When designing a website an important consideration is its usability and, in particular, the site’s visitors being able to understand how to use the site instantly without having to think about it. It should be obvious where to find the login link, the search box, know which text is hyperlinked without having to hover over it, etc.

The easiest way to design for people is to give them more of what they already know and understand. Let’s take a look at the most popular sites in the UK and see how they do things. We’ll look at where various page elements are positioned and how links are styled. This list comes from Alexa’s Top Sites in the United Kingdom.

Google (UK/Global)
google.co.uk/google.com

logo position - centered, top
login position - top right
search box position - central
settings position - top right
filters/options position - top
ads/sponsored results position - right column
corporate info position - footer
links - blue, underlined
unlinked URLs - green

Facebook
facebook.com

logo position - top left
login/logout position - top right
search position - top right
options position - top
feed filters position - left column
ads position - right column
corporate info position - footer
post box position - central, top
links - dark blue, not underlined

YouTube
youtube.com

logo position - top left
login position - top right
search box position - top, central and repeated at foot of page
corporate info position - footer
links - blue, not underlined

Yahoo!
yahoo.com

logo position - top left
login position - top right
search box position - top, central
filters position - top
options/filters/personalised links position - left column
corporate info position - footer
links - dark blue, not underlined
links - black, not underlined (in menu box)

Bing
bing.com

logo position - top left
login position - top right
search box position - central, top
corporate info position - footer
links - white, not underlined (to fit with background image)
links - blue, underlined
links - blue, not underlined (in menu box)
unlinked URLs - green

BBC
bbc.co.uk

accessibility info position - top left
logo position - top left
search box position - top, central
corporate info position - footer
links - green, not underlined

eBay UK
ebay.co.uk

logo position - top left
login position - top
search box position - top
filters position - left column
corporate info position - footer
links - blue, not underlined

The consensus

From looking at these popular sites we can see these common conventions:

logo position - usually top left corner
login position - usually top right corner
search box position - always at the top, usually central
corporate info position - always found in the page’s footer
search filters or options position - either running horizontally across the top or down the left side
ads position - in the right column, after the main content
links - usually blue or dark blue, sometimes underlined, more commonly not but underlined on hover

Consciously or not, this is what people are used to seeing on the web so this is what you should follow. Web users will instinctively look for these page elements in these locations and understand links in these colour schemes. Any deviation from “the norm” will increase the chances of uncertainty or confusion.

Junk email and blog posts are a constant problem. Here are a few ways to help spoil the spammers’ fun.

Email Spam

There are a lot of anti-spam or spam filter products around these days, many included in mail software but the sad fact is that once you’re getting spam you’re likely to keep getting spam regardless of these filters.

Spammers are able to change the sender’s email address, subject and body of an email so easily that if you block them they can still mail you just using a different mail account.

Anti-spam software like anti-virus software can only deal with what it knows to be harmful or unwanted. Anything new or unknown will slip through the net.

The way to avoid spam is never to let your email address get into the wrong hands. Once a spammer has got your email address they can not only use it to send you junk email but also sell it on to other spammers. Once you’re address is out there you’ve no hope of keeping the spam at bay.

If we understand how the spammers get our email addresses we can avoid them.

Unscrupulous Websites

This is an obvious one but when giving your email address as part of registration on a website be careful to check the terms and conditions or privacy policy as you may be agreeing to have your details passed to a third party. You just have to judge carefully how trustworthy you think the site is.

Unwanted Newsletters

At times it can be risky signing up to newsletters by email. Even though they offer you the option to unsubscribe at ay time they may also subscribe you to other similar newsletters without your express permission. You might sign up to receive newsletters from one site and start receiving them from another related site. Often where companies own several websites with subscription services they can try to cross-promote. Check the terms and conditions or privacy policy carefully.

Harvesting Web Pages

This is a common process used to gather email addresses. Robots trawl through websites looking for email addresses and feeding them back to the spammer. In short, never give an email address on a web page. Instead use a contact form which delivers the message to your inbox without ever revealing the address.

Guessing Common Recipient Names

Many spammers will not even try to find email addresses but will just try their luck at guessing them. If they know the domain name and send emails to info@ or sales@ there’s a good chance some of them will get through. If you try to use email addresses that are less obvious you shouldn’t get as much spam.

Email Scams

At one time or another you’ve probably had an email from a friend or colleague with some “too good to be true” offer or superstitious nonsense. These scams are easy to spot as they usually ask you to forward the message to a certain number of people and CC a particular email address.

The offers are never real. What is actually happeneing is the spammers are relying on people’s naivety to spread the email. Each time the email is forwarded to 10 people the spammer will get an email back (the CC address) and have 10 new email addresses to add to his/her spam database.

The difficulty with this is that to a certain degree it’s beyond your control. You just need to make sure that you’re never taken in by these scams and do your best to make your friends and colleagues aware of this scamming technique so that you don’t appear on their forwarding list.

