When we work closely with a project every working day, it becomes very easy to get too close to it and not see it in the way that others see it.

What seems obvious to you may not be obvious to someone being introduced to your project for the first time. So try and see your web site through the eyes of one of your own customers or new readers.

Have you delivered the information the were looking for? Have you provided context to help them get more information about your organisation if they need it? Have you explained acronyms and avoided using jargon?

A heat map is a picture of a web page that shows where users click when they visit a particular page.

The areas that are clicked most often appear in red (hot spot), while the areas clicked least often appear in blue or with no colour at all.

Heat maps are a tool used by web developers as part of their website usability testing routines.

Understanding how your visitors behave when they visit your web site is crucial to improving its effectiveness.

A variant on the heat map of mouse click is an eye tracking heat map which gives an inidcation of what catches most peoples' eye when they visit pages on your website.

You will require special third party software or an third party service if you wish to create a heat map of pages on your web site as they are currently not a standard part of analysis and statistics packages for tracking web sites.

When a web designer builds a web site they should ensure that the web site looks and behaves as expected in a variety of the most common web browsers.

Browser testing is the process of testing a web site not only in different web browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer, but also in different versions of each browser and on different operating systems.

For example, a web site viewed in Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP may behave differently to a web site running running on Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP or Windows Vista.

The aim of browser testing is to ensure that the visitor to the web site will be able to use the site as expected and if certain visual features are not available, that this does not make the site unusable. This is best achieved by building web sites that comply to web standards.

This refers to the amount of space available on a screen.

When publishing something in print, the size of the paper is known and therefore how something looks in print is entirely predictable.

A web site is not like that. Different computers have different display resolutions depending on their age and manufacturer and this affects how much of a web site can be seen on screen at any one time.

Add to this the fact that not all internet users have the window of their web browsers maximised, can resize the window are and can configure their web browser to show different toolbars and this means that the amount seen in one "pageful" varies greatly.

A screen reader is a piece of software interprets what is currently on a users computer screen.

The screen reader reads aloud what it finds on screen or outputs what it finds to a braille keyboard.

Screen readers are mostly used by people that are blind, have a visual impairment or a learning disability.

It is important that web sites are built in such as way as to be accessible to screen readers and their users.

When you use graphics or photography on a web page you should include Alt Text for each of these pictures. Alt Text is contained in an Alt Tag and is text that describes the picture so that visually impaired people using screen readers can have a description of the picture read out to them. The Alt Text is not displayed unless the picture is missing or the visitor runs their mouse over the picture.

For a site to be standards compliant each picture should have and Alt Tag, though it is not necessary to add Alt Text to each picture.

An example Alt Ext would be "Acme 1000 Widget. Click this picture for product details"