There are many people who fall into the category of lower literacy when it comes to websites. Some researchers estimate that as much as 50% of the U.S. population can be defined as having a lower literacy, while 30% of total online users can be said to have the same.

What’s discussed below is definitely something worth considering and applying to your website, especially if you think that a significant proportion of your visitors fall into the lower literacy category.

Higher literacy vs. lower literacy

The most important thing that I can emphasize up front is that when I use the term “lower literacy”, I’m not talking about people who are illiterate or unintelligent. Quite the opposite in fact.  People who have a lower literacy are able to read – they just struggle with it to some degree depending on the particular medium in question. In this case, I’m talking about lower literacy as it pertains to websites.

In general there are some common characteristics of people who have a lower literacy:

• They have trouble scanning text
• They need to go through content word-by-word
• They’ll often find themselves re-reading long, unfamiliar words

People who are otherwise highly literate and intelligent might actually have a lower literacy when it comes to websites. Older people in their 50s, 60s, etc. are a perfect example of this. Anyone who has sat and watched how their parents use a website knows exactly what I’m talking about – some of those characteristics describe them perfectly.

Higher literacy is just the opposite. People who are highly literate, especially on the web, are able to look at a website quickly, scan it for what they’re looking for, and interpret what’s on the website and what the website has to offer them.

If you think this describes you perfectly, you’re not alone – there’s a significant gap in web literacy levels between older and younger generations. Younger people have been using websites for a greater percentage of their lives than older generations have, so they’re that much more familiar with them. Add in the fact that older generations tend to be more “afraid” of computers than younger generations are – such as clicking the wrong link, filling out a form, etc. – and you begin to account for that generational gap.

Lower literacy on the web

So how does lower literacy manifest itself when people use websites? Here are some common habits that lower literacy website visitors display:

• Reading the navigation – Lower literacy visitors tend to read through all of your navigation links first, and then choose the option that best meets what they’re looking for.
• Narrowing the field of view – Lower literacy visitors will read through content line-by-line, giving them a particular narrow focus that they might find hard to zoom out from.
• Skipping over information – If something becomes too complicated, then lower literacy users are more likely to completely skip over it, potentially missing something important.
• Accepting as “good enough” – Digging deeper requires a lot of reading (which can be challenging and time consuming), so lower literacy users skip, usually looking for links.
• Avoiding search tools – Lower literacy users might have difficulty spelling the search terms, and then when they see the results, have difficulty processing out-of-context content.

How to design for lower literacy users

How can you improve your website’s usability for lower literacy users in order to make it work for a broad audience? Here are some suggestions:

• Prioritize your content – Place the most important content at the very top of the page, where readers who might otherwise give up after a few lines will see, and keep any other important information above the fold. This especially applies to your call-to-action.
• Avoid confusing navigation links – The links in your main navigation(s) should be written so that they’re as intuitively as possible. There’s no need to be creative and write “Who We Are” when writing “About Us” will do just as good a job instead.
• Improve your in-content navigation – Follow some of the basic recommendations to improve your page titles and headers, and you’ll not only break up the content for higher literacy users, but keep lower literacy users from getting frustrated.
• Avoid distractions – Design elements like Flash banners can serve a useful purpose on your homepage, but on internal pages, avoid anything that moves or might otherwise be a distraction. These really get in the way when you’re trying to concentrate, which lower literacy users need to do.
• Use a consistent page design – Unless there’s some compelling reason otherwise, every page on your website should have the same general feel to it, and should include all of the major navigational elements. Consistency is the goal – something that lower literacy users struggle without.
• Make effective links – There are things that both designers and writers can do to make links more effective. Follow some of these recommendations – such as using icons on particular types of links, or making the links scannable – to help lower literacy users navigate your website easier.
• Simplify form instructions – Forms give many people trouble, so you can imagine the trepidation with which lower literacy users fill them out – especially if giving away personal information is involved. Keep your instructions clear to avoid unnecessary confusion.

Do some of these tips sound familiar? If so, it’s because many of them are also general usability guidelines that you should be following anyways when creating your website. If you’ve already tried to incorporate many of them into your website and think that it’s as user-friendly as possible, then lower literacy visitors shouldn’t have much of a problem using it.

