Web usability principle 2: Make it easy to find your way around

Posted on 12 December, 2011 by Dermot

Signpost to web pagesContinuing our series on making your site easy to use we’re now going to look at website navigation. This is about showing people where to find pages on your site in the same way that you would use the contents page or index in a book. There are three main ways of doing this: menu bars, search boxes and breadcrumbs. In this post we’ll talk about menu bars and search boxes and in the next post we’ll look at breadcrumbs.
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Web usability principle 1: Be conventional

Posted on 24 November, 2011 by Dermot

In the last post Conventional website layoutwe looked at web usability and introduced Steve Krug’s influential book Don’t make me think. We’re going to look now at four of Krug’s principles for usable websites and we’ll start with why’s it’s good to have a conventional layout.
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Web usability – still the key to a website that works

Posted on 17 November, 2011 by Dermot

In these articles we’re going to look at four simple principles for designing a usable website. The idea of web usability was first popularised by Jakob Nielson way back in 1984 with his influential website useit.com, which is still going strong today.  However it was the publication of Steve Krug’s brilliantly simple Don’t make me think in 2000 which made it clear what we should be doing to design a website that is easy to use. Web usability is less of a talking point today but it’s still absolutely crucial to good web design. Read more →

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The 5 key ingredients of a great website

Posted on 23 October, 2011 by Dermot

What makes a good website? As you might expect there will be as many answers to this question as there are web designers, so we’ve tried to identify just 5 key ingredients which are essential for any website. Our strapline at Mannix is “Creating websites that work” so that might give you a bit of a clue as to where we’re coming from. We’re looking at it from the point of view of the users of your website – do they enjoy the experience and does it work for them?  So here are our top 5 ingredients, roughly in order of importance. Read more →

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