There are many factors involved to improve a website’s usability. We have discussed website navigation before. Today I will discuss adding a search facility to the site. It is recommended to have a search facility if a website has a large number of pages and covers a wide variety of topics.

Having your own search engine helps visitors to find what they are looking for, without going to different pages. Users just need to type in the keywords for what they are looking and they should be shown the exact pages on the website.

Study shows that more than half of web users are search-dominant, which means they prefer to use a search box to find what they are looking for rather than navigating through links.

Here are some guidelines to be considered when setting a search facility on your site.

• Search function should be easily available on every page of the website.
• It is recommended to have a search box on each page rather than a link to the search page. If it’s not possible to have it on each page at least it should be on your home page.
• The search box should be placed in an easy to find location. Based on observations it is recommended to have it on top right corner of the page.
• Try to make a search box wide enough to accommodate the user’s queries.

Finally, please note that both search facility and navigation are important for the website’s usability.

Nadeem
SEO Programmer

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Border-radius:
It’s the one we have been waiting for, it’s the rounded edges! Because i don’t want to alienate any users i have taken screen shots of the work so that all users can see it.

This new feature is long overdue in my eyes but now it’s here its good because it now eliminates the need to use images to create rounded corners on divs and it now makes it easier to re-create tabbed navigation that has rounded corners. This can be done because you can select which corners you want to be rounded and how rounded you want them. Below is an example of only two rounded corners.

Box-shadow:
Box shadow is another cool feature that will reduce the need for creating images to make a website look better. Box-Shadow is what it says, it places a shadow on the edge of a div were you want it, You also have good control over what type of shadow you have and how sharp or soft it is.

As well as making the web look nice the biggest advantage to having these features are that they eliminate the need to have images all over to give things good effects. In return this reduces the size of your page which means the page can load faster. In the age of broadband you may not see a massive difference in page load time but if you don’t have the luxury of broadband then you can tell the difference. This opens up your site to a wider audience and makes it more accessible.

Gary
SEO Programmer

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Created by radio station KPBS, there is a live map of the California wildfires showing burn zones, evacuation zones, locations of safe areas and much more. There are also pictures of the area and constant Twitter updates to keep people completely up to date with what’s going on.

This kind of accessible up-to-the-minute reporting is something that particularly helps people in the Southern California area, and is something that would arguably not have been available just a few years ago.

It’s a great example of ‘Web 2.0′ in action and how much the internet and delivery of information has progressed in recent times.

Rik
SEO Programmer

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Most people, including myself, are optimising for 800×600 to ensure that the web pages look consistent throughout different monitor sizes. In spite of this, why not optimising for 1024×768 which is currently the most popular used screen size?

There are 2 possible solutions for this:

Using liquid layouts based on percentages of the browser window’s size. They are flexible with the size of the windows as the user changes their window size. Liquid layouts use the screen space efficiently for most screen resolution or browser windows sizes.

Another common approach is creating a three column fixed layout optimised for both screen resolutions, where users with 1024×768 or bigger resolutions see the entire page and users with 800×600 screen resolution see only 2 columns. Obviously there some aspects worth considering such as the percentage of your visitors that use small screen resolutions and whether there are any elements that can be left out.

Tino
SEO Programmer

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Relative lengths

• pixels are relative to the screen resolution
• xx-small through xx-large are relative to the default browser font size
• percentages, em and ex are relative to the parent element

Absolute lengths

• points and picas – print units
• inches, centimeters, and millimeters – length units

Points and picas are print units and produce unpredictable results when viewed on the screen, for example Macintosh normally displays points almost 25% bigger than in Windows machines. Since users have a variety of monitor sizes and display resolutions, it is advisable to use absolute length units exclusively for style sheets for print.

What to use for screen display?

There’s no right or wrong, however there’s two important facts to consider: Accessibility Vs Control.

If you are concerned about accessibility ems is the unit you should use. Ems is relative to the parent element (commonly the body) therefore the user can control how the font is displayed by changing the default browser settings.

This also means that if a user selects a font-size much bigger or smaller than what you had in mind the page look and layout can change dramatically, for this reason the entire web page layout and design must take this into account.

If you prefer to have control over your design you should use pixels. Pixels are the standard unit of measure for screens and monitors, and fonts will be more precisely the size you want on the screen, across different browsers, user settings and different operating systems.

Tino
SEO Programmer

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However, just applying tags to relevant objects to conform to validation and minor accessibility requirements is not enough.

When designing webpages, far too many designers rely on the fact that their viewers always look at webpages in 1024×768 resolution or above. However, older or more visually impaired internet users, who are not entirely blind, (therefore do not use a screen reader or other visual aid) tend to set their screen resolution to 800×600. Which, unless the page has been designed with this in mind can really mess things up. Also, text size settings are an important part of accessibility and should be set to small, medium, large, etc. After all, web browsers do have the option of increasing text size for the visually impaired.

I recommend that from the layout design process onward these possibilitys should be considered when sizing and correctly implementing your design.

Many clients are coming to realise that there are laws when it comes to accessibility, same as a wheelchair ramp is required by law on public buildings, websites must conform to regulations as well.

As long as all these regulations are adhered to as you progress through your design process, you will not run into any problems.

Tom Tong
Design and SEO Consultant
Just Search Ltd

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