Usability

Listened to a great podcast on web page hierarchy, that gives insight into how to use hierarchy on a web page to increase usability, prioritise content, and to ultimately help attain whatever goals you've set for your website. He also presents a number of case studies, slides of which you will find in his presentation pdf. So much good stuff here, like how users actually read a webpage (we don't - we just scan), and what tools to use to create hierarchy (contrast).

Good article that takes us through the fundamentals of good navigation, and how to make your website links usable.

Infoworld reviews 6 of the 'top' open source AJAX libraries. What I picked up from this article is that although we are still in the early stages of AJAX, there is enormous potential, and some great toolkits that will help you get started using AJAX on your webpages. For my first foray into AJAX, I didn't use any of the abovementioned libraries. I used scriptaculous to create a drag and drop sortable list that is automatically updated in the database.

If you are using ajax on any web pages, you will want to give some indication to the user that a request is being processed. Animated gifs like those found here are great for this.

I have been using phpMyAdmin for a long time now to manage MySQL databases via the web, and have really loved the functionality they provide when displaying forms. If there is a radio button or check box that needs to be checked, you don't have to aim for the box or button itself, you can just click on the text next to the button/box. And voilà, the button is checked. This makes it so much more useable, especially when filling in long forms. To do this all you need to do is put a label tag around the text next to the checkbox/radio button, and put in a 'for' attribute that tells the form what button or checkbox to check when you click on the label.

I recently went to the Cell C website to find out about their contracts. When I got to the home page I clicked on a "more" link which I thought would take me to the website content I was looking for, and to me it looked as though nothing had changed (even though the page had refreshed), as the same large flash advert at the top of the page kept playing - there was no indication that I had moved to the content that I had requested.