Usability - designing for people

One trend I have noticed in 2008, particularly in the second half of a turbulent year, has been very strong interest from businesses needing SEO, eMarketing and generally wanting their Web sites to deliver something tangible.

It seems that people are waking up to the potential in their under-used and under-valued Web sites as one cost effective means of surviving the harsh economic climate by generating new business and getting more out of existing customers.

Purely frivolous Web sites will become harder to justify, but this could be a good thing as new creative energy gets channeled into more productive and results-driven Internet activities.

I expect SEO, eMarketing and Usability to finally rise up the agenda as businesses look to achieve measurable results. All aspects of the design and development process need to work in harmony, right from the business case, creative concept, through design, build and usability to content development and marketing. It ALL has to be right.

Developers will also need to be more agile, designing maintainable future-proof Web sites, while cutting development time by making more use of open source, pre-written and proven code, development frameworks, CMS products and online services.

Every year brings plenty of change and 2009 will focus attention not only on new ideas and technological advancements, but also on hard business and genuine Web site effectiveness.

Ask ten people to recommend a Web hosting company and you will get ten different answers. Finding the right place to host your Web sites is a bit of a minefield, so hopefully this article will offer some insight into the options available and help you make the right choice.

If you need some suggestions right now, cut to the chase and jump down to the bottom of this page for my quick UK Web host recommendations.

While simple static sites can be hosted free, there is a vast array of options available for hosting scripted or data-driven Web applications such as CMS, eCommerce, blogs, etc. Cost varies from £1.50/month right up to £350/month and beyond.

Dedicated, VPS, shared?

The four main categories of Web hosting (with typical monthly prices in £UK) are:

1. Shared hosting, free-£30
   A physical server is divided up and shared amongst hundreds of customers. Because partitioning is within the operating system, there is potential for some sites to hog system resources, breach security boundaries or even crash the server. In short, you’re relying on a host’s ring-fencing technology and the responsible use by other customers on the same server.
2. Virtual Private Server (VPS), £15-£80
   By partitioning a physical server, each VPS runs its own operating system and behaves like a dedicated server with all of the security and some of the performance benefits without the cost of a dedicated server, or the potential problems of shared hosting. Resources are shared evenly between each VPS and this makes for consistent performance.
3. Co-located server, £30-£300 (1U rack space)
   Your own server located at an ISP data centre. Only necessary if you have very unique or specific hardware or software requirements. Do what you want with it, but you’re responsible.
4. Dedicated server, £50-£350
   Your server, only your own sites are hosted, so nobody else can hog resources or crash your server. More flexibility in terms of customising setup and installing and upgrading software.

Many Web sites will appear to perform almost identically whether they are sitting on a cheap shared host or a top-end dedicated server. So why is there such a vast difference in price?

Web hosting is now a highly competitive commodity service. The main factors determining price are:

1. resilience and reliability - uptime; commonly 99.99%+ for HTTP, but database servers can have problems and may not be measured in uptime stats.
2. performance - general web site response time and data throughput.
3. capacity - ability to cope with high volumes of traffic or spikes.
4. ‘over selling’ - the number of other sites hosted on each server and controls placed on customer accounts. Beware of ‘unlimited bandwidth’ - although bandwidth is rarely unlimited, this often translates to ‘busy server’.
5. features - backup, control panels, SSL certificates, auto installers, storage and data transfer allocation.
6. support - what are you responsible for yourself and how quickly can you get help when you need it?

So, start by determining your present and future needs - the number and scale of Web sites to be hosted, mission-critical status, support required, etc.

If you already use shared hosting, try ipneighbour to find out how many other sites are hosted on your server. The results can be quite interesting, and alarming.

Platform

The platform of choice for hosting Web sites is still predominantly Linux/Unix for ubiquitous LAMP applications, CMS and blogs or JAVA, Rails, or Python apps.

Most shared hosting runs on a solid Linux platform and some hosts use grid or clustering technology which is supposed to offer performance, resilience and scalability benefits. In practice, these can under perform compared to a decent VPS or dedicated server, but for many people it’s a good enough alternative.

If you particularly need to run .ASP scripts or .NET applications, you will have to go down the proprietary Microsoft route. Just make sure the server is fully patched and set up correctly - these servers are constantly under attack and blighted by security problems, despite recent improvements.

PHP 4 / 5

As one of the most widely used scripting languages for Web applications, good PHP support is essential. PHP5 was released way back in 2004 and PHP4 has now reached end of life. Unfortunately, many Web hosts still only support PHP4 and some offer only outdated releases of PHP5.

