Web site development - your measuring stick

Anyone who is developing content for the Internet needs to consider who is going to read it, and what they are going to get out of it.

To that end, as I am developing a website, I have done a lot of reading on usability. I am very interested in creating the best website that I can.

There are several URLs that I keep going back to. They are my measuring stick to see if I am on track. I will not say that the website is perfect. Certainly not. But I think it has been very useful to look at things like this. Here are some links to super useful stuff before you publish anything on the Internet, read:

Usability 101: Introduction to Usability
A definitive source of information about making your website work for an audience on the Internet.

50 Web Usability Tips that Help You Attract and Retain Visitors to Your Website
It is on the DoshDosh blog, which itself is worth following if you are serious about your presence on the Internet, especially if you are blogging. Each time I start to work on something big on the Internet, I come back to this post. I find it one of the most useful I have read on the Internet.

The other thing is your own common sense. If you are blogging or doing a website for a specific audience, perhaps you know more about the reading habits of that audience than those 'usability' experts do. If you are in a very academic field, for example, your readers may read more of the content of the website than the norm on the Internet.

Lastly, use your friends. Other's eyes can be great to help you find and weed out the obvious mistakes that you missed. The most important thing to ask them is, did you actually read it all. If not, delete some, make it more readable, break it up more with useful headers and so on.