Adhering to 'better practice' development techniques such as CSS will go a long way to improving your site's usability potential.
While not necessarily ensuring a more user-centred design, this will be beneficial to the kind of regular maintenance you may need to perform on your pages.
The great thing about using style sheets in particular is that you don't have to rip out inline tag formatting to tweak how everything looks or behaves.
Remember that the production formula for a 100 per cent usable site that will never require any changes certainly hasn't been found as yet, and you'll more than likely want to gradually hone a live design in accordance with user response.
CSS will provide much of the flexibility needed this without going all the way back to the drawing board, while also enabling you to explore other avenues of user provision and support.
A popular solution in accessibility circles is to build multiple style sheets into the design of every page so that colours, layouts and text styles can be switched to suit the needs of a diverse audience.
This can also be a technique for improving usability, because it gives more choice and control over how the user views the site itself.
Rather than focusing merely on making content more legible for disabled visitors, the logical extension of this idea would be to mirror the many usability mechanisms that feature within an Operating System such as Windows.
The desktop metaphor has continued to evolve in a direction that makes the personalisation of a workspace paramount, with menus, interface schemes, wallpapers and icons all able to be tailored independently.
This has resulted in an environment that isn't constrained by one universal view, and can be adapted to meet the needs of different workloads, moods, tastes, requirements and abilities.
Translating this kind of capability onto the Web may not be the simplest trick in the world, but the potential for letting users configure a design that works best for them shouldn't be overlooked.
Role Playing Games Anyone familiar with 'user centred design' will know that working with 'personas', of pen portraits of potential users, helps you apply abstract principles of Web usability to a site.
Personas are also great for translating accessibility guidelines, because they force you to think about how your target users, including those who are blind or unable to use a mouse, would perform the most common or crucial tasks within your site, such as ~gating a menu or checking out an order.
Of course, it's only an approximation of how all people use the Web, but by having these issues in mind when you start building pages, you're less likely to end up with messy 'retrofits' to include further usability or accessibility features.
Holding The Users Hand Many of the most basic practical design tips are actually the most important when it comes to usability.
Apart from developing solutions for the specific expectations of the users you're trying to target, it will be equally important to ensure that nobody gets lost among all the content.
Doing your best to counteract this can range from remembering to give every page an accurate and appropriate title, to carefully modularising everything into more palatable sections.
Text heavy content should be presented in a way that pushes the most valuable info to the fore without battling of overwhelming anyone.
Similarly, you'd be surprised how easy it is to lose novice users when pages extend beyond the length of the screen.
Many people fail to realise that the browser's scrollbar is there to help gain access to document areas that otherwise would be ignored.
Keeping your site real estate compact will therefore help to deliver things in short bursts and will also ensure that important navigational controls are always clearly visible.
Guiding visitors effectively around the site has to be considered a priority, and requires a narrative structure that reassures the user as they go about their business.
This needn't demand much from a coding perspective, and can easily be achieved with a good use of headings and a consistent instructional voice.
However, more sophisticated aids like dedicated help or FAQ pages will go a long way to raising user confidence if things go awry.
You might also want to consider the implementation of dynamic tools like rollover tips or info dialogs.
JavaScript driven layers are perfect for quickly realising these kinds of features, with many online code libraries happy to let you download the listings with no fuss at all.
As long as you remember to stick to the established conventions that characterise most of the interfaces your users will be familiar with, it's unlikely your designs will go far wrong.
The Road Ahead As far as navigation goes, the roots of how well it works should be traceable to the planning put into the original site map.
It's here that you should have ironed out any inadequacies in the way page links are structured, before translating it for real.
But this isn't to say that errors or oversights won't be made during the practical process.
Take advantage of Dreamweaver's built in checking and reporting tools for analysing link tags, browser support, code syntax and spelling.
The last thing any designer wants to do is lose visitors to bad links or find the flow is interrupted by a page loophole that can't be escaped.
In this instance, alternative routes of navigation may prove both beneficial and more troublesome as you increase the site's complexity.
Giving visitors a number of different pathways to the same destination is sure to give you a bigger headache, but the impact on usability will be immeasurable.
Visitors will appreciate the option of either leaping to the info directly or taking a more roundabout journey when casually surfing.
This is something that a good many commercial sites, and particularly search engines, will do whenever they decide a general revamp is called for.
Kelkoo's recent re jig to their pan European domains made a real point of cutting back on the number of pages shoppers would have to traverse to reach the products they wanted.
By allowing direct keyword searches, along with general category fishing, multiple results listings and the selection of suggested items from their database, they consciously thought about how best to cater for their market, and have gone some way to improve usability in the process.
Access All Areas There are still too many misconceptions surrounding Web accessibility.
it isn't just a 'disabled thing', it's not simply a question of providing text only alternatives, and most of all it doesn't mean sacrificing the look and feel of your site.
if done properly, the result is a site that's easier to maintain, leaner on bandwidth, and will evolve gracefully as the Web itself continues to evolve and widen its scope.
Think of accessibility as the next stage of evolution, reflecting the ever widening reach of the Web and the maturation of browser technology.
The online world these days is far more representative of the offline world, and the special circumstances of many users can't be ignored.
At the same time, the coalescence of browser standards, especially CSS, means it's possible to create sites that adapt to personal circumstances and preferences.