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Sample Library Websites: University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries: http://www.library.wisc.edu New York University Libraries: http://library.nyu.edu/ Penn State University: http://www.psu.edu University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center Library-Dallas http://www3.utsouthwestern.edu/library Arizona Health Sciences Library: http://www.ahsl.arizona.edu Sample Non-Library Websites: Adobe: http://www.adobe.com An examples of "Arresting Design"-- any site that goes above and beyond the call of duty by providing an easily navigated, useful site that also makes you think "Wow! That's a great site!" when you visit it. O'Reilly and Associates: http://www.oreilly.com A publishing company that specializes in computer reference and computer training materials. They are in the business of factual information and have created a site that reflects the structure and order of their subject matter. Note how their use of lines helped to create a sense of order and control. Contrast and color play a large role here, too. Web Style Guides: Yale University: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites: http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual New York Public Library: http://www.nypl.org/styleguide World Wide Web Consortium: http://www.w3.org Graphics for Web Sites AltaVista: Image Search (http://www.altavista.com/image/default) A comprehensive database of images on the Internet.. ImagiTek's Color Selector, www.imagitek.com/bcs.html Presents a simple interface for selecting from 12 colors for your web pages' text, link, visited link and and active link. There is also an option for selecting among 18 background gifs. Once you have selected your color scheme, you can preview the results. The 216-Color Webmaster's Palette ( http://www.visibone.com/colorlab) VisiBone's Webmaster's Color Laboratory, complete with hexidecimal and RGB codes. Usability Study Resources: Jacob Nielsen's Website: http://www.useit.com One of the leading usability resouces on the Web, this site includes an archive of Jacob Nielsen's bi-weekly Alertbox usability columns, which is the most useful. Nielson is widely regarded as the King of Net usability, whose rules of Web design have been followed by millions of people. Online Articles: User Testing: How to plan, execute and report on a usability evaluation http://builder.cnet.com/webbuilding/pages/Graphics/Evaluation Usability Study and Website Redesign Project at MIT http://macfadden.mit.edu:9500/webgroup/usability/results/index.html Questions to Ask Yourself When Reviewing A Site Does the site appear clean and organized? Is the navigation intuitive? Is the site visually consistent? Does each page provide some kind of useful content? Does the design visually commnunicate the message of the site? Does the site load quickly?