Posts Tagged ‘usability’

The end of the FAQ

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series All things must end

We’ve all seen websites that list frequently asked questions, or FAQ. Continuing in our series All Things Must End, we’re going to show that FAQ are training wheels from when the web was new and have no place on modern websites that are properly designed.

Image via Wikipedia

While there isn’t really anything inherently evil about a [...]

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Reading plain text email is safer and faster and preserves privacy

Image via Wikipedia

We try to cover basic security best-practices as much as possible. We talked about the value of NoScript, a Firefox plugin that prevents JavaScript from loading on web pages unless specifically allowed by the user. Today, we’re going to examine why reading email as HTML is a bad practice from a privacy, security [...]

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Accessible websites, more RFP ideas

The example RFP for website construction posted last week mentioned a little about web standards and user agents, but after further reflection it seems we need to examine further the importance of an accessible and usable website and add a few more requirements to the proposal.
An accessible website is one that can be viewed on [...]

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PDF should be optional on web

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe in 1993. As of July 1, 2008, it’s an ISO standard, which means that the format is open and published so that anyone can create it or use it.
There are many misconceptions about the proper use of PDFs, and today I’m going to try [...]

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Flash is bad, m’kay

Flash is a very bad way to build websites. It’s not only about SEO. It’s about usability. For the same reasons that mature developers don’t use “fly-out” or “drop-down” menus, you shouldn’t use Flash because it requires you to do one of two things. You can either alienate the growing minority of users using alternative [...]

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