Thoughts?

Is lower literacy something you should be concerned with if you have a website? Or do you think it’s dependent solely on who the particular audience for that website is – no different than gender, profession, interest, etc? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

While some of these things fall into what I would call basic design practices that should always be done, others are what I think of as the little extra touches the designer can do to make a website that much better.

No matter what you call them, what everything on this list has in common is that they’re extra value that clients are receiving for their financial investment. It’s something that I communicate to them when giving a cost estimate for their project because it shows both how I’ll be spending the time and what they’re getting for what they’re paying.

See how many of these things you do when working on a website for a client – and if you’re not doing them, consider adding them to your regular design process.

Design and Navigation

• Create an error page – You may have checked every single link on your website, but it’s still inevitable that some visitors will type a URL wrong or somehow get to a page that doesn’t exist. A custom 404 error page will help your users find what they’re looking for when that happens.
• Add a favicon – Favicons are the little icons that you see at the top of a browser window and in your bookmarks list. They’re a great finishing touch for any website to have, and can even have some small usability benefits – great reasons for why websites should always use favicons.
• Validate the site markup – Make sure your website adheres to web standards before you launch. Validated websites load faster, better, and on more web browsers, and are also “future proof” in the sense that all web browsers will handle the website as you designed it.
• Cross-browser test – Your website should look and functions the same in all of the major web browsers and on all of the popular operating systems. Most of the popular cross-browser testing tools, such as Browser Shots, also test your website in various screen resolutions as well.

Server Optimization

• Resize images accordingly - If you’re calling an image from the server and the image files is really large even though it’s being displayed much smaller, resizing ahead of time will speed up the load time of that page, and help keep the amount of server space you’re using up at a minimum.
• Put javascript in the footer – If you’re calling external Javascript within your website, putting them in the header means that the server will try to load them first before loading your content. Putting them in the footer loads the content first before fetching the script – much more desirable.
• Clean up server of working files – While developing a website, I often find myself with extra files on the server that I had used at some point but am not using any longer. I delete those unnecessary files so that what’s on the server is only what’s being used somewhere on the website.

Search Engine Optimization

• Generate a sitemap – Creating a sitemap is useful for your users as a navigation tool, but for the search engines perspective it will help them find new content on your website faster than by relying on their crawler to find it. This will help you get more of content noticed and more links followed.
• Submit URL to search engines – If you’re launching a new website, the search engines won’t know about it unless you tell them to come and crawl your website. This one of the simple steps to bolster SEO on your website, so at a minimum submit the URL to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Create a robots.txt file – This file tells the search engine spiders what they can and can’t crawl on your website. If you don’t want them to look at certain directories, this is where you would specify that. One way this might be useful for SEO is as a way to avoid duplicate content on your website.

Content

• Proofread your content one last time – There’s no excuse for spelling or grammar mistakes on a website. If you’ve written content for a website, such as links, intro text, etc., having extra eyes looking at it to make sure everything sounds good and is written properly will make sure any errors are caught.
• Check for broken links one last time – You can spend all the time in the world making your website as great as possible, but if you have broken links on it, the website looks bad. Before you launch, click through all the links on the website to verify that everything works properly.
• Set up Google analytics – Understanding what content your visitors are looking at on your website is absolutely essential in order to make it as effective as possible. Google Analytics is not only free, but incredibly popular and easy to use, which is why I use it on all my client websites.

Thoughts?

Is there anything that I didn’t list here that your normally do when you launch a new website for a client? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

Those who don’t like drop-down menus say that they make a website less usable, but I think the opposite is true. They can open up a website’s content to its visitors from anywhere on your website, making it that much easier for people to find what they’re looking for. And from a designer’s point of view, they can be very useful in helping to clean up a busy layout so that you’re not overloading the page with content links.

Here’s my take on drop-down menus: if you are going to use them, they need to meet three criteria in order to enhance the overall usability of the website – what I like to call the “3 W’s”. They should be:

• Well-planned – how the content in the menus is organized
• Well-designed – how the menus actually look
• Well-developed – how the menus function

Let’s go through each of these in a bit more detail. I’ll give you some things that you should do under each category in order to make your drop-down menus as user-friendly as possible.

