Our Priorities
Our priorities are important to us: accurate, legible, and friendly, in that order.
Accurate
Your web site should be accurate in several ways: the content should accurately describe of your offerings, grammar and spelling should be correct, and pages should conform to Internet specifications.Content
Visitors to your web site want to know what you have to offer, and you have only a few seconds or words to grab their attention. On the web, this requires accurate details presented in a terse manner. Otherwise, merciless users will move straight to the "back" button.
Grammar and spelling
Some visitors will be sensitive to spelling errors, incorrect homonyms (to, too, or two?), poor sentence structures, and other grammatical errors. These will be taken as a sign of incompetence, inviting users to question your knowledge and quality before they've even finished reading about your offerings.1
Internet specifications
Your site must work for everyone, regardless of which web browser or what version they are using.2 To ensure all visitors see what is intended (or hear or feel, in the case of aural and Braille browsers), the web page must conform to specifications. The markup that describes formatting details (such as emphasizing these words) must be syntactically correct to ensure reliable, consistent interpretation by browsing software. Malformed markup results in browsers guessing at intent, causing missing or illegible text, unusable or awkward layout, or even entirely blank pages.
Image: A web page exposes part of its mark up due to an error.
Testing
Multiple tests are necessary to ensure accuracy: spell checking, HTML validation, CSS validation, and accessibility validation. Finished must be reviewed for grammar and semantics. Since theory doesn't always agree with practice, work must be rechecked by hand— at Devious Fish, we test on Safari, Firefox, Opera (regular and hand-held/small screen mode), and Internet Explorer. Occasionally, we even break out Links and check with that too.
Legible
Legibility might not seem to be an issue since everything is
typed, but it's not just the print that matters—
color/contrast, font sizes, layout, and medium contribute too.
Screen and windows sizes vary from small hand-held mobile phones or
personal organizers up to maximized windows on large monitors.
Users may be reading printed copy, reading with a Braille device,
or listening to a speech-synthesized edition via an aural browser.
Image: a malformed web site renders illegibly in Safari and Firefox (shown with the invisible text selected). Opera renders the same page with visible text.
Most neglected of all isn't even a person: search engines. Search engines "read" sites by filling databases with word associations, using headings, emphasis, links, and other mark-up cues to guess what's important and what's not. Done wrong, even the most beautifully rendered page is only a run-on sentence to a search engine. Done very wrong, a site can remain unindexed (be ignored) by search engines.
By taking advantage of accessibility and portability features on the technical side of things, a web page can adapt to a given medium. Constructed right, your site won't be limited to the obvious case of a visual representation on a computer monitor, but will also be readily usable on mobile telephones, aural and Braille browsers. It will look good when printed, and will get appropriately indexed by search engines.
Friendly
A friendly site presents information in an straightforward way with good personality, making it easy and desirable to use.
Visitors come to your site for information, not a new user interface experience. The look and feel should be familiar, following common practices for layout and navigation menus. Links should allow a user to intuitively navigate to the page they're searching for on both initial and returning visits. There's little more frustrating to your visitors to have to search for a desired nugget of information that is buried in a bad design. Often, this inspires users to search elsewhere.
Browser behavior is standard, and it should stay that way. Fancy sites using technical means to change browser behavior (such as response to a mouse click) confuse novice users with the variant behavior, and irritate advanced users by interfering with features such as tabbed-browsing.
As for personality, a page should focus on providing content with appropriate attitude. Pages shouldn't be too "busy", with excess advertising, flashing text or animations which distract from content.3 Technical specifications should present data and avoid hype. Advertising should also avoid hype, include links to technical details and similar products, and provide all purchasing details such as price, availability, shipping costs, variations available, etc. Overall, the site should feel helpful to and inspire confidence in your visitors without being overbearing.
