Newbies to web publishing often mess up their sites. They make their content inaccessible due to their wacky layouts, distracting animations and JavaScript, and excessive slang.
This is ESPECIALLY true of the cut ‘n paste code users on Xanga. Lots of tech-savvy people despise Xanga. Some say it’s because of its closed-source, proprietary nature, but I don’t really agree. Xanga itself is okay, but it’s the individual people using Xanga that give it a bad reputation.
When people think they’re making their site layouts kewl, they also cause it to become counterintuitive and counterproductive.
Here’s the list of generally disliked practices for any site–not just Xanga. It’s in order of severity, starting with the worst offense.
<
ol>
Text that is (virtually) the same color as the background. Also known as “spoiler text”. If you have to highlight text to read it properly, the user will be very annoyed. Highlighted text also often disrupts embedded images, inverting colors or dithering a dim color in. Also, it makes possibly nice layouts look disgusting because the words are “boxy” and every element on the page is highlighted. Why force your users to CTRL-A/APPLE-A, or worse, triple-click, just so they can read your page?
31337 $P33k, rAnDOm cApS, ALL CAPS, no caps, and rely hard2read chatr slang. C4n U 34$!1y r34d th1$? (Can you easily read this?) hOw bOuT ThIs, iS tHiS cOOl oR wHAt?! Capitalization was designed to help letters to naturally flow together, but rANdoM cAPs breaks up this flow, AND ALL CAPS CAUSES WORDS TO APPEAR IN BLOCKS WHICH ARE HARD TO READ. no caps n hrd2rd slang + carless mispelings will cause most visitors to head for that green left-pointing arrow on their browser.
Continue reading ‘Web site usability’
I got the results of my Certificate of Merit Level 7 piano test and… I passed! (-: The judge did notice that I made some mistakes in my practical evaluation, but I got an excellent 97% for the musical theory portion. Now I’m going on to level 8. [yawn]
[silly]ROTFL(-:[crazy] YES! I’m a science fair winner! 5 tickets to Great America!! Next Sunday, at the awards ceremony, I’ll find out what place I got.
I took the Certificate of Merit piano test today. I’ve been preparing for it for months now, and overall, I’m glad it’s finally over. This year was particularly hard since I had skipped from level 5 to 7. The written theory was easy enough, but I don’t know if I passed the practical part. I probably made tons of mistakes. [crap]
In retrospect, though, I did how I did. I don’t think it was bad enough for the judge to fail me. 
Today was the Judging Day for the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science and Technology Championship.
My project was about internet-based distributed computing, which is the process of using many computers to approach a task that would be too complex or time-consuming for just one. Click here for my interactive Macromedia Flash introduction to distributed computing.
It seems my project must have been pretty interesting, because I talked to almost 15 (!) judges. They were definitely impressed by my work, as I had actually developed the software for the experiment.
Near the end of the day a director/judge wanted to interview me about my project. I was looking at other projects, so James and Richard pulled me back to my project and we talked about it for quite a while–15 minutes! He understood everything and we even ran through the code for my software.
I had a great science fair this year. I think my project was extremely successful and far more interesting than last year’s.
View the Flash Introduction
View the Report
Other people’s projects
During the public viewing time, I walked around and looked at other peoples’ projects. One that really caught my eye was “An X86 Robotics Development Platform Using Off-the-Shelf Components”. The student put together several robots using easily available components.