What is usability? Everyone agrees that web pages should be easy to use. However, defining usability is something of a battleground. There seem to be as many definitions as there are usability gurus. Some generally useful ideas from the mass of usability material include: Don’t make users scroll sideways to get crucial information. Don’t put information more than thee clicks away. Don’t use mystery navigation, such as navigation that relies on icons. Test your pages to death on a range of people who don’t know what to expect.

Wherever possible avoid features that don’t work in all browsers. (This is a lot harder than you might think, given the wide array of browers out there now and how each of them has an almost random interpretation of the “standards.)

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