Planning the content of your drop-down menus

The most common way that drop-down menus appear is what you’re probably familiar with already – simply a vertical list of links that appear beneath the main navigation links. These can be used when you want to organize such things as:

• Pages in a section
• Categories in a blog
• Products in a particular category

But it’s not as simple as just creating a list of the links that you want to appear in each drop-down menu. There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to the content of this type of drop-down menus:

• Keep the links manageable – Don’t provide so many links that it becomes too time-consuming for someone to look through it to find what they’re looking for. Making the menus into a long list of links guarantees that they’re not going to be usable at all; Lehman College’s website is an example of this.
• Don’t have more than two levels at most – This can be very distracting to the user, and if you have a lot of content, your menus start to really stretch out across the screen. Drop-down menus should help your visitors get to main topics of interest within your site’s information architecture; they don’t necessarily have to touch every single page on the website.

Plenty of websites out there have nicely-organized drop-down menus like this. Check out Garmin’s website for a great example.

The recent design trend

Fortunately, there is a new trend within web design that is helping to solve these problems. Recently you have begun to see the widespread use of bigger “panels” that group options together, helping users have greater access to information. Jakon Nielsen, one of the leading usability experts, even published a study on this topic in which he found that using these “mega drop-down navigation menus”, as he calls them, can improve how your visitors navigate through your website.

A lot of popular websites are incorporating these types of menus. You can find them on such popular websites as:

• ESPN.com
• Food Network.com
• HGTV.com
• White House.gov
• Samsung.com

(Regarding the White House’s website, how they used a mega drop-down menu is one of the things that I really liked about the new design of the White House website, which I wrote about back in January.)

I’m a big fan of these mega drop-down menus, providing that they’re done well. The links still need to be organized in order for them to be useful – something I think the last 3 examples above do well, but that ESPN doesn’t. Grouping them into categories with headers is a great way to make it even easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

Making your drop-down menus look nice

When it comes to styling your drop-down menus, here are a few things that you should do to make sure that they’re as usable as possible:

• Provide visual separation – You want to make sure that your users are able to easily look through the links in the drop-down menu, so adding in some padding around each link, or using a horizontal line as a separator to distinguish between links, is a good idea. Best Buy’s website is an example of this, although I think they could use slightly more padding around each link.
• Use the hover effect – If you have your links set up as block elements, then having the background change color when a visitor is hovering over that link in the drop-down menu is a good touch to incorporate. Again, visit the White House’s website for an example of this in action.
• Semi-transparent backgrounds – If you have a nice background image and you want it to show through, then doing this might be something worth considering. Don’t make the menu too transparent though – make it just enough so that the background shows through. You want to maintain enough contrast between the menu and the background so that your users can tell what the links are.
• Keep things consistent – The most important thing to keep in mind is that drop-down menus should look like  a natural extension of the main navigation bar. This means using the same colors, fonts, etc., with the goal of making everything appear to function as one.

Just remember that the ultimate goal of all of these tips is to make sure how the menus are designed doesn’t get in the way of the user’s ability to browse through the links contained within them. It would be a shame if you had drop-down menus where the content is well-planned and organized, but the design gets in the way of people using them.

Getting your drop-down menus to function properly

So now that you know how to organize the links in your drop-down menus, and how to make them look nice, there’s one final piece of the puzzle you have to think about, and that’s how they actually work.

You can definitely have drop-down menus that meet the first two W’s, but that have a problem with the third. And this might be what website users find the most frustrating about drop-down menus – when they don’t work properly. We’ve all had experiences where a menu takes too long to display, or where it disappears too quickly. It’s the small things like those that have the biggest impression on your visitors.

