posted by Mark

When evaluating prospective web design and online marketing companies here in Dubai, another good idea is to stop thinking about someone interested in getting a website for a moment, and look at things from the perspective of someone who would be using one.

What this really comes down to is usability. For any vendor you are thinking about working with, assess some of their finished projects with an eye toward thinking about how easy they are to navigate and use. Do they load quickly? Is it easy to get from one page to another, and are the content and links clearly marked? These might seem like minor points, when you are looking at page after page of dazzling designs, but they aren't. Usability isn't just one more issue – it’s a key issue that can determine whether your new site helps you to reach any of your marketing goals.

Not every shortcoming in usability is going to be the design team's fault. There certainly are times when, even though one idea or layout is recommended, the client makes a final decision that forces the design in another direction. But if you are seeing page after page of Flash intros that take forever to load, nearly hidden navigation bars, and other issues that make it hard for the site to be useful, then it's fair to wonder why the designers didn't warn or inform their clients to make better choices.

It doesn't matter how wonderful your pages look; no one is going to stick around to view them, read them, or find the information they're looking for if your site doesn't feature the highest level of usability. That's especially true if they haven't done business with you before, since they aren't likely to stick around and see whether you are worth the time and effort.

To know whether a design firm is doing their job, you have to think like your own best future customer, and that means keeping usability at the front of your mind. Remember that, make sure you look for obvious clues, and look for vendors that make sites that are as easy to work with as they are to look at.

posted by Khurram

If you've worked with Blue Beetle recently, there's a good chance the topic of "usability" has come up more than once. That's because, like many of our counterparts, we believe it's a trait that no serious online marketer can afford to ignore – in the same league as search engine optimization or compatibility across different browsers.

Most clients understand this intuitively: the easier it is for people to move around your website and find what they're looking for, the more likely they are to decide to do business with you. The difficulty isn't in seeing the value of usability, but putting it in practice.

What's needed is a way to add features to an existing online platform, without having to sacrifice speed and performance for your visitors.
As it turns out, there is a tool that does exactly that. It's called AJAX, which stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. While I'm sure that clears up the issue for those of you who spend your leisure hours looking through web design articles, maybe I should point out that in the real world, that basically means that AJAX allows your website to run more like a desktop application would – cleanly and seamlessly by displaying portions data dynamically, instead of refreshing the entire page when loading new data from the server.

The result isn't just an improvement in usability... it's a whole new chapter. By changing content and adding resources as your visitors input information, AJAX lets them read, shop, and navigate with a level of data and responsiveness that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.

For your website to be helpful to your visitors – not to mention profitable for you – it needs to have a high level of usability, and there's no better way to achieve that in this day and age than using AJAX.

posted by Mark

If television and movies have taught us anything about history, it's that the old American West was a place "without law." Drinking, gambling, and gun fights in the street were the symptoms of towns that seemed to have sprung up from nothing – the result of a mad gold rush that attracted entrepreneurial types from all over the world.

While the idea of saloons full of marshals, cowboys, and horse thieves might be overplayed for entertainment value, the concept of places being built from nothing actually gives us an interesting parallel to the development of the online business community. In the first days, there were sparse settlers setting up shops in camps at any URL they could find. Over time, though, areas have become crowded, complex communities have formed, and yes, laws are coming.

In this case, we aren't talking about political laws, but accepted standards of the way sites should be designed and arranged. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), an international group of designers and consultants, is moving towards a set of universal guidelines that would serve as a kind of guide to best practices in layout and coding.

This might seem like a bit of a reach, given that the online community can be ferociously independent, but it actually represents change in a good way.

Just as laws and standards eventually came as a relief to the American West – few people enjoyed the prospect of being shot in Cheyenne or Abilene – uniform standards on the web will make pages safer and more accessible for everyone. By creating a handful of common tools, they mean that pages from all parts of the world will become easier to find and use by anyone, regardless of their hardware, operating system, or local provider.

Why should you care? Because usability is a close cousin of profitability; the more people who can view and navigate your site, the more potential buyers you can reach effectively. As more and more communities go online, and next-generation mobile devices spread like wildfire, WC3 standards are going to help smart marketers expand their reach.

The "law" might not be coming to the web, but standards are. Making your site work within them might not be mandatory, but it is going to be a good business decision.