What Joanne Jacobs’ site lacks in web design, it mostly makes up for in content design. I have a few content-related critiques of her site but overall, her site is very user-friendly as defined in chapter 3 of Nielsen’s book Designing Web Usability.
Length of text: The length of text in Jacobs’ posts are generally 50% shorter than they would be in print comparatively and some are even shorter than that. Jacobs gets to the point of her post quickly and in as little words as possible. However, Jacobs site is based on references to other blogs or articles, so the information is usually not original material, but rather, a summary.
Scannability: This is another area where Jacobs’ page shines. Because her posts are so short, they are automatically easy to scan. Jacobs does a good job of breaking up her posts with indented paragraphs but she only occasionally uses bullets or subheadlines. The reader can easily pick out key words and focus on what they see as the most important information.
Chunking: Because Jacobs never delves too deep on her topics, no “depth of content” is sacrificed, as Nielsen puts it, by shortening text. Jacobs uses hypertext well to break up information and her hypertext is always a link to a longer piece about the topic.
Headlines: For the most part, the headlines on Jacobs’ site are in “plain language” and don’t try to be “cute” or “clever,” but there are exceptions. The subheadline below her nameplate is clever as well as informative and, I think, explains exactly what her blog serves to do. It reads “Free-linking and thinking on education by Joanne Jacobs,” and her page is entirely based on links and informal thoughts.
Copy Editing: It’s clear that Jacobs copy edits her posts effectively and thoroughly. I have yet to find any grammatical or spelling errors. I can definitely appreciate this because pages that do have errors seem amateurish and the errors are often distracting to web readers like me.
Use of Inverted Pyramid: Most of the posts that reference news articles are written in inverted pyramid style. Jacobs starts with a lead, usually different than the lead in the original article, and the lead is often more suited for her audience. However, on most of the posts that reference other blogs, inverted pyramid style is not used. Additionally, some of her posts are only one-sentence long, others are simply video clips and a few of her posts don’t fit into any stylistic category.
Page Titles: The page titles on Jacobs’ page are short and straightforward. The most prominent page titles are at the top of the page and help the user navigate to information about the author, freelance opportunities, details about her book and of course, her blog. Each page title is unique which avoids confusion to the reader.
Legibility: For my eyes, the grayish-black text font does not contrast sharply enough against the white background. I would prefer a deeper black. Jacobs uses a plain-color background with no design, her font is big enough to read easily and no text moves or blinks. Also, her posts are left-justified and she never types in all capital letters.
The top post on Jacobs’s page is unlike any other post I’ve seen on her site. For the first time that I’ve seen, Jacobs has inserted her own original commentary. The post, entitled “What to tell a prospective art teacher,” is a seven-sentence-long open question to the teachers in her audience. No links to other articles or blogs are present here. Even though it’s nice to get a glimpse of Jacobs’ personal life, I wish this post were more compelling and I think it could be.
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