Monday, 30 January 2012

Website standards and usability


For anyone getting into the field of website creation and design, as I am, a little background knowledge is in order.

The World Wide Web was the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist that Time magazine ranks among the top 100 minds of the century. In much the same way that Gutenberg’s printing press impacted society, Berners-Lee’s Web has brought profound changes to the way we conduct business, find and share information, socialize, and communicate.

To establish international Web standards and manage its growth and development, Berners-Lee founded and heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization consisting of member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public. The significance of the W3C, for anyone involved in creating websites, is that this governing body dictates both HTML and CSS standards.

Another person of influence, with regards to website design, is Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s leading web usability consultants. Nielsen has published a number of books on web usability and website design and also issues a biweekly column, Alertbox, on usability issues. Follow this link to read what he considers to be the top ten mistakes in web design.  

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