There are many significant benefits - performance, security, functionality - to using recent stable versions of PHP5 and many of today’s increasingly demanding Web applications require it. PHP5 also has much better support for Web services, XML, JSON etc.

So, choose a good Web host with up to date PHP5 support (5.2+ ideally). Hosting companies tend not to upgrade PHP on their servers, so start with a recent version or you could find yourself lumbered with a server which won’t run a lot of modern Web applications.

Reliability

So what about uptime? It actually varies little between the average hosts and the best ones. Decide if your Web sites really are mission critical. If they’re not, the rare possibility of a short outage might be worth what could be a considerable cost saving.

Side-note: if you think your hosting needs to be mission critical, then your Web site usability definitely should be! Bad usability can lose you far more visitors/customers than an unreliable Web host.

Shared hosting - getting better

Recent years have seen increasing popularity of VPS as a more cost-effective alternative to dedicated servers.

Shared hosting, traditionally unreliable, has also seen the emergence of premium level shared services which have made significant improvements in performance and reliability. This blurs the boundaries between shared and VPS hosting, just as VPS has with dedicated.

Multi-domain and reseller hosting

Most hosting packages on offer these days allow customers to further sub-let their own web space; several domains (in the 10’s or 100’s) can to be hosted on a single shared or VPS account. Sometimes this is pitched as a ‘reseller’ option, although most server appliance control panels, such as Plesk, support reseller activity and some have direct billing facilities.

You can also set up client areas with their own control panel access, quotas and allocations. You can even brand your control panel to make it look like you provide and run hosting services yourself.

Domain names and DNS management

Another important element of Web hosting and Internet services is domain name management. If you look after multiple domains, it is important to use a good domain host with a decent full-feature control panel and a sensible policy on moving and re-tagging domains.

Most Web hosts offer DNS management, but it’s probably worth managing this elsewhere, with a well established and stable company. Moving domains can be more difficult and disruptive than moving web sites. Updating DNS records to point to a new host or server is relatively straightforward compared to re-tagging your domains to a new IPS.

Finding a good hosting company

Assuming you have identified your hosting requirements, you then have the difficult task of finding a good company to fulfill those needs.

Ask around for some recommendations, but treat these with caution. The experience one lucky, or unlucky, customer has with a hosting company may not be an accurate reflection of the real situation.

Search the Internet for hosting reviews. Most hosting companies get slated on forums and review sites, so be wary of single reviews from disgruntled individuals or suspiciously glowing reviews. Look for a consensus and trust your instinct.

Web Hosting Talk is one of the main hosting forums,

Server location

If your Web sites target users in a particular country, it is best to host on a server which is located in that country. The main benefits of serving your sites from the same country as your users are:

1. SEO: search engine rankings can be affected by which country your web site’s IP number is registered to. Because search results are commonly tuned to the country each user is located in, hosting on a server in a different country can reduce search result rankings, often significantly. Hosting companies know this and often conceal the location of their data centres.
2. resilience: reduced points of failure if network traffic has fewer hops to make.
3. performance: slightly better if your local host is a good one.

My Web host recommendations

I have the dubious honour of looking after a variety of servers and hosting accounts for my UK clients as well as myself. This gives me plenty of hands-on experience and the unique ability to compare and contrast.

I will be posting a more detailed review of UK-oriented Web hosting companies in due course. But for now, here’s a taster based on my experiences so far…

• Rackspace: one of the best - great performance and resilience. Premium service, premium prices.
• United Hosting - UK and US data centres, premium shared and dedicated hosting. Very focused on server/network performance and reliability, with truly outstanding customer support.
• 1and1: good value packages, reliable but mediocre performance despite the massive network. 1and1’s atrocious support is legendary. GeoIP warning: data centres in Germany.
• Servage: feature-packed ‘value’ shared hosting, big cluster setup promises much but delivers shocking unreliability. GeoIP warning: data centres might be lurking in Germany, Sweden or Denmark.
• 34SP: good range of budget hosting options, but cheaper shared hosting has had some reliability problems. Reasonable support. Still not shaken off the ‘hobbyist’ tag. Now offers VPS. Certainly worth considering.