Here are some thinks to keep in mind when figuring out how your menus should function:

• Be careful of hover menus – Some drop-down menus appear when you move your cursor over the main navigation link, but this can be a double-edged sword. It’s good that the menus will be obvious to your visitors, but it’s bad and can cause confusion if someone unintentionally hovers over the link, only to have the menu appear when they don’t mean for it to.
• Indicate when clicking is needed – Some drop-down menus are only activated when you click on the main navigation link; Digg is a perfect example of this. Because the menus can only be activated by clicking, there is a little arrow telling people that those links are to drop-down menus – a good thing to incorporate if you choose this display method.
• Delay deactivation – Say someone moves their cursor off of the drop-down menu, and it disappears right away. You don’t want that to happen – if they moved the cursor by accident, they would have to go through the whole menu to get back to where they were. Having a slight delay gives them the time to move their cursor back over the link in the menu, and can cause less frustration for your users.
• Make them appear smoothly and seamlessly – However you want your users to activate the drop-down menu, it had better load immediately when they do activate it. You don’t want to disrupt the visitor’s experience in any way, and you certainly don’t want to make them wait for something to happen. It’s the same principle as with load time – if your website takes too long to load, chances are they’ll hit that “Back” button unless they have some compelling reason for being on your website.
• Skip the tooltips – As I’ve written about in the past, you need to know when to use your TITLE attributes wisely. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t heed my advice. On their website, the drop-down menus are nice, but if you hover over the main navigation link long enough, a tooltip appears that (a) shows the exact same thing as the link itself, and (b) obscures the first option in the drop-down menu. My point is, just be careful how you use your tooltips, especially in cases like this.

Remember!

Drop-down menus are unfortunately one of those design elements that can leave a big impression about your website – especially a negative one. If they’re done poorly, people will remember that, and might be less likely to come back to your website in the future because of how difficult it is to navigate around. If you’re in business and trying to sell something through your website, that could be fatal, but the same applies to any other website as well – organizations, colleges or universities, news, etc.

If you are going to implement drop-down menus in your website, give it some thought first and make sure that they meet the criteria of the “3 W’s” from above.

When you are ready to actually create them, there are plenty of resources and guides available for how to create drop-down menus on your website. You can create them in CSS, Javascript, AJAX, or many other programming languages – there are too many for me to list here.

Thoughts?

What do you think of drop-down menus – do you love them or hate them, and why? Or what about the new mega drop-down menus – do you like that trend and wish other websites would start using them? Share your thoughts about anything I mentioned or that relates to drop-down menus by leaving a comment below!

Yes, you read that correctly.

Barack Obama ran for office using arguably the most technologically-committed campaign ever. The new look of the White House website is no surprise when you keep that in mind – although I must say that I actually was a bit surprised to hear about it. Considering everything else that is being talked about this inauguration day, honestly, who was even thinking about the White House website?

Thoughts on the new design

The new look of the White House website picks up where his campaign and transition websites left off. In fact, if you go to Change.gov now, there is a note saying that the “transition has ended and the new administration has begun. Please join President Barack Obama at Whitehouse.gov” – so you do get the sense of continuity from one phase of his election and presidency to the next.

Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and a contributor to the White House blog, writes that the new website is “just the beginning of the new administration’s efforts to expand and deepen the online engagement” that many Americans used to help play a role in the election.

I think what I’m most impressed with the most is how Obama’s calls for transparency and communication in government were carried over to the website. What those two things translate most readily into in web design terms is what I talk about all the time – a commitment to site usability.

What’s done well

What are some features on the new website that make it very usable and that I really like?

• Intuitive navigation – The top navigational bar has only a few simple choices, and the drop-downs that appear when you hover over a link provide links to all sorts of information about his agenda, the administration, the history of the White House, the government, and how to stay informed. They’re simple to use and look great – what more could you ask form.
• E-mail updates – This is a standard feature on many websites, but this is downright genius the way it’s incorporates here – not to mention groundbreaking. But it comes as now surprise to see the administration use this, considering Obama’s use of other technologies during his campaign, such as text messaging.
• Functional footer – This is also a commonly found design element nowadays, but again, it’s use here really fits well with the openness and accessibility that the website and administration are both trying to convey. It makes it even easier for people to find the information that they’re looking if they don’t want to use the drop-down menus at the top – again, a hallmark of usability.

