Site Usability

Today I spent a great deal of time running usability tests on over twenty miscellaneous sites. The last site I reviewed was my oldest daughters elementary school website. Theme for they day, Font. I saw the typical 99% of all sites not passing W3C validation, but what really stood out to me today was the font. There were too many sites using too many fonts. BestWebImage.com displays just one type of font on your browser.

I think my daughters school site what was the final blow though. The site was done completely in Comic San. Honestly, I like the font, but only in design. Another problem with Comic is that if you shrink it down it’s very hard to read. How did they solve that problem? Set the font size to a static pixel size. Having a large static font size created a second problem. A page with lots of text in a large font equals lots of scrolling especially when, do I dare say it, a small static content column set under 400 pixels wide. All I can say is, Stop!

I can understand the value of adding the Comic font. They want to make the site fun. The reality is though, there is literally nothing on the site for the students to do, and the target audience is clearly their parents. I’ll be dropping of my full analysis to them tomorrow morning. Here is another great reason to have a site plan.