Web site usability is a somewhat nebulous concept to most entrepreneurs and small business owners. Web designers might know more about it, but usability is not a required subject for graphic designers, and few real studies on this subject have made it to the mainstream. When I worked at Microsoft as a technical writer, I participated in both user interface design and usability studies, so I have some familiarity with the subject.

There is one book that was brought to my attention recently which I bought and devoured. Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” beautifully sums up the web visitor’s experience and provides guidelines for web designers and web site owners alike. Given that most people arrive at a site for the first time as a result of a search engine click, here are some of the questions that each site should answer:

• What is this? What is the purpose of this web site?
• What do they have here? Can I buy stuff, rent stuff, sell stuff?
• What can I do here? Get help, log in, go shopping, read an article?
• Why should I be here and not somewhere else? Did my search land on a page where the search result I saw is obvious?

All of these things must be obvious within the first few seconds of the visitor’s arrival, or they’ll just hit the back button and continue surveying the search results.

The book goes on to describe specific remedies for web visitor frustration, including keeping your navigation simple, keeping colors and fonts consistent, and making it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Keep navigation hyperlinks simple and direct, and make sure the link they click corresponds to a title on the page to which the link takes them.

I highly recommend this book for everyone who works on their own web site!

Webinar Date: April 9, 2008

Working with a web professional is a tricky proposition. If you’re not skilled in HTML and web site management, you’re probably going to use the services of a web designer or webmaster at some point.

There are two main challenges involved in using a web professional.

1. Who controls your web site
2. The fact that most designers don’t like maintaining a site

First of all, control of your web site really comes down to one issue: who has the username and password for the web server. If you signed on with a web professional who uses a server that can host more than one domain, then they’re going to be unwilling to give you access because more than just your web site is at risk. Control of that username and password, though, is crucial to your ability to access and update the site. If you are about to sign on with a web professional, then you need to insist on a web server that you can access. It needs to be YOUR name on the administrative account, your credit card for billing, and the emails need to come to you first.

Secondly, most web professionals who construct web sites like doing it because they like the design and creativity. I certainly did when I was working on sites for other people. Maintaining a site after that is not as interesting; a tweak here, a page there — it’s routine by comparison. Most web professionals also have more than just you for a client. You’ve got to get into their rotating schedule if you want to make updates.

For entrepreneurs and small business owners, the best scenario is one where you have a web professional who creates the site for you (if you’re not skilled or don’t have time) and you maintain it after that. If you have the time and the desire to maintain your own site, you’re going to save yourself thousands of dollars because you’re not spending $75 to $125 an hour for your web professional to handle the small changes.

Webinar Date: March 26, 2008

In today’s webinar, we covered Cascading Style Sheets and how they replace hand-editing of text on a web site. We discussed the use of simple formatting tags like bold, italic, and underline. We also look at the now little-used FONT tag and talked about the problems associated with using it because of poor implementations in the browser.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) give us the opportunity to group text characteristics together into a single text file that we can link to on every page. We can specify that all paragraph tags use Verdana as the font, 12 pixels as the size, and blue as the color. Instead of applying those characteristics to every paragraph by hand, we specify it once inside the CSS file and all the pages respond accordingly.

The beauty of using CSS in our web pages is that if we decide to change the paragraph font color from blue to black, we can make that change in one file, and all the web pages update automatically.

CSS is also used for positioning text on web pages, but that’s an advanced activity that the average user usually leaves to their web designer. CSS can also be used to make pages more accessible to those of limited vision or dexterity.

Downloadable example files for this webinar can be found at http://www.pcpowertips.com/webinar/20080319/index.html.

Webinar Date: March 19, 2008

In today’s webinar, we talked about tables in HTML. Tables are one of the most used tag sets in the language; commonly used for overall layout as well as small arrangements of text.

The basic set is very simple: starting the table, ending the table, with row and table cell tags in between. What’s challenging and interesting is handling the combination of rows and cells when needed, then the positioning of text, and finally the proper use of color in borders and backgrounds.

Nesting tables one inside another is the next level of complexity, but it’s done quite often in web pages. The challenge is not to use too many tables in a page because the browser has to read through all the code first before rendering. The difference may be in milliseconds of load time, but tables are in fact slower to load than unstructured text, so you must use them judiciously.

We had two handouts for this webinar that make good practice documents. You can download them from http://www.pcpowertips.com/webinar/20080312/index.html. The second handout has 11 examples of the different formatting you can apply to a table.

Enjoy!

Webinar Date: March 12, 2008

In today’s webinar, we started our HTML lesson with a discussion of browsers and how they read and render web pages. HTML pages are plain text documents containing tags that control the appearance of text and graphics in the page.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for the appearance of text and behaviors in web pages so that there are common outcomes when a page is displayed. If for example, a tag is broken or missing, browers revert to the default appearance of text (usually Times Roman) in the specified font size.