Other promising Web hosts; I can’t claim any first hand experience with these, but research indicates these companies are very well regarded:

• InnoHosting - UK and US data centres, well-priced shared, VPS and dedicated hosting. One to watch?
• MediaLayer - US data centres, LAMP optimised shared or dedicated hosting.
• Media Temple - US data centres, grid/cluster shared, VPS and dedicated hosting. Does it live up to the hype?
• 5QuidHost - great value US/UK LAMP hosting. Looks rather ‘back-bedroom’, but enjoys an increasingly good reputation.
• Slicehost - US data centres, high performance bare bones Linux VPS for hardcore techies.

Look out for my detailed Web hosting reviews, coming soon. All will revealed, in my no holds barred review. In the mean time, if you have any good or bad experiences with a Web hosting company, please let me know.

By not accounting for the unique characteristics of the medium, many accomplished designers are struggling to apply their talent to the Web and in doing so, create problems which ripple all the way down through the development process.

This can have a negative impact on project time-scales, costs and user experience. It can also compromise the design when problems which could have been avoided need to be corrected further down the line.

The term ‘design’ is often misused and misunderstood; in this context, I’m talking about the agency-style creative and graphic design stage which is all too often annexed from the peculiarities of the medium and the complexities of the development process.

Here are some ways to avoid the top six problems we encounter with non-Web designs:

1. Design for screen resolution
   Printed output has the benefit of significantly higher resolution than the screens Web sites are viewed on. As a result, designs created at higher resolution, and proofed/approved on printed hardcopy usually do not translate to a 72dpi screen. Text usually suffers first, becoming unreadably small once the layout has been scaled down to fit within a 1024x page width, or worse if you are constrained to 800x. Other design elements suffer too and the whole balance of the layout can get seriously compromised once the design has been shoe-horned into a medium for which it was not originally designed.

   Recommendation: for non-Flash page designs, create mockups or visuals in pixels at 72dpi. Don’t use a vector-based design application; Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXPress are the wrong tools for this job. Use something like FireWorks or PhotoShop, work with a browser viewport template at 100% size and use browser fonts.

2. Account for variable content
   Most successful Web sites are content rich, growing rapidly and organically with contributions from numerous sources. Problems arise when a design assumes that content doesn’t vary in length and is always displayed in a fixed size text box. This never happens. Even in cases where content won’t change, different browsers on different platforms will render text differently no matter how well your CSS reset tries to level the cross-browser playing field.

   Recommendation: expect content to change, particularly in length. Make sure your design gives it room to grow and contract. Don’t expect text to fit snugly within a fixed-height box - it won’t.

3. Don’t treat navigation as a visual design element
   Navigation design is an incredibly important part of the whole Web design process. Information architecture, content classification and user interaction must all be taken into account when designing navigation.

   Visual styling obviously needs to compliment the rest of the site design but it is essential to get the navigation working first.

   Recommendation: fully map out the site’s content first and get a handle on the big picture. From the user’s point of view, navigation needs to be understood and interacted with, not just looked at!

4. Providing a style guide
   It is not practical to expect visuals for every page on a Web site. Because there can be so many different layout variations, particularly with dynamic pages, developers need a style guide to help them get the aesthetics right where no specific visual exists.

   Recommendation: supplement design visuals with a style guide covering design elements and specific details which can be applied in situations where no page visual exists. Also describe how user interactions should look and work - for example, rollovers and ’selected’ states; developers will happily improvise, but designers will always have something in mind, so they should share it!

5. Work with - rather than just provide assets for - the development team
   Projects where concept and design are determined, then handed over to the dev team to build, will have problems unless the designers have a thorough understanding of content, technical and user interaction issues, such as navigation.
   Recommendation: It’s a team effort - people working on concept, design and build all need to communicate, work together and respect what each other is contributing.
6. Don’t sell clients non-workable visuals
   This is often where the problems start. All of the mistakes described above are rolled into a set of print-friendly visuals which clients buy into. When the time comes to start making the design work on-screen and on-line, changes have to be made to get a workable result. “Can you make it look like the visual we approved?”

   Recommendation: if you have to sell a visual concept to a client, make it very clear that it is not an accurate design and is likely to change. If you need to get accurate Web visuals approved, take these important issues into account and present something workable. There is no need to see costs escalate or to fall out with a client over the difference between what is expected and what was delivered.

We know how essential good SEO is to Web site success. One important and often overlooked element is the ’snippet’ of text shown in search results pages (SERPs).

Snippets are important. Really important!

There is a human factor involved here: you want people to notice your site’s entries on the search results page and click through to it. This underlines the importance of getting your page titles and META description tags right, not only for good SEO, but for humans as well.

