| User Interface |
This includes document weight or page download time, color contrast, view options.
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Tip: Maximize the use of <ALT> tags.
This would allow the user to view the page even without viewing the images. With these <ALT> tags for all your picture links, in the event that the picture wasn't able to load, maybe due to system failure or something, the user will know which picture is missing from the page.
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Tip: Place captions for all photographs.
If you'll be including photographs on your pages, provide captions for all pictures in your photo gallery. A short paragraph would do or at least state the dates in the caption. Who are they, what do they mean to you, etc. You should first seek their permission as to what information you could put on-line, though. Even if we say that a picture is worth a thousand words, throwing in a mind-boggling phrase or sentence would also help in explaining the thought or the idea of the photographs. Maybe you could include the location or the time when the photograph was taken. Or a simple explanation on how you came to be there when that magical moment happened.
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Tip: Publicize your e-mail address.
Place your e-mail address on each page. This would encourage openness to your readers, as well as generate feedback from those wary of using online forms. If you'd rather not use a personal e-mail you could configure your GeoMail to be forwarded to another address.
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Tip: Good images comes from good sources.
Designing them yourself is one of them. Add more of your own images rather than relying on others. You should really be proud of your own work rather than getting others to do the work and display their work on your page. An amalgamation of images might be that important, but most users can find their own way to the respective sites that offers the original versions of these images. Use image palette reduction tools for faster downloading time of your images, especially those banner images. You could use the minimum 8-bits color instead of going for the maximum. Anyway browsers use dithering to maximize colors on different screens and computer systems.
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Tip: Place captions for all photographs.
If you'll be including photographs on your pages, provide captions for all pictures in your photo gallery. A short paragraph would do or at least state the dates in the caption. Who are they, what do they mean to you, etc. You should first seek their permission as to what information you could put on-line, though. Even if we say that a picture is worth a thousand words, throwing in a mind-boggling phrase or sentence would also help in explaining the thought or the idea of the photographs. Maybe you could include the location or the time when the photograph was taken. Or a simple explanation on how you came to be there when that magical moment happened.
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Tip: Use caution on text colors.
If you decide to employ colors on your text, see to it that they are visible on the background you are using. The colors of the links: available, visited, and active, should also be different from any of the colors you used for the body text. If this is not possible, at least be kind enough to differentiate the color of the available links from the color you used for the body text.
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Tip: Minimize the underlining.
If it is inevitable that you need to underline words in your text, be sure that you are not using blue as the color of your body text. This, an underlined blue text, could easily be mistaken for a hot link, especially so when the browser is configured to underline and use blue color for links. Some users, especially newbies, are not yet aware that the pointer changes to a hand when placed over a hot link.
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Tip: Mind your Document Weight.
There should not be a page exceeding 30-40KB. The rule of thumb for web pages is 30-40KB including the HTML codes and all images. Pages exceeding this rule usually takes longer time to download and visitors might opt to push the stop button or interrupt the transfer and browse some other pages other than yours. Also, you could try the simple hyperlink text instead of using an imagemap for your links. Text-based hyperlinks loads much faster that image map, especially if the latter used the maximum number of bits.
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Tip: Never assume that the users are dumb.
Remove the caution, such as: "Click here to return to the index page" or "Best viewed with Internet Explorer, download yours now!" or any similar notes. Some users are irritated at the notion that the webmaster considers the user a dummy of sorts or they cannot afford to get a new version of the browser they use. And some people are just stuck with using their old browser's versions due to personal or ISP reasons.
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