Al's TAFE Certificate IV I.T. (Website Design) Exercises

Semester TWO

Lesson 4 » Website Usability.

Exercise 1

• Write a little treatise about the Dud Links exercise you did in class. Show me the pages you did to reproduce the phenomenon, with a verbal explanation about the traps and recommendations.
  
  
  • Dreamweaver defaults to putting the local hard drive address into the links within a page until the page is saved. It is therefore wise to double check that each link has been updated by dreamweaver prior to uploading your site to your server. If the files are in the root directory it should remove all references and leave just the file name and extension. If the files are in a folder, Dreamweaver will leave the folder name, forward slash, the file name & extension. When clicked in a browser the browser/server knows that the file specified in the link is in the root directory or the specified folder. Also, files names are case sensitive so care should be taken to ensure all file names are lower case with no spaces.
    
    
  • This link is correctly linked to a page within this site. click here to try it! NOTE: you will need to click back on the browser to get back here!
    
    
  • This link is incorrectly linked to the local root directory of the computer. The file is still linked to the harddrive and therefore does not work. Click here to try it! The productz.html page is on the site (click here to try it).

Exercise 2

• List off 25 of your most disliked failings of websites.
  
  
  • The things I hate most about websites not designed by me.
    1. sites created in M$Backbook,
    2. POP-UPs (any tripod sites) and this one that does not load if you have popup's turned off,
    3. pages that are to wide,
    4. large FLASH splash pages (especially if they take a long time to load),
    5. boring spashpage with an 'Enter Here' link to the real site,
    6. ghastly colors,
    7. ghastly text (colors, size, animations, flashing text, unreadable),
    8. un-navigable sites (when you can't find what you are looking for),
    9. un-themed sites and this one,
    10. crappy sounds (some that are not related to the site),
    11. broken & incorrect links,
    12. too many font types,
    13. too many graphics (some that are not related to the site),
    14. links incorrectly setup to open a page within a site that open another frame,
    15. pages that have no return link,
    16. pages that don't allow the user to go back (click the back button takes you out of the site),
    17. attachments to cursors (trailing graphics chasing the cursor),
    18. un-related advertisements,
    19. links with underling disabled,
    20. site with no 'site map' (either a site map page or links at the bottom of each page),
    21. distorted graphics,
    22. sites that take to long to load,
    23. oversized/large pic on home page,
    24. advertising,
    25. ridicules home pages (this takes the prize).

Exercise 3

• Compile a table showing web browser type, resolution, color depth, operating system and one or two other elements of interest for the visitors to 4 websites. Average out the figures into one lot of percentages eg: 80% use Explorer, 10% Netscape  then 50% have 1024x768 resolution etc etc.
  
  • Graph of users PC environments.

  browser	%	resolution	%	color	%	op system	%	CSS	%	Java	%
  Explorer	92	1024 x 768	53	32 bits	65	Windoz XP	69	Supported	99	v 1.3	92
  Netscape	3	800 x 600	28	16 bits	24	Windoz	25	Unsupported	1	v 1.5	5
  Mozilla	3	1280x 1024	7	24 bits	8	Mac	3			v 1.1	2
  Safari	1	1280 x 960	2	8 bits	2	Linux	1			v 1.4	1

Exercise 4

• Put all the above in one document on the webworkshop server. And if that's not enough I'd like you to make sure you have put sitemeter code on every page of your webworkshop site! See this tutorial for more info: Assessing Traffic.
  
  
  • I have setup a site meter on every page in this site. It's located at the bottom of the menu bar. I've included a sample here.