Website Usability

What is Web site Usability?

Web usability is about designing your web site in such a way that your viewer can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently.
Finding your site is critical but, once found, the site must be easy to navigate and the content must be understandable. Without this the site is pointless.

When visitors reach your site, they want the experience to be a pleasant one. From the speed with which it takes to load the site contents (research shows that if a site takes over 6.8 seconds to load, the viewer goes looking elsewhere for your product or service), to the ease of navigation and the readability and quality of the text and the images used.

Never use frames or framing to lay out your web site .Frames can cause a number of usability problems, namely:

• Disabling the back button in browsers.
• Search engine optimisation issues.
• Bookmarking is not possible.
• Impossible to e-mail the link to someone else.
• Problems with printing the desired web site page.
• Users are turned off by links which do not open, or are slow to do so.

A good website is an easy to use website.

A quick overview of the differences between usability and accessibility will help you better understand our consulting services. Usability refers to how user-friendly your site is. Is it quick and simple to navigate? Does it present information in a logical format? Is it easy to find what you're looking for?

Accessibility has to do with building a website that can be accessed by anyone and everyone, including those with disabilities. The primary focus of accessibility tends to be on those with impaired vision. For some businesses accessibility is a legal mandate. For all businesses it's a smart move.

Usability Analysis of Apple.com

One of an important thing of web design is web usability that make your website easy to navigate, fast access, easy to read and users are not confuse. Apple is a good one that they have a good usability website (apple.com). I found this article on Digg, it’s all about how Apple design a good website and good web usability on their official website.

The Apple menu is probably one of the more well known and most copied navigations there is. You are likely asking yourself what makes this relatively plain and very simple navigation so great. Well, first is the consistency. The menu stays exactly the same throughout all pages, which is a simple way to avoid confusing the user.

Any website (or any design layout for that matter) starts out as a simple grid. Grids are the foundation to any layout and the content is built upon that grid. Apple uses very clean and well-spaced grids on each page, which makes for a very pleasing experience.

On top of a smooth layout, the colors also compliment the usability of the site. Color schemes are crucial to the feel and vibe of the website. Very often coloring does effect usability of a site, believe it or not.

Censorship on the website

Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body.

Internet censorship is control or suppression of the publishing or accessing of information on the Internet. The legal issues are similar to offline censorship. One difference is that national borders are more permeable online: residents of a country that bans certain information can find it on websites hosted outside the country. A government can try to prevent its citizens from viewing these even if it has no control over the websites themselves.

In some cases, Internet censorship may involve deceit. In such cases the censoring authority may block content while leading the public to believe that censorship has not been applied. This may be done by having the ISP provide a fake "Not Found" error message upon the request of an Internet page that is actually found but blocked.

In 2010, the network administrator will enhance the network management and control in China. In China, the socialmedia include QQ, Renren, Kaixin, Weibo, etc. The government will focus on these groups and websites, they will effectively integrate various resources to enhance Internet management and control, the Internet police force to the extension of the public security organs at the county level, will reach to the QQ-line patrol control group, micro-blog and other "weak management space, " extension, raise "online found Detect, control and disposal capacity "to prevent the formation of hidden crime organization.

Web standards

Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specification that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web (W3C). In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.

The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.

A W3C Recommendation is a specification or set of guidelines that, after extensive consensus-building, has received the endorsement of W3C Members and the Director.

An IETF Internet Standard is characterized by a high degree of technical maturity and by a generally held belief that the specified protocol or service provides significant benefit to the Internet community. A specification that reaches the status of Standard is assigned a number in the IETF STD series while retaining its original IETF RFC number.

The only way to fight is to provide it – and this is what nowadays HTML, CSS and JavaScript do as the Flash competitors, based on Web standards. The so-obvious- in -the -past boundary between Flash websites and Web standards gradually disappeared to an extent – you can never be sure at first glance which technology has been used to build a particular Web site.

The list of websites favoring Web standards is constantly growing nowadays. Well there is a good apart reason for that - the iPad and iPhone’s lack of Flash - someone will say! That is correct but it is not the only reason - there are other certain benefits that Web standards bring.