How to make sure your website is conform to common guidelines.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">I want to know what the necessary guidelines for usable web design are. </span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Next the process for creating&nbsp;a website that corresponds to these existing guidelines has to be decided. </span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;" lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #000000;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Additionally it would be good to know if there are ways to measure the quality of a website after it has been produced. Are there automatic approaches or does this have to be checked manually? </span></span></span></span></p>

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Submitted by Romana Feichtinger on Sat, 11/07/2009 - 20:57
2 answers

evaluate the accessibility of a website

depending on the target audience of your website you may also consider to make it as accessible as possible. there exit some standards from the w3c dealing with this issue (web accessibility initiative):

http://www.w3.org/WAI

unfortunately it is not really possible to automatically test the complete accessibility as defined in the wai standards.

Submitted by Jürgen Giefing on Wed, 12/07/2011 - 15:50

Create and evaluate your website through W3C guidelines

There exist several guidelines for web design. The most common ones are the W3C guidelines. Those define, how tables, fonts, colours etc. have to be designed to guarantee the creation of a high quality website. The best way to start is to roughly go through all those guidelines and pick those who seem to be necessary for the current project. Next you can look for code samples or great designed websites, like published in the book “web design index” by Günter Beer. Some sketches can help to find out, how the website shall look like. When you start creating the website, make sure to use XHTML and CSS, since this is the recommended W3C standard. When you’ve created the first version of your webdesign, you should test it’s usability with some test persons, that give you creative feedback so that you keep on improving the design. When you think that you’ve finished and considered the guidelines, you can check your website automatically with the help of the W3C validators, that can be found here: http://validator.w3.org/

Submitted by Romana Feichtinger on Wed, 11/11/2009 - 21:15