Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
Scaling and scalability—why is it important that Web sites can scale?
Content needs to be written so that users can grab the information they need in as little time as
possible. Text can be made more easily readable by doing the following:
- Highlighting or making bold key phrases and words
- Using bulleted lists
- Using paragraphs to break up information
- Using descriptive and distinct headings
On the page, use an inverted pyramid style, or newspaper style, for your copy. The bulk of the
information should be at the top of the page to make for easy scanning.
There are some key “don’ts” when it comes to building a user-friendly Web site:
- Never resize windows or launch the site in a pop-up.
- Don’t use splash pages. These are pages at the entry to a site that are usually animated and
contain some variation of the phrase “click here to enter this site.” - Never build a site entirely in Flash—most search engine spiders cannot even crawl Flash sites.
- Don’t distract users with “Christmas trees” (blinking images, flashing lights, automatic sound,
scrolling text, unusual fonts, etc.).