Usability
When creating any document it is always a good idea to keep in mind who the target audience is. The same holds true for web development and below are a couple of useful tips on making your webpage more user friendly.
- Avoid using underline in your document because in most cases links are reflected as underlined text and users may think a heading or text that is underlined is a link.
- Fonts, Size and Formatting. For body content, try to use fonts that are easily read, such as arial or verdana. Keep in mind the target audience and also that the website will be viewed by different people with different levels of sight ability (vision).
- It is also a good idea to have color contrast on your site, i.e. Yellow on a white background creates too little contrast and makes the content difficult to read. For best results we recommend Black or a Dark Gray for body text. Avoid using colors of blue for regular text because they are often associated with links. The easier the text is to read the longer the users will spend viewing your website.
- To test whether the font and formatting of your site is appropriate, have a few people view the website and ask them to share their opinion of the readability of the content. This is also a good way to check editing issues.
- Additionally, it is wise to view your site on monitors with different screen resolutions. If you add content while working on a higher resolution monitor it may seem small, and tempt you to use larger font or image sizes. However, this same content on a lower resolution monitor will be much larger and could actually hurt the effectiveness of your site.