There are a huge number of books and articles written in the field of usability and about the art of giving the user the opportunity to find the information he is trying to reach while browsing the website. The writers of these books are handling guidelines that are recommended to be followed, as well as describing their own views, ideas and theories of the subject. We found an interest to research the different possibilities, if any, to develop a website optimal for the user from a usability point of view. Another thing we noticed was that a need of a substantial guidance existed in website development aimed for recently started companies.

New theories and rules regarding usability, which are seen as superior to the old ones and therefore replaces them, is not created that often. This is different from other IT related subjects. For example, when looking at components inside of a computer, performance and disk space is doubled in a matter of a two year time period. Graphical design is also a thing that is ageing relatively fast and becomes obsolete when a new and fresh design comes along. With usability theories on the other hand it is possible to read books written ten years ago and even though all of it might not be pertinent, you can still see the big picture and find things that still counts as Reliable and correct. What we have seen is that the general opinion thinks less of usability compared to graphical design. Looking at how many pages the usability section gets in an HTML-guide or the number of books at the library’s shelves, the graphical sections outnumber the usability ones.

This report and the attached manual, which is created based on the results and questions answered throughout this report, bring the most essential usability theories to light. Subsequently they are analyzed and tied together in the latter parts of the report. The author Jacob Nielsen, which is one of the greatest usability experts in the world today, stands for a major part of what is written about the subject. we will look at different theories from Nielsen and also look at a master’s degree thesis by Fredrik Hansson (2006) which deals with a survey concerning the color of links.

The report consists of two parts; the first part is mainly about the usability theories explained above while the other part contains a basic HTML-guide as well as a style sheet-guide (CSS). These two guides prepare the users who choose to use the attached manual to create their own sites. We mainly aim our work towards the entrepreneur who is about to or has just started his own business.

The parts we focus on in this report are site design where write about site dimensions, site length and describe page headers and page footers. We also deal with implementation and typography suited for the web. Another thing we bring to light is usability on a deeper level. Not everybody knows exactly what the expression means

and we try to bring clarity to it.

The manual gives the user a description of building a website from start to finish. The basic idea is to give substantial information to the point where the users can go and create a site by themselves without any extensive prior knowledge. However, we recommend some computer knowledge.

The result of this report and the part that is described in the result section is a presentation on how a site is created based on the rest of the report. It will give answers to how a site is built in order to be as useful as possible.