A good user experience is like a good teacher. You shouldnt need web standards the site itself should teach you how to use it. It should be a natural thing. People use the web in different ways and from what Ive seen can actually be pigeon holed - however much you don’t want that to happen. The amount of women I see double clicking links, yet I struggle to remember a male doing that - ever (obviously you can extend beyond male/female difference). Anyway the point being for the majority of sites you do have a pigeon hole, there is a certain demographic, just like there is for tv programmes, shops, magazines, and there are certain ways these demographics use the web, just like there are certain ways people watch the tv, shop and read.
The other thing to remember is rules are there to be broken. I must find out where I read this but ’some of the best art and design comes from breaking the rules - and making it work’ - Im sure this applies to useabilty. We should be changing and questioning standards all the time, they may change from site to site, we can always have more than one rule. Through my experince of web building and designing I hear far too much that something is done a certain way because somebody from up above ‘likes it like that’. But what about the people that are going to use the sites, what about our ‘customers’, does anyone stop to ask what they want. Does anybody after the copy for the site has been done, through the process of designing and building actually go back to the original reason and purpose for the site build. Its like any good design it doesn’t need to be simple, it doesn’t need to be complicated, it needs to fill a need, a reason, a premise for why the design is needed in the first place.
Things to think about/include
What demographics are there and are they defined/influenced by the medium.
No click site.
Differences between males and females and how this effects the way they interact with websites.
]]>Then I saw this <a href=”http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/09/my_little_pony_modded.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890″>modded little pony</a>, wowsers, now I do want one.
]]>Take away 611 from 990 and your left with the width of the smaller portion of the grid. This of course works with height aswell.
Symmetry is also very pleasing on the eye, you can portion your design up into an equal grid. Or maybe even a combination of the two…
]]>Also I highly recommend checking it out in IE6 - no seriously I’m not joking (they are tho).
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Or for IE (obviously):
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]]>Sometimes the content is questionable, but its all user generated so that’s fair enough, and the point being really that its absolutely FREE!!
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