Monthly Archives: April 2008

News

I’ve Been Hacked

I’m just digging into this but it appears Small Farm Design has been hacked.

Recently I’ve noticed that my site has been running incredibly slow and I had a few clients comment on the site speed. After talking to my hosting company I started to look into my files. I noticed hundreds and hundreds of links to porn, Viagra and other things that should never be on Small Farm Design.

It appears this is happening on a larger scale than just my site (PsionMark writes about his attack, GoogleLady writes about her attack and Jason Tan writes about his attack). But as others have pointed out this hasn’t been making any headlines.

I’m currently working to re-secure my site and hope to eliminate this annoyance. Also I want to apologize if you have received anything in my feed other than the intended article. I hope to have this resolved soon.

Website Design

Web Site Design & Usability Checklist

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A well designed and compelling web site is important for a number of reasons such as enhancing or creating your identity, communicating your company’s message and establishing credibility. However, the design must meet the user’s needs in order for a site to achieve its goal.

The following checklist should provide a good starting point to make sure your site is well designed and usable.

Site Links & Navigation

  • Are hyperlinks stylized to be easily distinguished from the rest of the site text?
  • Do clickable items stylistically indicate that they are clickable, as well as, provide immediate (0.1 seconds) feedback?
  • Are text links clearly labeled to provide a clear indication of where they will take the visitor?
  • Is your primary navigation clearly and consistently labeled
  • Is your site navigation is easy to use for target audience (for example, larger buttons for an older audience)
  • Are you providing an alternate navigation method if your primary navigation is images, Flash, or DHTML?
  • Is your navigation is structured in an unordered list for accessibility
  • Are you providing secondary navigation aids, such as a site map, a skip navigation link, or breadcrumbs
  • Have you double checked all your links to insure there are now broken links?
  • Is your navigation easy to find and in a consistent location?

Web Site Design & Layout

  • Does the design of your site match your brand?
  • Is the web site’s design aesthetically appealing?
  • Is the design audience appropriate?
  • Are the colors used harmonious and logically related?
  • Does the site colors provide high enough in contrast to assist colorblind and visually impaired visitors?
  • Does the colors and graphics enhances or distracts from the site?
  • Are the fonts easily readable and degrade gracefully — standard text size should be readable, for visitors who don’t know how to adjust their browsers?
  • Are all the graphics are optimized to increase download speed?
  • Does the design of the site clearly indicate its purpose? The purpose must be clear within a few seconds without reading much or no text copy at all.
  • Is there a clear call to action on every page?

Web Site Content

  • Does you content create a clear Visual Hierarchy
  • Is the content on your site readable — type face, font size and color?
  • Is the web site copy succinctly written?
  • Is the copy written in a style that suits your website’s to ’speak’ to your target audience?
  • Is the contrast between body text and the background color sufficient to make it easy to readyreading easy on the eyes?
  • Is text broken into small, readable chunks seperated by headings, sub-headings with emphasis on features to assist in scanning the page?

This web design checklist is not the end all of lists. I’m sure there many more items that should be added. Moreover this list should be used a guide and not be seen as a list of must dos on every site.

Usability, Website Design

Homepages Should Point Visitors in the Right Direction

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Having an effective homepage is one of the best practices for your business’s website. A homepage serves as the front door of your website. You should design your homepage to feature the visitor’s most requested information and services and to serve as a top-level directory to access the primary sections of your website.

Why Homepages are Important

  • The homepage is the main tool for sending your visitors in the right direction.
  • Web sites need to focus on helping the visitors find the content and information they search for and need most.
  • Studies shows that more than half of all web users evaluate websites based on homepages alone. If you have an ineffective homepage, many visitors will immediately be turned off and may never come back to your site.
  • Web visitors want fast, efficient service. On homepages, they expect to find what they’re looking for quickly.
  • Web users are impatient. They don’t want to be distracted by text or graphics that don’t help them find what they want or that increase download time.
  • Even if your website is targeted to specialized audiences (for example ), your homepage needs to communicate basic information to the the general audience.

The homepage is different from all other web site pages. A well-constructed homepage will project a good first impression to all who visit the site.It is important to ensure that the homepage has all of the features expected of a homepage and looks like a homepage to users. A homepage should clearly communicate the site’s purpose, and show all major options available on the web site.

The homepage serves as your website’s starting point. If visitors feel lost or disoriented visitors they can always return to the homepage and start over. This makes it important to provide a link back to your homepage on every page of your website.