Information Technology Systems & Services
Web Design Quotes
- quotes[1] = "To be effective, the interfaces for online information systems must be as rich and flexible as the physical environments they replace. They must not only supply a direct path to reach the users goals, but must be able to accommodate different approaches to the task. This means that the interface design must not only organize the content for easy access, but must incorporate the right combination of technologies and interaction techniques to allow the user to work in their own style. - Whitney Quesenbery"
- quotes[2] = "Accessibility means that users of any kind, using any device, should have access to the essential information that is contained on your web site. The information is the key. All too often, web designers focus on how a web site looks from one browser to another. They get caught up in developing a pixel-perfect design for Internet Explorer and Netscape, running on a desktop machine. As the Internet grows, and more devices become web-enabled, designers must take into account what happens when a user tries to access a site with an alternate device. - Randal Rust"
- quotes[3] = "Card sorting is an excellent approach to help you choose your classifications. It can help shortcut long, tedious and often fruitless debate. It delivers classifications that people would actually choose, not what they say they would choose. Because it's fast and easy to do, you can get a wide range of feedback into your classification design. - Gerry McGovern"
- quotes[4] = "Simple and comprehensible navigation is essential for the success of any application. Users must be able to move from page to page via links, buttons, or menu items. More importantly, navigation must also address the tenuous balance between real-life user goals and business goals of the application. - Rick Oppedisano"
- quotes[5] = "An accessible website is one that is marked up using Standard HTML to provide clear document structure. The presentation of webpages can be made flexible by the use of style sheets to help divorce the content from the presentation of that content. - Jim Byrne and Pat Byrne"
- quotes[6] = "No product can identify or solve all accessibility problems, as such issues require human analysis and judgement. - Jeffery Zeldman"
- quotes[7] = "An iterative design and testing approach also allows one to make a steady and rapid progress on a project, to learn through empirical evidence, and to 'shape' the product to fit the end users' abilities, expectations and aptitude. - Jeffrey Rubin "
- quotes[8] = "e shouldn't assume that the general viewing public is an idiot. We should try to evolve the medium by making intuitive systems that educate the user - not design to what level we think they can handle. - Joshua Davis"
- quotes[9] = "Accepting the unpredictability that rules the user interface of the Web. - Peter-Paul Koch"
- quotes[10] = "Webpage building is a lot like bar tending. Build it right and it will work no matter what the container. - Glenn Davis"
- quotes[11] = "The Web Accessibility Initiative takes the position that to be accessible your page must work when scripting is turned off. If your scripts are essential in creating content on your page, then clearly your page won't function with scripts turned off...Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page. - Jim Thatcher"
- quotes[12] = "When the World Wide Web Consortium released the first working draft of XHTML 2.0 on 5 August 2002, the major surprise was that, unlike its predecessors, it was not backward compatible. With previous releases, such as the move from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0, and later to XTHML 1.1, the changes were about additions a browser that could read XHTML 1.0 Transitional documents could also understand HTML 4.01 documents. Not so with XHTML 2.0. - Nicholas Chase"
- quotes[13]= "It is not about you or me, it is about the user. - Thomas Vander Wal"
- quotes[14] = "The old computing is about what computers can do. The new computing is about what people can do. Designers can do better in helping users succeed. Too often people are struggling because they can't understand the menu choices, they don't know what the dialog boxes mean, and the error messages are too frustrating and confusing... - Ben Shneiderman"
- quotes[15] = "The most important goal of effective communication is clarity. Clarity is not the same as simplicity . Often, simple things are clear if the message is intended to be brief and small, but often the message is about a complex relationship that can only be presented with a necessarily large amount of data. This complexity can be made to appear clear by effective organization and presentation and need not be reduced to meaningless "bite-sized" chunks of data, as simplification usually does. Clarity refers to the focus on one particular message or goal at a time, rather than attempting to accomplish too much at once. Simplicity is often responsible for the "dumbing" of information rather than the illumination of it. - Michael Hoffman"