This requires a copywriting skill which is just as important as it would be for crafting finely-tuned ad copy, which is critical for online PPC ads. Where you appear in search results is vital, and the copy which users see is also the copy on your free and very important ad.

As if that wasn’t enough, if your SERP snippet is not representative of your site, misled or disinterested users will land on your site then go straight back to the search engine and try another site or re-search. Google is smart enough to spot this, will consider it to be ‘lack of relevence’ and your pagerank will be degraded as a consequence.

So, if you don’t get your snippet right, it can have a negative impact on your pagerank, which affects search visibility and therefore reduces inbound traffic from search engines.

Snippet updates - take action early

Our next challenge is the lack of control we have over our SERP snippets. It can take weeks, or even months for updated page snippets to appear on the search engines.

If you are developing a new Web site, it is important to get a relevant holding page on-line as soon a possible, not only to establish the domain and provide content for search engines to find and index, but also to register an optimum snippet, which will not be easy to change once your site is finally launched.

Here is an example of a good holding page with relevant copy. There are plenty of bad examples too - this is a useless holding page.

Take a look at this search and you will see what unhelpful and damaging snippets look like in a search results page. Many of these snippets will persist in SERPs long after the sites have fully launched.

There are lessons to be learned from the Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 debacle which can be applied to many complex projects, including Web sites.

The T5 shambles is a high-profile and very damaging embarrassment. It’s not the only problem of course: Britain’s Heathrow airport has been a major time-bomb for quite some time. In fact, you might question why such a large and expensive facility has been built around an airport which is so chronically short of runway capacity.

The big story this time of course is the fact that despite considerable testing and vast expense, on launch day, Terminal 5 failed spectacularly due to a number of unexpected circumstances which all combined to break the whole facility, and in some style.

This is also what can, and routinely does, happen to complex Web sites on launch day. So what lessons can we learn from this?

1. Testing is crucial, but it won’t guarantee smooth running from day one.
2. Usability of all systems, computerised or not, is extremely important. Poor signage at T5 caused confusion and staff, who had received some training, struggled with systems when this proved to be inadequate.
3. Fix known problems. Issues raised during testing may not have been acted upon. This could be down to poor communication and lax Management. Listen to staff, document all known problems, prioritise issues and deal with them.
4. Don’t overlook peripheral issues. Many of the T5 problems were compounded by difficulties with side issues such as staff car parking and security bottlenecks. The knock-on effect of these may have been underestimated.
5. Conduct full-cycle and high load testing. Unit testing is not enough - how everything hangs together is just as important. At T5, there were problems when three different teams of baggage handlers failed to synchronise their activities.
6. Anticipate potential problems and build-in capacity to deal with them. When the baggage handlers at T5 struggled to cope with the number of items passing through the system, everything backed up and ground to a halt. Ask some ‘what if?’ questions, and work out practical answers.
7. The consequences of not testing can cost far more than the testing which could have helped avoid the problems in the first place.
8. When problems develop, communicate with the people who are affected. If you can’t provide any detail, at least reassure people that problems are being dealt with.
   
9. Launch with reduced load, ramp it up, monitor the results and make improvements from what you learn as things develop. On launch day, T5 experienced large passenger numbers and a high level of load. Problems escalated quickly to a level beyond which they could not be dealt with. The facility broke and a many people were affected.

This last point is possibly the biggest lesson to learn for Web projects at launch.

Live testing is inevitable

Like it or not, real users will be testing your Web site when it goes live, regardless of how prepared you think you are. Accept this, deal with it and make it a part of your launch process.

Stage traffic buildup and never mailshot large numbers of people in one hit inviting them all to visit a newly launched Web site. Stage your traffic generating activities, monitor the affects on load, errors, user behaviour, etc., then identify areas for improvement and fix the big ones before ramping up your traffic.

With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to criticise those responsible for the Heathrow Terminal 5 shambles. Of course, T5 is a large and complex facility which was only a few different decisions away from working and being hailed as an incredible achievement.

We can learn from this and do more to avoid complex Web projects from suffering a major “T5″ at launch time.

Sandisk’s Sansa ‘microsite’ is a frustrating and unsuccessful attempt at a product oriented Web site. It looks quite respectable on the surface, but if your goal is to find information and make a purchasing decision, this site fails to deliver.