Next we looked at the basic set of tags required for a page to display at all. Then we added simple heading and paragraph tags to give the text some structure. Taking advantage of attributes that the tags offer, we could change text alignment (left/center/right), as well as “text decoration” like bold or italics. We also tried creating hyperlinks and adding images using those tags.  The demonstration files for these activities can be downloaded from http://www.pcpowertips.com/webinar/20080305/index.html.

Next week we’re going to cover tables, which are used for positioning text and graphics.

Webinar Date: March 5, 2008

In today’s webinar we talked about Web Design tools. When you’re first learning how to create web pages, the simpler your web editor the better. You want to be able to focus on the code itself, not be distracted by all the bells and whistles in the software.

HTML pages are plain text documents. Whatever tool you use MUST be able to save plain text files with no formatting. You can create web pages in Notepad — you don’t need anything fancier than that. We even started a web page in Notepad during the webinar. It’s nice, though, to have a tool that is meant for HTML code.

We looked at TextPad, a $32 tool that has some shortcuts for creating web pages. If you decide to buy that tool, however, be sure to download this HTML definitions file (HTMLTAGS.TCL) and replace the one that comes with TextPad. I adjusted the default TextPad HTMLTAGS.TCL file because it still uses upper-case tags and some tags that aren’t used anymore.

Next we looked at a well-featured, free web page editor called HTML Kit. I used this one when I took CSS classes at a nearby community college. You can download it from http://www.chami.com/html-kit. HTML Kit has both syntax coloring and syntax prompting, which help you visually as you work with the code.

Finally, we looked at FrontPage and Adobe GoLive as examples of full-featured, professional web design tools. They offer syntax coloring, syntax prompting, a built-in FTP tool for uploading files, and a structural file that organizes and tracks all of the files in a site.

• FrontPage and its successor, Expression Web, go to great lengths to shield users from HTML code by providing design layout views that simplify creating web pages.
• FrontPage has been very popular with users who are starting to create their own web sites because there are hundreds of design templates available.
• Adobe GoLive and Dreamweaver are advanced tools used in conjunction with other Adobe Products like Photoshop and Illustrator.

If your web design tool does not include the ability to immediately upload your files to your web server, you’ll need an FTP tool. There are two that I’ve used and/or recommended:

• CuteFTP  http://www.cuteftp.com
• VanDyke SecureFX http://www.vandyke.com/products/securefx/index.html 

In addition to web design tools, you will probably want to look into the following supporting tools:

• Color chooser/constructor: Amiasoft Color Pro http://www.amiasoft.com/colorpro
• Menu builders:
  • Ultramenu http://www.ultramenu.com
  • Deluxe Menu http://www.dhtml-menu.com/
• Creating and editing MP3 files for podcasting: Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio http://snipurl.com/pcpt_audiostudio 
• Creating and editing videos and DVDs: Sony Vegas Movie Studio http://snipurl.com/pcpt_moviestudio 
• Creating screen capture videos: Camtasia http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

There are more tools you can use, but these will give you an excellent start.

Webinar Date: February 27, 2008 

In today’s webinar we talked about the operational aspects of choosing a domain name, where to register a domain name and whether or not to use private registration. We learned how to look up the owner of a domain name (http://www.whois.net/ is one web site), and talked about establishing a PO Box or mailbox at a mailing center as the contact point for domain registry, to avoid using our home addresses.

We also talked about web hosts; the different types of plans, and how many domains could be hosted on a single server. I had a short list of features to shop for when choosing a web hosting plan:

• Registration types and cost	• Windows vs Unix/Linux hosting
• Monthly and Yearly Plans	• Single vs Multiple Domain plans
• Email Support	• PHP and MySQL Support
• Amount of storage space (in GB)	• Blog and Podcast Support
• Number of user accounts and access level	• Bandwidth allowances
• Type of Tech Support (email, phone, 24/7?)	• SSL Certificates
• Reputation (Visit their user forums to find out)

Dispute resolution is an important issue; will the web host shut your site down first and ask questions later? Or will they attempt to notify you first? You want to be sure that you can get a hold of someone if something goes wrong. Visit the user forums for your web host to see what other users are saying. Be sure you understand their privacy policy and dispute resolution procedures before you commit time and effort to a site on their servers.

Finally, we talked about the issue of control over your web site. When you’re deciding where to host your site, be sure you can set up accounts that allow your web designer access but not complete control over the site. You’re the one paying for it; you should be in control of it. If your designer refuses, then get another site over which YOU have control. You may choose to get another designer too, but that’s a separate decision. We’ll talk more about working with web professionals in our March 26th webinar.

Webinar Date: February 20, 2008