CUOMA Blog » Usability http://www.cuoma.com/blog Official Blog of Cuoma Design Studios Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:45:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Flash Abuse http://www.cuoma.com/blog/lang/en/flash-abuse http://www.cuoma.com/blog/lang/en/flash-abuse#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:08:41 +0000 cacique http://www.cuoma.com/blog/?p=12&lang=en When used excessively or in inappropriate places, Flash is terrible for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)and your visitors. I clarify, Flash is a premium program which allows creative multimedia designers to produce excellent works. However, at CUOMA, we never or almost never use flash in web design, neither in intros nor in navigation.

Navigation
This is the most common way of abuse, Flash navigation is extremely bad for a number of reasons:

-Search Engine Optimization: having text on your website is the most important thing. Search Engines use text for indexing your site. The problem with Flash is that the search engines do not go inside Flash files to collect the text information.

-Page loading time: Using Flash for your navigation will slow down the loading time for your web page.

-Not user-friendly: Two things, the aim of website design is to provide simple navigation throughout your website. In Flash navigation the visitor must wait for an animation to load completely each time their mouse click an item. People hate waiting!. And the last thing is that not everyone is using Flash.

Flash Intros
The worst way to use Flash is on your website’s intro. Most people are impatient when surfing the web, many of them do not have patience to watch a Flash intro.
If it is impossible not to have a flash intro, please, include a “Skip Intro” button that is clearly visible to the user. But we think that there is to try to avoid the flash intros.

OK, But, What is the Best Practices in Web Design?
The best way to build a professional website is by using CSS (cascading style sheets). If you need more information, visit http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS

]]> http://www.cuoma.com/blog/lang/en/flash-abuse/feed 16 Creative & Friendly 404 Error Pages http://www.cuoma.com/blog/lang/en/creative-friendly-404-error-pages http://www.cuoma.com/blog/lang/en/creative-friendly-404-error-pages#comments Thu, 29 May 2008 14:47:11 +0000 cacique http://www.cuoma.com/blog/?p=10&lang=en It is very common, to visit one of these pages. The most commonly: pages, which don’t exist any longer, have moved to a new server or have never existed at all. Once you’ve missed your intended destination, you’ll get an internal error message from the server, by default these messages aren’t that helpful.

Off course, you can design server error messages just the way you design any other pages of your website.
It’s not only a more elegant way to deal with errors, but is also extremely useful for keeping users on your web-site, finding new clients or communicating with the old ones.

Our website has the following error page by default, the error page has the same style of the other pages, and the most important thing is that it has menu to guide the users to find our services, works, and all information of our company.

CUOMA 404 Error

If you see more examples, smashingmagazine has good post with 40 examples of user-friendly 404 error pages.

Also you can see the error working if you enter http://www.cuoma.com/404

]]> http://www.cuoma.com/blog/lang/en/creative-friendly-404-error-pages/feed 3