Here are some of the problems I noticed:

• No deep linking - many issues arise from this.
• Poorly presented product information.
• Text content crammed into a small pane with fiddly scroll up/down buttons.
• No summary of key product features, just a few pale icons which look like spurious design elements.
• Small text with weak contrast will be difficult to read for some users.
• Navigation buttons scattered around the screen, inconsistent positioning.
• Site starts playing a sound track without choice or warning - not good for covert surfing in an office environment.
• Product comparison table lacks detail, makes for difficult horizontal eye tracking and has no links back to individual product info.
• Hover highlight on accessories nav block conceals next/previous buttons.
• Product reviews are pointless: they don’t quote any review content or link to the original source.

Fortunately, the Sansa microsite also has poor SEO and no deep linking, which will limit the number of people who find and ultimately have to suffer this Web site.

In a recent article on the BBC News web site entitled “Do small firms really need a website?“, there were some counter arguments from people who were not necessarily in agreement with the Federation of Small Businesses view that small businesses need to keep up or lose out.

One of these views, from a building contractor, commented that nine months after a new Web site was launched, it had ‘not generated a single phone call’.

Update: this web site has been significantly improved since I first looked at it. The comments below are based on the original site.

After assessing the Pople Design Construction site, it becomes immediately apparent this site has many serious failings which prevent it from being found in the first place and render it next to useless for anyone who does manage to find it.

Here are a few reasons why this site will not be successful:

1. Almost zero search engine visibility
   • no text for search engines to digest and index.
   • opening page has a JavaScript link which opens a pop-up window.
   • site uses one page containing a Flash object: no SEO, deep linking, etc.
   • use of a .com domain will lead some people think this business is not UK based.
2. Unhelpful content
   • There is no explanation of what services this business offers. You are left to take a guess based on project images alone.
   • Projects are titled unhelpfully - ‘fairwarp’, ‘highfields’, ‘holly bank’, etc. - there is no information about the nature of the project or the type of work which was done. For example, if you were looking for loft conversion projects, you would have to sift through everything.
   • Most of the images on the site are good, showing a wide range of work. There are, however, some which look out of place. For example, a shot of a roof top vent next to a wall with a splat of bird poop on it. Some other photos show unfinished work, which is not the outcome you want when you get the builders in.
   • Recommendation is a crucial source of new business in the design and building industry. Where are the testimonials?
3. Poor usability
   • The navigation menu is not visible until you click on a small grey arrow.
   • Designed as one single Flash object, this suffers from a range of problems, as I have already highlighted in my posting about the problems with bad use of Flash.

This Web site will not generate much attention in its current form. Due to its very design, it is turning its back on many potential visitors, which of course are potential customers.

There is probably a great business behind this ailing Web site. A Web site designed to be found, usable and useful will really benefit any small business - Pople Design Construction could have a vastly more positive experience of being on the Web.

Web sites are often used to get location info - the classic ‘how to find us’ page - and despite some fantastic dedicated mapping sites, many sites still offer poor maps and difficult to follow directions.

Including a link to an external mapping or route planning site - such as Google Maps, MultiMap, ViaMichelin, Map24 UK, MapQuest - should be a no, brainer. These sites offer large easy to use maps and/or great route planning facilities which can map out a custom route for each individual visitor.

Another option is to embed a third-party map into your own page, but this can result in a small map with many of the interactive and route planning features missing, so always include a link to a full mapping / route planning site.

Sites should also clearly display a postcode for satnav users. Mobile route planning devices are very common these days - make it easy for people to use them!

For downloadable PDF maps to print out, Give Way produces superb custom maps which are very detailed yet extremely easy to read. (download a sample Give Way map - PDF, 235k). Incidentally, this is a great example of usability in print design.

Here are some examples of sites with poor location maps, weak directions or no help for satnav users:

• Coors Visitor Centre - update: the CVC has now closed, presumably because nobody could find it.
• Salisbury Race Course
• Scottish Arts Council - users are invited to download a Word document.
  
• Silverstone Circuit
• The O2 (Dome)
• University of Sussex
• York Art Gallery
• Chessington World of Adventures - update: this used to be in the list of good examples. As well as changing the address of the page, therefore creating a load of dead links all over the place, the updated page seems to be a step backwards. Acceptable map, with a link to a routeplanning site where you get dumped at the front door and have to do the rest yourself.

Some helpful ‘how to find us’ pages:

• Alton Towers - update: another address change, more dead links.
• Birmingham NEC - embedded Google map, but needs a link to open the map in a new window.
  
