Nielsen's HomePage Usability Rules: A Self-Assessment
22-Jan-2004 Filed in:
Software DevelopmentJakob Nielsen has been supporting his book,
Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, with a few of articles on homepage design. I took the opportunity to make some changes to my own site after reading them.
The first article,
Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003, lists what's been annoying him recently. I did well on this one—I only needed to add some ALT text to my images (Tip #5 is
Overly detailed ALT Text—oops, I actually didn't have any) and make pages stop linking to themselves (#10). The latter improvement is not directly supported in my CMS tool (CityDesk) and took a fair amount of scripting, but armed with CityDesk keywords and my
keyword organizing utility, I got it done.
That article linked to
The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines. I didn't do too badly on that one either, but I decided to differently color visited links and make it more clear where you are on the site (#3). I rewrote my tag line to be more informative (#5) and made my
tags more descriptive. I was already following #2 (<em>Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size</em>), since that's a pet-peeve of mine.<br />Finally, I read <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020512.html" rel="self">Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability</a>. By this point, most of the tips were redundant. I haven't added a search yet, but I'll do that soon.<br /><br />The book has over a hundred guidelines sure to improve any site.<div class="blog-entry-comments"><div id="disqus_thread">
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