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A Dozen Techniques to Improve Your Software Online Help
There are several main reasons why putting your software manual on-line is necessary. It makes your web-site attractive for search engine crawlers and therefore brings you targeted traffic from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search engines. A...
A Guide To Writing Successful Website Copy
We all know that the lion’s share of web traffic comes through the search engines. We also know that keywords and links to your site are the two things that affect your ranking in the search engines. Your keywords tell the search engines what you...
Blending Colors
When you are familiar with software applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Flash and other drawing programs, I know you are also very much familiar with the swatches. Swatches contain selection of different colors that you can use during the creation...
PHP & Templates
Much in the same way PHP can display dynamically generated content , PHP can change the whole look of your site. Through a template system and simple variable that sets a session containing the user's preferred template, you can make your site...
The Wonders of Content Management Systems
As you get serious about your web site, your time will become invaluable. A content management system is the best way to maximize your efforts
What A Content Management System Does for You
A good CMS system will allow you to update can entire...
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Hints All the Way
One of the best ways to make your site easier to use is to
provide hints to your visitors everywhere you can. You might
think that sounds simple enough, but the amount of time required
to do it and the number of things to consider puts a lot of web
designers off.
Visitors Don't Know Your Site
You have to consider that the overwhelming majority of your
site's visitors are likely to be visiting for the first time -
some of them may be loyal visitors, coming back over and over
again, but the modern web lends itself more to being dipped in
and out of using search engines and links from other sites. If
there's some kind of process visitors need to go through to
accomplish something on your site, you can't assume that they
have any familiarity with it at all.
For this reason, it's important to scatter hints across your
site. Whenever there's something that could seem mysterious if
you hadn't used it before, hints should either appear
automatically or be easily accessible, in case the user needs to
know what to do.
Question Mark Icons
One of the easiest ways of doing this is to put question mark
icons next to things that you think might be confusing. For
example, at a website that lets people pay their water bill, I
saw this:
Register for Online Billing First name: ____ Last name: ____
Account no.: ____ [?]
Notice the question mark next to the input box for account
number - this was provided because, of course, not every
customer is likely to know their account number by heart, or
where to find it. Clicking the question mark popped up an image
of a paper water bill, with an arrow pointing to where the
account number could be found. Unless you want customers to
wonder 'what account number?', that's the best way of doing
things.
Alt Text
Alt text is the contents of your images' alt tags - that is,
text you put in your image tags' alt properties, like this:
The main purpose of this text is to provide an alternative form
of display for browsers that don't support images, and blind
users. However,
For Chinese Dissidents, Exile Can Mean Irrelevancy
Chinese activists have often fallen off the radar after leaving their homeland. Activist Chen Guangcheng is now safely in America, but hopes he can still play a role in China, where he fought forced abortions and sought to improve conditions for the disabled.
Ex-Rutgers Student Sentenced In Webcam Spying Case
A judge on Monday sentenced former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi with 30 days in jail for using a webcam to spy on his roommate. Tyler Clementi committed suicide days after Ravi saw him kissing another man.
How Should Online Bullying Be Prosecuted?
Former Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi faced up to 10 years in prison for spying on his roommate with a webcam. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide after Ravi broadcast footage of his encounter with another man on the Internet. On Monday, a New Jersey Superior Court judge sentenced Ravi to 30 days in jail, plus three years of probation. Audie Cornish talks with legal expert Emily Bazelon about the case.
it also has another purpose: as 'tooltips', to
provide hints. If you have a small icon of a printer, for
example, and clicking it causes the current article to change to
its print CSS and then print, then you make make the alt text
look like this:
Now, when users hover over the printer icon, the text "print
this article" will appear as a tooltip - that is, black text in
a yellow rectangle. This is useful for letting users know what
will happen when they click parts of your site, without having
to have text next to everything - especially good if you're
limited for space, or you expect lots of people to use your site
from mobile devices like phone and PDA browsers.
Javascript
Finally, one of the best ways to make your hints
context-sensitive is to use Javascript. Not only can you enhance
the alt text boxes to look nicer with Javascript, but you can
also display hints entirely automatically. For example, you
might have a form that asks for someone's state and date of
birth:
State: _____ Date of Birth: _____
Using Javascript's onfocus event, you can easily write a little
code to not only highlight the box the visitor is currently
typing into, but also provide a hint next to it - so when I'm
typing my state, the hint can say 'two letters is fine - just CA
or NY', and when I'm typing my date of birth the hint says
'dd/mm/yyyy'.
What does this approach achieve? Well, it lets you provide hints
when they're needed, without having to clutter the page with
them or put them in small, faded text that makes them hard to
see. Making your site sensitive to context when it comes to
helping the user get things done is one of the big keys to
better usability.
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