I've recently begun looking at Google Analytics as a way to gather some additional information about our website users to inform redesigns and site enhancements for the three Illinois statewide websites. Google Analytics is a free tool for websites with under 5 million pageviews per month and involves adding a couple snippets of javascript to all the pages that you want to track on a web site (most easily accomplished by adding it to a global header file). 

Creating user-friendly websites takes a lot of planning at the design stage. Below are a number of resources on usability in web design:

• UseIt.com-Jakob Nielson's website on usability and web designs
  
  

What is CSS?

The use of cascading stylesheets (CSS) is the preferred method for managing the presentation layer of web pages. HTML tags such as font and bgcolor and align in tables, have been deprecated and new browsers may not always support such tags.

AJAX is one of the latest buzzwords around Web 2.0. Why? Web 2.0 is a lot about the user experience and AJAX is one of the slickest technologies out there for creating rich user experiences.

What is AJAX?