Content
Identify
information content
In the user/audience analysis, users are asked to
rate different topics according to their level of interest in them.
When you begin designing, identify the information content that your
target audience found most interesting and that will best fulfill your
purpose.
Plan content
that utilizes web technology in unique and appropriate ways
Users will be drawn to your site if you present
your ideas and materials in ways that they could not find in other
media. For instance, providing users an area where they can exchange
fruit recipes is something they might enjoy, which no other media form
can offer.
Design your site
so that it is accessible to a full range of users
Provide support for users with physical,
environmental, and/or technical limitations. Physical limitations
include varying degrees of vision, hearing, mobility or cognitive
impairment. Environmental limitations include poor lighting and a
noisy work place, and technical limitations stem from lower-version
browsers, low display resolutions, low settings for number of colors
displayed, and slow modems.
The Ease of Use Web guidelines offered here contain
information throughout to assist you in creating an accessible Web
site. For a checklist on making sites accessible to users with
disabilities, refer to IBM's Web Accessibility Guidelines.
Plan to give
users content that will format correct in their browsers
Old browsers do not support frames or JavaScript.
Also, only newer browsers such as Netscape 4.x and IE 4.0 will
interpret Java applets. If you want your site to be viewed by people
who use older browsers or screen readers, you can either provide a
version of your site that does not use these new technologies, or you
can use new technologies only as a way of supplementing your other
content.
For example, assume that you want to offer a web
page with a video of how to carve a pineapple. For people with
browsers that cannot display the video, you may choose to provide
another version of the page that does not feature the video. Or, you
may choose to maintain only one version of the page and provide the
video as a way to augment detailed textual instructions of the same
information.
If you choose to provide multiple versions of
certain pages in your site, you can use language script such as
JavaScript to detect the type of browser and serve the compatible
page. (To download the code for a browser sniffer, see "Browser
Compatibility" in the "Production" section.)
Obtain URLs that
will enable users to find your site easily
To enable users to find your site and your product
information easily, we recommend placing product information within
your company domain. In other words, instead of creating specific
domains for your products (www.widget.com), use standard URL formats
that place the most important product information within the company
domain (www.acme.com/widget).
When 69 web users were asked in a survey what URL
they would expect to use to find information about the Acme Widget,