Websites Archives - The Last Drop of Ink

This drove me so “nuts”, I’m sharing this video with you, so you don’t make the same mistakes and I’ve got a simple rule that you can never fail with for usability on your website.

Hit play below on the video below to see what this rule is:

As I mention in the video, it’s purpose is to demonstrate some very straight forwards points for you to look out for on your own website and if you design your website so that a 6 year old can use it, then a user of any age & experience can use it and that’s gotta be a good thing right?

If you design your website so that a 6 year old can use it, then a user of any age & experience can use it

In the video I discuss “action colours”, these are soooo important to get right on a site and confusing customers with multiple button colours, placements and not using them at all at key stages makes the user think.

This sounds wrong, but we don’t want out customers to think, we want the customer to just follow the item flow all the way through to the checkout pages and it’s our job as website owners to make this as easy and intuitive as possible for them.

Learn More

If you’d like to learn more about website usability, then there are two books on Amazon that are must reads. I’ve got them both and they’re never leaving my office.

The first is “Don’t Make Me Think” which has lots of examples and is super easy to follow, the second is called “Call to Action” and it’s remarkable how many sites just get this wrong or not even at all! Both on Amazon & available on the Kindle.

Oh yea… Lookout this afternoon for our 8th Podcast, the topic’s timing is brilliant, it’s fulfilment!

Well, it’s about time I re-launched the mobile version, after all 10-20% of the traffic here during the weekdays can come from mobile devices.

Yesterday I altered one of the standard themes, wrote a customised mobile site and after testing on numerous devices, it’s been launched.

It’s been set up so that if you’re on a mobile decide (other than an iPad) that you’ll be redirected to the heavily cut down version which includes the basic functionality.

Home link
Search
Finger-friendly links
Image optimisation
A method to get back to the main site if desired

Being a speed freak, I’ve also ripped out (blocked) the really large overhead files as well, so that instead of the total page weight being around 183Kb, that it comes in at a tenth of this at 18Kb. You can test mobile sites here http://ready.mobi/results.jsp?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flastdropofink.co.uk&locale=en_EN

I’d like to also pass on an excellent tip I found to block the extra styles and JavaScript files in WordPress from here. My example is below and blocks the tubepress extension from loading css and js files in the header on the mobile site, by blocking them in the functions.php file.

add_action( ‘wp_print_styles’, ‘my_deregister_styles’, 100 );
function my_deregister_styles()
{
wp_deregister_style( ‘tubepress’ );
wp_deregister_script( ‘tubepress’ );
}