* Three features that Web site owners should include to put smiles on users' faces
There are three simple and often overlooked details that many site administrators seem to either don’t know about or don’t care about but that should be fixed to make their users happy. Me included.
The first is going to cause major headaches to a lot of content owners in the near future. This issue is really basic: Not putting the date on content.
Not having a date on Web content may not seem a big deal but for people reading your content it can be crucial to the opinion they form of you. For example, stumbling across an item that seems relevant but is actually weeks or months old can be a waste of time for users when they try to “dig deeper.” This happens to me quite often particularly where the topic is one of the more obscure corners of technology such a Linux subsystems or IPs.
The rule for dating content is simple: Anything that isn’t evergreen (things like your company details) gets a date. Everything else does. Moreover, that date should be visible, not hidden in the HTML or otherwise easily overlooked.
Is this crucial to your Web site’s success? No. Will it make users like me happy? Absolutely.
The second detail is browser compatibility. I suspect that many sites assume that if they don’t do anything fancy their content will implicitly work cross-browser. This assumption is often not true when it comes to things like file downloads. I was just trying to download statements from a banking site using FireFox and much to my irritation the process didn’t work unless I switched to IE.
Would fixing this so that FireFox was properly supported have made me happy? Absolutely.
The third issue also concerns downloading. Many sites now use CGI applications to handle downloads so that right clicking on a download link can result in receiving an empty file or a chunk of HTML. This isn’t a problem when you’re dealing with a single file but as I was downloading six statements and each had to be opened individually to actually trigger the download, it was a pain. If you have to use a CGI process for whatever reason allow the user the opportunity to download, for example, a ZIP of any or all of the files.
Yet another issue that if they fix it, they will have happier users. Including me.