Forms and Blogs

Contact forms, blogs and other Web 2.0 applications invite visitors to a webpage to leave comments or provide feedback. Spammers see this a an opportunity to leave spam messages usually containing links to their websites.

Comments can often be set so that they have to be moderated and manually approved by the owner before being published but even then huge amounts of spam can become a problem with moderation becoming unmanageable.

There are two answers to this - use clever scripting to fool spam robots or use a CAPTCHA control in your page.

Spam robots visit pages and look for opportunities to enter content. They cannot do things that a human user can do such as answer questions or interpret images. By forcing the page visitor to act like a human in order to leave a message we can reduce spam to only that manually left by real people.

Spam robots can easily be fooled by using fake fields in a form. Include a field for some bit of information you don’t actually need and hide it using CSS. Only allow the message to be left if the field is blank. The spam robot will complete it.

You’ve probably come across CAPTCHA controls but may not know them by this name. You’re shown a fuzzy image containing a word or letters and numbers and then asked to type the characters into a text field. Spam robots can’t do this.

If you’re having problems with spam coming from your website ask your web developer to use some of these measures and you should see a difference within a short time.

6 Quick Tips

1. Never open spam emails - if in doubt, delete it
2. Never reply to spam emails - you’re just confirming delivery
3. Never forward suspicious emails - don’t spread the problem
4. Check terms or privacy policy when giving your email address
5. Never publish an email address on a web page
6. Use scripting or a CAPTCHA control on web forms - don’t allow spam robots to post

Twitter keeps hitting the headlines at the moment but a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it really is and how it differs from other Social Networks. I’ll try to explain it in terms more people can understand.

Twitter is basically about posting short messages, much like SMS texting on mobiles. Each post is called a “tweet” and is limited to 140 characters. It can’t include other media as such but it can include hyperlinks so anything you wish to share is only a click away.

It doesn’t work like email where you choose the recipients of your messages but more like a subscription service. You put your message out there and it’s read by your subscribers. In many ways it’s more like broadcasting.

As a Twitter user, or “Twitterer”, you have the option to “follow” other users meaning you subscribe to their broadcasts. Each user has lists of “following” - who he/she has chosen to follow and “followers” - who is following him/her.

Twitter has 2 real strengths which differentiate it from other networks.

Firstly, the 140 characters limit means it is highly portable and works well with mobile phone applications. For example, it’s very easy to let your followers know what you’re doing whilst on the move.

Secondly, when you read someone else’s “tweet” there’s a facility to “retweet” it, which means instantly broadcasting it to all of your followers. This means that something written by one person can reach millions within a very short time frame. This is what tends to happen with big breaking news stories and this is why it is becoming such a powerful tool for marketing and PR.

If anyone wants to follow me and be alerted to new articles I’m @chris22smith.

I’ve recently started a new web development blog and have been pleasantly surprised at the high levels of traffic (relative to anything I’ve done before) it’s receiving after such a short space of time. I’ll share with you how I’ve achieved this.

My traffic building strategy was to target a few carefully chosen high quality links. My plan was to try to create a small number of links to my site, quality not quatity, coming from web pages highly ranked by Google and with a subject matching the page on my site. I also decided to use deep linking rather than just point everything at my home page.

The subject of my blog is web development resources and, in particular, ASP.NET web development. (Two links in that last sentence, sorry, can’t help myself.)

When I blogged about a particular solution I then went in search (Google) of people with technical issues looking for my solution. All I then did was create a forum account and post a reply linking out to my blog post. Highly relevant. I’d respond to forum posts that had been dead for 2 years. Doesn’t matter. I’m still getting a link to my site which is good for me and the solution is posted on that forum for anyone who searches in the future.

The key point is that in this scenario is that the inbound links I have created are actually useful to the linking site’s audience. Everybody wins. It’s in no way trying to cheat the system. This is the right way to generate your inbound links.

As a web developer and programmer I’m always on the look out for solutions to little problems. How do I do that? How can I make that do this without X, Y and Z happening? You get the idea.

My first port of call is always Google. The way I see it is that I’m unikely to ever have a technical requirement that somebody else hasn’t had before. In fact, it’s highly likely that hundreds, even thousands of people have faced the same challenges. By using the right search terms on Google I can usually find the answers to my problems. This inspired me to build a technical blog. It’s my way of sharing what I’ve learnt and, hopefully, helping someone else out.

As well as trying to help others it’s also tremendously useful to me. Every time I overcome an obstacle I write about it and provide the solution giving code examples where I can. It’s very handy to just be able to just come back to it rather than try to remember things that I’ve done in the past. I also use the site for setting up links to resources I like and use. Again, it just saves me time looking for things.

My site is called Dinowebs, http://www.dinowebs.net. The site covers all sorts of coding and web development subject matter. Please take a look.