Hewgill Networks

Description

This site is Greg Hewgill's personal home page. It's a place for me to distribute software I've written, show off cool things, write about stuff I'm interested in, and generally mess around with web site technology. I like good design. Good design makes things usable, and usable things get used more often. For something public like this web site, why not make it as nice a place to visit as possible? Now, although I like good design, I don't claim that I am good at creating good design, but I try my best. Here are some of the design elements I've incorporated on this site to make it easy to use: Every page on this site has a navigation bar at the top. This bar tells you where you are relative to the site home page, and has a link to each page higher up in the hierarchy. This is especially useful if you arrive at a page on this site from a search engine hit. It quickly answers the "Where am I?" question, and provides an easy way for the user to find out more about where they are. -Search available from every page In the navigation bar, every page has a Search link (or the actual Search box on the home page). You can always find stuff on the site, even if you're not looking in the right place. And by leveraging the power of what appears to be the most popular search engine on the web (Google), most users already know how to use it. -Minimal style sheet attributes You have the right to see the web according to your own preferences. I don't know whether you are colour blind, whether you need glasses to read the computer, whether you prefer serif or sans-serif fonts, or whether you find large fonts easier to read. You see these pages in the way that you have configured your browser. Even blind users using screen reading software should have no trouble reading the content and navigating this site. If you do have trouble, let me know and I'll try my best to fix it. -Simplicity These pages are (hopefully) simple - text with links to files and other pages and sites. No animation, no pulldown menus, no mouse-rollover graphic changes, no HTML tables used for layout. Even the smallest cell phone browser should be able to present the content on this site easily. One of the best resources I've found for web site design and usability is Jakob Nielsen's useit.com site. In particular, the Alertbox columns have a ton of sane advice about usability.

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