Spool allows that designers who are well versed in the visual display of information and who understand the vocabulary of a site's audience can employ graphics to great effect. It includes advice about audience analysis and echoes Nielsen's call for site designers to provide for users who access and navigate a site in diverse ways. She finds today's Web designers caught in dilemmas that result from the conflict between best practices and the need to provide rich, complex content. Best Practices Best practices for Web site usability, such as site maps and pages that down- load promptly, have started to emerge. Since online text is slower and more tiring to read than printed text, Web writers need to be succinct, using 50 percent fewer words on the Web than they do in print.
Spool recommends expressive text links that clearly reflect their contents.
Link labels should be longer rather than shorter, so that the additional words can expand the user's understanding of the links' contents. He qualifies by cautioning that long, Yahoo-like lists of underlined links are not a desirable goal. Search Systems Experts disagree about the value of search systems. Nielsen finds that over 50 percent of users go to a site's search facility as their first strategy. He advocates using a long search box to encourage entry of many keywords, and recommends using search logs to identify problem areas for the site.