Design vs Art Blog

Reading large amounts of text on a website could be not very comfortable. If you are designing, for example, a news website you have to take care about the screen size.

In order to make reading more enjoyable The New York Times, as well as other newspaper websites, use a fixed-width screen size. It doesn’t matter how big the browser window is, the site width stays the same:

If they were not using a fixed screen size users could make their browsers too big and the text lines would be too long to easily read them.

This web design and usability pattern help users read the information you are offering them, having as a result better chances of them finishing reading the text and staying longer in your website.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Encouraging users to give you feedback is not that easy, if you are designing a blog you should make the posting procedure as simple as possible. Otherwise many users will get impatient and leave without writing any comment.One example of complicated design could be the SEOmoz blog. The content of this blog is very useful but if you want to post a comment a pop-up is prompted and users are asked to login or register.

Note that the Register button is not visible, users must drug the window (although that might depend on the screen configuration). This adds one more usability flaw to this interface.Then another floating window to post the comment:

Techcrunch, the famous blog, has a much more practical solution for posting comments. I will go for simple solutions, allowing users to post straight away.

Popularity: 19% [?]