Beginner Usability: A Novice's Guide to Zombie Proofing Your Website: Undead Institute

By John Rhea

When the zombie horde shuffles toward your city they'll smash against the walls and pour through any hole they find. And if you have cracks and crevices in your website, making it hard to use or frustrating your audience, the horde will shuffle through those holes and past your website unharmed.
 

What You'll Beat Zombies With

This book covers that gap between code and design, the things zombies hope you won't learn, usability. It's how a user interacts with your site and whether they can find the information they came looking for or complete the task they set out to do. Most usability books focus on the front end, how a user interacts with your site, but there's also usability on the back end where you update and maintain the site. Better maintenance and better usability both lead to less crying and fewer zombies so it's a win and a delayed apocalypse for everyone!
 

How You'll Learn to Smack Zombies Around

You won't just passively take in the view, like a zombie shuffling across the mainland. You'll have plenty of combat practice with analogies, examples, and code tutorials you can build, break and fix again. Working with your hands and your head you'll craft code that pleases the eye and knocks a zombie into last Tuesday.

All the code and directions are provided as both codepen tutorials and downloadable html files, so you can fight the apocalypse how and where you like. You can work with them on the codepen site or on your own device.

And later you'll bring those skills together in a final project that cements those skills into zombie smashing muscle memory.
 

Why Zombies?

Are zombies just a gimmick? Why would this be any better than a straight laced book that sticks to the facts?

Straight laced books are often straight boring. And if you have insomnia problems go buy that book. The author, John, has read the boring books and knows that staying awake and engaged are also important for learning. But this book uses zombie references and analogies not just to make you smile, but to help the material stick. If a tough technical concept is related in silly terms you understand, like a zombie trying to buy gum at a super market, it's much more likely to stay in that brain those zombies are intent on eating.

Come on, hit the buy button, build up those walls and fill in the cracks, make your website as usable as possible for both you and your users and give those zombies what for!

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Rhea
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393296799

Book preview

Contents

Cover

Front Matter

Copyright

Content Warning (for Silliness)

Four Word

Zombie Bob say No!

Title

Useful Zombies (What is Usability?)

Apocalyptic Expectations (What visitors expect)

The Frustration Index (Impact of frustrations on visitors)

Frustration 1: Color by Zombie (Poor color choices)

Frustration 2: Standing out from the Horde (When headings and links blend in)

Frustration 3: Click the Zombie (When you can't click what you want)

Frustration 4: Kill the Click Here (Useless link text)

Frustration 5: Scaling the Undead Walls (of Text) (Large blocks of text send visitors running)

Frustration 6: Contagion is Too Small to See (Unreadable tiny text)

Frustration 7: Improper Apocalyptic Alignment (Text aligned improperly)

Frustration 8: Suffocated Text Shouldn't Live on (No spacing around text)

Frustration 9: A Busy, Busy Horded Mess (Background images behind text)

Frustration 10: The Inconsistent and the Undead (Disconnected, inconsistent design)

Frustration 11: Tag, Zombie, You're It (Text all over the place)

Frustration 12: Undead Images (Poorly sized images)

Frustration 13: A Zombie’s Alternate Text (Forgetting alternative text on images)

Frustration 14: Horde Structure (Poorly structured page navigation)

Frustration 15: Can't Find it on the Post-Apocalyptic Map (Weirdly placed navigation)

Frustration 16: The Current Zombie Page (Keep the current page in your nav and mark it)

Frustration 17: Zombie Placement (Logos and Search boxes in the wrong place)

Frustration 18: Proofread, Proofundead, Proofread (Proofreading was skipped)

Maintaining the Apocalypse (File/folder structure)

The Zombie Files (Choosing what file to display)

Lowercase Letters and Lower Class Zombies (Case sensitivity in filenames)

Undead Special Characters (Special characters in URLs)

(In)Denting Zombies (Making code readable)

Crash Test Zombies (Testing a site)

The Next Zombie Offensive

Sneak Peak of HTML5 Forms and Interactive Elements (Or How To Poke Zombies in the Eye)

Got Questions?

© 2019 by John Rhea. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Distributed by the Undead Institute a division of StoryLab LLC

Also available as

Book #3 in the My First Webpocalypse Virtual Boxed Set

Book #3 in the Undead Web 101: Student Bundle

Note: If you’re reading this on an e-ink screen you