- quotes[16] = "When working on a web site, we embark on the integration of language and science, art and technology, and concept and practice the moment we create a link (hypertext) on a web page. Instead of just reading the page, our site visitors are now motivated to make a decision whether to follow that link or not. Links move us away from a static media element that encourages passivity to one that encourages activity. - Molly Holzschlag"
- quotes[17] = "The location of visual elements in the UI has a huge impact on how the user interprets information. Placement of these elements often appeals to the user's conceptual map of the interface. Humans naturally associate paired elements as being connected, so when laying out visual elements, know that the user will attempt to interpret the contents and functions of various page elements and how those elements relate to one another. - Rick Oppedisano"
- quotes[18] = "When content can be divorced from presentation, using style sheets, the same content can be presented in many different ways. We do not have to worry about creating quite so many versions of each web page to meet the needs of a diverse audience. - Jim Byrne and Pat Byrne"
- quotes[19] = "XML is the holy grail in separation of style from content. Keep your content in display-agnostic XML, and you can use XSLT to transform the content to many different formats, HTML being one of them. - Matt Bridges"
- quotes[20] = "In my view graceful degradation and liquid design are both subsets of fluid thinking, one explaining how to flow around browser support problems, and the other helping us to let go of pixel-precision in graphical design. - Peter-Paul Koch"
- quotes[21] = "Despite progress, websites today are still three times harder for users with disabilities to use than for other users. - Kendra Mayfield"
- quotes[22] = "Technical accessibility is not enough to make a website easy to use. The real question is whether users can get what they want from a website in a reasonable amount of time and whether the visit is pleasant for them. Users with disabilities are humans and need easy and simple user interfaces just like anybody else." - Jakob Nielsen"
- quotes[23] = "Designers have to learn to stop trying to control the display of their pages. They have to accept that forces beyond their control will cause their design to display differently, sometimes radically, in certain situations. - Randal Rust"
- quotes[24] = "Keep it simple. The fluidity of the Web is not the problem, it's the solution. If you accept that your site will never be viewed exactly as you want it, you understand the spirit of the Web and its standards. - Peter-Paul Koch"
- quotes[25] = "we shouldn't assume that the general viewing public is an idiot. We should try to evolve the medium by making intuitive systems that educate the user - not design to what level we think they can handle. - Joshua Davis"
- quotes[26] = "Think fluid. The WWW isn't a fixed medium. It's unpredictable. It will do unexpected things to your site, and the best you can do is go with the flow. - Peter-Paul Koch"
- quotes[27] = "There is a common misconception that usability equals common sense, but actually usability is more than common sense. Although the definition of usability is closely related to logical relevance and common sense, it is very unwise just to rely on common sense in ensuring the usability of a product. Using common sense is not only unwise but sometimes also dangerously misleading. - Adi B. Tedjasaputra"
- quotes[28] = "No matter what tools you use, it will still be necessary to use human judgement to figure out if a web page is accessible. For example assessment tools can tell you if there is some alt text missing. But it cannot tell you if the alternative representation makes sense and will be of use to those for whom it is intended. - Michael Burks"
- quotes[29] = "The first step to creating an accessible website is to create sites that are accessible to machines. Your best chance of achieving this is to use standard HTML. - Jim Byrne and Pat Byrne"
- quotes[30] = "In web-based applications, style sheets can be used to impose a uniform appearance on pages. HTML style sheets are a lot like ones seen in larger office suite applications like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. The developer sets universal properties for how a certain kind of paragraph or other text unit should look, stores those descriptions in a style sheet file and inserts this file into the HTML code. The defined styles will be applied to the paragraphs on the page. Using style sheets allows the appearance of a whole site or application to be changed simply by the altering the common style sheet. - Rick Oppedisano"
- quotes[31] = "usability is a case-by-case thing, not a set of universal guidelines - Jeffery Zeldman"
Join the webdev
listserv and receive web site updates.