|
Parts of this article were taken from Jakob Neilsen's website.
| Language; writing for the web |
People rarely read web pages (and possibly other electronic documents)
word by word; instead they scan the page.
- Summary first (at the top of the page).
- One idea per paragraph, summarised in the first few words or sentence.
- Half the word count of conventional writing.
- Highlighted keywords.
Highlighting can be achieved by hypertext links, and changes in typeface or colour.
- Meaningful sub-headings, not clever ones (the heading conveys useful information).
- Bulleted lists
- Objective, neutral language. Users detest marketing or promotional language,
and it has been shown to slow them down.
To ensure that they look the same on most browsers,
web pages should use the 216 browser-safe colours.
Each operating system reserves some colours for itself,
and the colours are different depending on the OS.
What we are left with should work on most displays.
These colours can be generated by combining all possible combinations
of the following values for red, green, and blue:
hex: 00 33 66 99 CC FF
dec: 0 51 102 153 204 255
For example, 3366CC would be one of these colours, while 4466CC would not.
Note that the Gimp can convert an image to a web-optimised palette.
Use the Indexed option under the Image menu;
it will produce a dialogue that gives you a choice of palettes.
If the Indexed option is dimmed it means that you are already
using an indexed image (such as PNG or GIF),
so convert to RGB and then back to Indexed.
| 