It's long overdue seeing as the new site has been up for about two months now, but better late then never!

Somewhere in March of last year, we heard we might be doing the site NU.nl for ilse media. Readers not local to the Netherlands might not know it, but nu.nl is almost a concept in the Netherlands. It's the news site here, millions of people rely on it for their news throughout the day. So not very surprising we were all very excited about doing this.

A few days ago I was at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting. One of the talks there, was about PHP 6 and the unicode support it promised by Andrei Zmievski. I have long been waiting for unicode support in PHP because of some projects in the past where I discovered the limitations we currently have to work around. So I was coming into the talk expecting that it could now speak unicode natively.

A impressive website is not only nice to look at and packed with technological wizbang, but is also usable. Usable not only by the people who wrote it, but by the actual users that are going to visit the site.

This is why it's important to think about usability while designing a website, while building the functionality and while putting in the content and the final tweaks.

A good way to analyze the usability of a website is by asking yourself questions about the visitor; Why did they stumble upon the site? What are they expecting? What can they do once they get there, and how can we communicate that as fast as possible.