Re: website finally up

Clay -

It looks like I am in the miniority, but that's okay. As webmaster is my
profession my opinion is that usability is the most important aspect of a
website. After all, you have done all of the hard work to produce a product
then create a website, so it only makes sense to want to make things as easy as
possible for visitors to be able to appreciate what you ahve done. If you have
a dedicated following (let's say you are Ozzie Ozborne) then you will have
people who will have no problems spending whatever time is necessary to
investigate the whole site. Probably, none of us on this list are in that
category, and the typical visitor to our sites would be someone who is just
coming to see what is there. They need to be taken by the hand and walked
around, pointing out to them the great things you have done. This can always
be done in an "artistic" way.

The most important link on nany page is a link back to the homepage. During my
Web testing at my last job I was surprised to see how many people, when given a
new task, would go back to the homepage and start from there despite the fact
that the obvious solution was to use the global navigation - and these were
people who were already somewhat knowledgeable about the site. This was an
interesting revalation to me. It also begs the question as to where one should
be sent when a splash page is used, since the splash page is the actual
homepage. Do you require the extra click?

All of this is, of course, just my opinion, and the important thing is to enjoy
putting together your site. As long as you are not involved in an ecommerce
site (I know of none that have a splash page) then have fun with what you have
done - I'm just looking at it from a usability standpoint.

Cheers -

george

--- Clay <wcharmon@wt.net> wrote:

> Well, thanks for the input everyone. I am definitely going to do some
> tweaks with page size and image sizes/compression etc based on your
> comments. I am still thinking about the whole splash page thing.
> Maybe some text instructing the interested viewer to click on the
> image would be appropriate. The other idea I had was to make a
> mouseover image that makes the door knob glow bright red or
> something. That is a little twee though. I dunno. Most people figured
> it out, I guess.
>
> One other design issue that I debated with myself was whether to keep
> the a 'global' menu on every page once the main part of the site was
> loaded. I personally hate having to hit the back arrow button just to
> get back to where I started.

Handmade Photographic Images - http://www.GLSmyth.com
DRiP Investing - http://DRiPInvesting.org

        
                
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Received on Wed Sep 7 06:31:20 2005