Nice to know that even the pros can make mistakes!
You right, of course, Rachel. I’d love to say I put this in deliberately to see if you were paying attention (you are : ), but that’s sadly not true.
Thanks for writing and I’ll fix that up in a later edition. I hope the book is useful to you otherwise.
Best,
Charles
Charles Wyke-Smith
charles@stylinwithcss.com
Just got an email update from Jakob Nielsen’s website, Alertbox, January 25, 2010: “Testing Expert Users.” It notes a growing trend to create usability testing designed for experts, presumably because more people are “experts” since they use the web more frequently. But it cautions that usability for novices should be an important part of testing, since each new visitor to your site is a novice on that site.
Interesting note that all testing described refers to commercial sites.
Before getting to the reading, I’m wondering how many classmates had as much confusion as I did in choosing a web hosting service. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for: how much disk space do I really need? If it doesn’t say it’s compatible with Dreamweaver, will it be? Do I need a mirror site—and how do you do that anyway? I need a checklist of what to look for. Searching for a new phone service would be easier. Thanks to all the friends who offered suggestions.
My frustration with most everything digital often makes me wonder how small museums/heritage organizations deal with such issues. How do they go about choosing their web hosting? Perhaps they know about Techsoup’s overarching support for non-profits, and companies like Dreamhost’s free web hosting for non-profits. Or do they?
I thought Stylin with CSS (Charles Wyke-Smith, 2d Edition, 2008) was very helpful because it’s written in clear English, with great examples in the text. The accompanying website is especially helpful because it generously shares templates among many other tools. I think I found a mistake also, with the sample code on pp.21-22, and the sample rendering on p.23. On p.23 a sentence appears which is not in the code, “You can find more CSS related links at the Stylin’with CSS site.” If I’m right, it makes me happy to see that I don’t need to be a mater programmer to follow code.
The article “How People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility “didn’t seem particularly useful to me. The concept of website evaluation is important and necessary, but I think that non-commercial enterprises will need to develop their own metrics for evaluation, with more emphasis on qualitative measurements. If there are ways to garner qualitative measurements from website statistics, that would be wonderful. But my last reading in archives and metrics suggest that it is much more difficult to measure quality of experience in the non-commercial world. In other words, Target can look at sales figures contrasted with web advertising to see direct links to the action of purchasing. But online museums can’t measure what it means if someone spends 2 or 20 minutes looking at a painting.
I had trouble reading the Wrobleski article, “Who Are You” because the layout seemed so disjointed, and the fonts were so small. It felt like a web page crammed into a book, where it did not fit. I scanned it, but even that wasn’t as effective as scanning a website, where I could adjust the font size, and focus on sections of my choice.
Finally, I am happy to know that “Attractive Things Work Better.” I think we all know this intuitively, so it’s nice to see the science of brain functioning used to explain why we know this. I read this just after choosing a graphic principally because it makes me happy when I look at it. Unfortunately, I have to delve into copyright issues before using it in my banner or webpage.
