This is the search box: -

A post:-

Bit of the homepage with portfolio thumnails!

Shot of the Portfolio page: -

Finally another shot of the homepage with a jquery powered slideshow with all the big names I’ve worked with!

Cheers for having a look at Sindustries v3 it’s serouisly going to rock your sox!

P.s. There are more images of the re-design but your just going to have to follow me on twitter to find them!

Its been a great learning curve and I’m proud of Sindustries simple beginnings and that I’ve managed to keep Sindustries.co.uk going for so long.

I can remember setting up wamp for the first time and installing wordpress designing “version 1.0″ and launching that which was rather fun. Then I decided It was time for a re-design (The theme your viewing right now.) again another barrel of laughs but I noticed that things I done in first version has effected this version and because of this Sindustries.co.uk is getting another major overhaul!

Yeah, in one year three different revisions all part of the learning process and in Sindustries 3.0 there is a definite improvement in design and mark-up.

I bet you would love some stats, wouldn’t you?

Since launching sindustries.co.uk web site its had: -

10,407 Page Views.

2,763 Absolute Unique Visitors.

Most of my traffic comes from referring sites & search engines.

Some people might say this “OMGZ I HAZ 10K IN ONEZ DAYS B4 LOLOL!!!!11!!1!1!1!” and my response to this is simply that I setup Sindustries.co.uk to learn, not to get popular its my pet project that I work on however as time goes on I have realized that I have enjoyed blogging as much as learning and with Sindustries 3.0 blogging is going to have a much bigger focus.

Enjoy.

1 – Pagination

Image from smashingmagazine.com

Pagination is a good usability aid to let users see visually how many “pages” of content your  site has and provides away of users to easily browse from new content to very old content. A bonus as well is you also get more page views when users browser the other “pages” advertising score!

2 – Previous Post & Next Post

Image from sindustries.co.uk

A great feature that I think you should use even you already have a “most recent/popular” post’s at the end of your post its the same idea as pagination in which you can view older content or newer content inside of a post but displays the the next newest as well as the older post to that .

3 – Footer with Links

Links in the footer are awesome for users deep linked into your site, helping robots crawl your site and providing a way for your users to find  out where they are and where they want to go.

4 – Banner or Company Logo Linked to Homepage

Image from PSD tuts+

I know this one is a no brainier but for those of you that don’t know always make your website header logo or banner link back to your websites homepage this provides a user a “fail safe” in which they can go back to the homepage and start again.

5 – Navigation Menu

Image from aiburn.com

I cant stress enough how much how much a good GUI on a website is so important.

Design your menu and ensure that your menu looks like a menu make sure your buttons are designed to be clicked on so your buttons/menu doesn’t suffer from”menu blindness” make sure you have a hover and an active state I personally think visited isn’t a requirement for Navigation menus but design your hover and active states with a “change” like a highlight or text becomes bold anything that stands out.

6 – Search Box on Every Page

Image from netmag.co.uk

With your Wordpress site include your search in the header file this way users can search your website from anywhere in your website and from any page.

It is also possible to design a search results page that can also add extra usability

7 – Use Headings Properly in Articles

Image from alistapart.com

The proper use of headlines in articles make sure you use your H1 tag’s and maybe give your H2,3,4,5 a different look however on Sindustries I keep my article “Subs” all the same style.

8 – End of post “Stubs”

image from smashingmagazine.com

Post stubs are great for giving users a visual cue to say “stop and go somewhere else” and getting users to go much deeper into your own website or onto another website owned by you like twitter for example.

9 – Categories & Archives

Image from sindustries.co.uk

This might seem very very trivial but considering even the BBC didn’t have categories or archives the result was it made users finding similar style of stories difficult and you couldn’t even look at the past weeks content because they had no archive !

Now wordpress gathers categories and automatically produces an archives, simple help your website visitor out and use them on your site.

10 – Contact Details

Image from abuzeedo.com

What does contact details have to do with usability I hear you say but its simple.

Its to allow users to contact you! If your site doesnt have a contact page or email address then how are you ment to know about any problems or clients trying to contact you ?