• UK Identity and Passport Service - embedded Google map, but needs a link to open the map in a new window. Update: another address change, more dead links.

New Web sites, particularly newly registered Internet domain names, can take many months, sometimes 6 to 12 months to become fully visible on search engines. Get something out there early, even if you are not ready for a full-on Web site.

Some businesses are in the fortunate position of not needing a Web site to help them generate business. Indeed, there is something very cool about being so good, you just don’t need a Web site.

Other businesses may have plans for a new Web site, but need to delay for budgeting reasons, or have a large project in the pipeline which could take many months to complete.

In all these cases, the new Web site could take a long time to show up in search results, particularly on Google which sandboxes new Web sites. Google considers established Web sites to be more credible and trustworthy, which directly affects how highly that site will rank in search results.

Here’s a good tip: even if you don’t need a Web site, or have plans to launch one in the future, get at least one search friendly Web page out there as soon as possible. This helps to get you established with the search engines and will pay dividends when the real Web site comes along, helping you to generate traffic sooner and achieve results quicker.

Make sure your holding page is search friendly and contains some content relevant to the business you are in. Don’t just sling up a ‘coming soon’ or ‘under construction’ page. Create something useful and relevant even if it doesn’t reveal the true identity or purpose of the site which will replace it.

Flash and Usability have always had a contentious relationship. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Flash itself, but when it gets misused, the problems created can be quite damaging in terms of traffic generation potential and user goal achievement.

Flash is great for delivering enhanced content, embedded video, animations and for achieving more complex interactions. It even makes development easier with consistent and predictable results across different browsers and platforms.

Many of the problems its misuse can cause are demonstrated quite nicely by the Manchester Central Web site, (exhibition / event complex).

The interface on the Manchester Central site has quite a few problems, which I’m not going to describe in detail here. Perhaps its most notable weakness is the way in which it limits inbound traffic due to its very design.

As this site demonstrates, the most serious problems arise when Web sites function entirely within Flash from one container page. Taking the Manchester Central Web site as an example, here are some of the problems it has created for itself and its visitors…

One URL, no deep linking

Without support for deep linking, quite a few serious problems arise because all inbound links, including search result links, dump you in at the front door, so you have to navigate through to find the information you are looking for.

By not being able to link to a suitable landing page, this also hinders online marketing initiatives such as email marketing and paid advertising.

Other problems:

1. The browser back button doesn’t work as expected. Navigate around the site and as soon as you click the back button, you get dumped out to whatever page you were looking at before you entered the site.
2. Accessibility compliance is probably non-existent. Unless an accessible alternative is provided, users with disabilities are shut out.
3. You cannot print out pages of information from the site unless PDF downloads have been provided.
4. The site will not be viewable on most mobile or hand held devices. Unless a non-Flash version is provided, an increasing number of mobile users will be excluded.
5. The JavaScript loaders will effectively block any users who may not have script functionality running on their browsers.
6. Site owners are probably getting little or no analytics data on site activity. This is even more important for sites that have SEO and usability problems.

In short, this makes the site harder to find (= less traffic) and when users do visit the site, frustration is likely to feature highly in the whole experience.

Try it now!

Visit Manchester Central site and find out what music events are scheduled in two or three months from now.

If and when you eventually find this information, can you Email that page to someone? No. Print it out? No. Bookmark it? No. Go back and re-trace your navigation steps to find something of interest you noticed a few pages earlier? No.

You may also have noticed one of the other big problems with many Flash sites: non-standard home-brew UI gadgets. In this case it’s a painfully slow scrolling frame, no page jump, no grab box, and no other means of navigating easily to the information you want.

There are other problems with the Manchester Central site: low text contrast in places (bad readability), inconsistent style on active/linked text, use of ‘click here’, confusing navigation with poor sense of orientation, no site search or site map. These are classic problems, not caused by Flash itself.

Flash is great, but use it wisely

Flash encourages creative expression, design freedom, an opportunity to do something different and push the boundaries. This is great - just make sure the result is usable, can be found and linked to.

Many of the problems exhibited by the Manchester Central web site can be avoided by sensible design and it is quite possible to allow at least partial deep linking into Flash sites. Flash content can also be accessible - Adobe provides plenty of documentation on Flash accessibility.

There is no reason why imagination and creativity should be stifled by usability issues. However, always remember that Web sites are used by real people attempting to accomplish real tasks. Make sure that designs work for the people who really count.

For business owners, deliberately losing traffic and frustrating their customers is indefensible.