its objectives.
Read More at
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2004/nt_2004_05_17_web_style_guide.htm
Apple's Web Development Best Practices
The Safari development team at Apple has made a dedicated effort to implement Web standards. This means that the easiest way to ensure optimal rendering of your pages in Safari is by following the standards. Doing so will also guarantee optimal rendering in Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Of course, each of these browsers has its own minor quirks or legitimate differences of interpretation, so testing your site in all of them is still mandatory. By comparison, Internet Explorer for Windows -- the most popular browser for the Windows OS -- often requires web developers to use a number of non-standard tricks or to accept layout differences. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon, so for now, web developers have to work around these problems. This article gives some practical hints on how to create standards-conforming websites, and to work around some of issues that will arise for Explorer for Windows.
http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/bestwebdev.html
BrowserSizer (Freeware)
BrowserSizer is a low-fat, NOT in-your-face tool to help web developers check to see how their web pages look on screen resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 and WebTV. It controls Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator from an un-obtrusive, sit in your tray, application that provides an interface to resize either browser to the standard screen resolutions. Isn't it annoying to change your development machine's resolution just to test for people who haven't figured out that they can change THEIR screen resolution?
http://www.applythis.com/browsersizer/default.asp
Some strong opinions from Jakob Nielsen about PDFs...
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, June 10, 2001: Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading Forcing users to browse PDF files makes usability approximately 300% worse compared to HTML pages. Only use PDF for documents that users are likely to print. In those cases, following six basic guidelines will minimize usability problems. * Create a gateway HTML page that summarizes the PDF file. * State clearly that the PDF file is for printing only and present the same content on other Web pages in traditional formats. * Link only to the gateway page. * Never let your search engines index the PDF file * Ensure that your PDF document format is at least one version behind the latest offering. * Format your printable documents for different sizes of paper. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, July 14, 2003: PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation. PDF Usability Crimes * Linear exposition. * Jarring user experience. * Crashes and software problems. * Breaks flow. * Orphaned location. * Content blob. * Text fits the printed page, not a computer screen.
Technorati allows you to enter a URL and get a list of "every other page that has linked to it in the past 24 hours, ranked by freshness or AUTHORity. It shows the contextual text surrounding the inbound link, its age, and other helpful facts." You can also search by keyword. Feedster is another blog search engine.
http://www.technorati.com/