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Guidelines for home page usability, task orientation, navigation and IA, forms and data entry, trust and credibility, writing and content quality, page layout and visual design, search usability, and help, feedback and error tolerance.

Keeping usability for stumblers, browsers and surfers in mind when creating a website can be an exasperating task. Doing so shouldn't have to be so frustrating... What follows is a list of how to improve your site's usability without going crazy!

About frames, iframes, css frames and usability.

Russell Wilson's blog on usability, user-centered design, interface design

Web forms. Everybody knows web forms. Each day we have to fill in some information in a web form, be it a simple login to your webmail application, an online purchase, or signing up for a website. They are the basic, and pretty much the only way of gathering information on the web. You basically know a web form when you see one as they always look the same and they've kept this look over the years. Try as hard as you might but web forms can only change their appearance so much. Some may argue that this is a good usability feature, and I tend to agree, but there comes a time when you just need to style web forms so that they look different. How do you do that? Niceforms comes to the rescue! Niceforms is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones. You can either use the default theme that is provided or you can even develop your own look with minimal effort.

links, links and links

examples of css styleswitchers

CrazyEgg are not crazy, but insane important (if You want to know what Your users are clicking). It provides simple with most clickable areas of Your website. It can have huge impact on Your site.

Some bright folks also feel the same pain and went ahead and built meta-languages and compilers that take their own version of CSS and compile it to standard CSS code. Their own CSS meta-language is thus able to have new features, like variables, mixins, operations and so on. The most notable of these right now is SASS (part of HAML). I've tried SASS and really liked it, but one thing really bothered me. I didn't like how all the syntax was different to CSS. Sure, it's not CSS anymore, it's SASS, but do we really need to change the syntax of the stuff already present in CSS - why not just expand it? I've asked a friend of mine who is much more competent at programming than me about how long it would take to code a CSS compiler that retained the original CSS syntax but added a bunch of new features. He liked the idea and so we've put together our own version of CSS together with a compiler we call LESS, which stands for Leaner CSS.