Of course, the snazzy Web 2.0 design really does wonders in tying eveything together, and the web designer in me can’t help but wonder if it’s running on WordPress!

What could be fixed

I know I’m probably being a bit too nit-picky here, but there are a few small touches that I would have done differently:

• Styling the text links – The text links are the same color as the text, and aren’t underlined either, so it’s hard to tell what is a link and what isn’t. I would have done this a bit differently, since styling them properly helps with both usability and accessibility – something I detailed in another post I wrote on the subject.
• Page title tags – The page titles on pages throughout the website are very basic: “Contact Us” is all it says for the “Contact Us” page, for example. I’m sure that the White House website doesn’t have search engine optimization forefront on their mind, but it wouldn’t hurt to include some more information in them. People who use tabbed browsers would be appreciative of that!
• Breadcrumbs – Once you get into the sub-pages on the website, there is a well-styled breadcrumb bar that appears at the top of the footer area. I just wish that they would have done the same at the top of the page where it would be more visible.
• Form fields – Eye-tracking studies have shown that it’s best to put the labels on top of input fields on website forms, but the Contact Form on the website has them reversed. I would switch this up and it will look a lot better.

It’s a great start

Overall though, this is a great website that I’m very impressed with. I’m curious to see how the website grows and changes over time as more content is posted to it – pending legislation and executive orders, for example – and new features come online – such as the RSS feeds, which aren’t quite ready yet.

From a marketing angle, I think it very accurately reflects the message that the new administration wishes to convey about itself. And as I’ve written elsewhere, if the design of a website is able to help convey the right message about an organization, then that truly a great website.

Whether to place the sidebar on the right or the left is an ongoing debate, so there are no right answers to this (no pun intended). At the end of the day, web designers have to take into account many things when determining where to put the sidebar – including how it fits in with the overall look and feel of a website. Placing the sidebar on one side versus the other might just feel like the better choice, so it should go where it feels more comfortable visually.

So here are some reasons for putting the sidebar on either side:

Put Your Sidebar on the Left

On most websites where the main purposes of the sidebar is to help people navigate through the website, you will find sidebars on the left-hand side of the page. What are some reasons for why navigational sidebars appear on the left?

• It lets you emphasize on the content, not the navigation – When you go to a website, your eyes tend to naturally drift towards the center of the page. Several usability studies have confirmed this by examining how people actually look at websites – check out usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s article “F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content” in particular for more information on this. So if the sidebar is on the left, then what people will see in the center of the page will be the beginning of your headline, paragraphs, sub-headers, etc.
• People look for, and even expect, navigation there – Most prominent websites, with the exception of blogs, tend to have some form of primary site navigation on the left. So if you’ve spent any time browsing the Internet, it becomes natural to start looking for, and even expecting, the navigation to be there.
• We read left to write – This should be obvious, but it’s one of those subtle things that you don’t fully realize the impact of when you’re looking at a website. Don’t believe me? Just look at a website in Hebrew, a language read from right to left, and you’ll notice the difference right away. (Here is a good example of one of Israel’s leading newspapers.)

Put Your Sidebar on the Right

An argument can also be made for why you should put the sidebar on the right. Blogs are the best example of websites that tend to have the sidebar navigation on the right, and it’s something that is being seen more and more on newer websites. So what might be some good reasons for putting the sidebar on the right?

• Blog sidebars go on the right. Period. – People have the same expectations as mentioned above when it comes to blogs. If you look at blogs with any regularity, you come to expect them to be there. But other websites are beginning to put their sidebars on the right as well; prominent newspapers such as the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune already format articles on their websites in a blog-like fashion with the content on the left and the sidebar is on the right.
• It’s (arguably) more search engine friendly – Search engine spiders read through your web pages in the order that the HTML presents your content. So if you put the content on the left, that means that search engines will see your content before your navigation, and might weigh that more when determining your website’s position in search engine results. (I say arguably because there are a ton of other factors that determine your placement in search engine results, but that topic is too broad for discussion here.)
• We read left to right – That’s right, you did read that correctly. The same trend mentioned above can apply here in reverse too. Since we scan a page from left to right, putting your content first means that people will see it first when their eyes scan through a web page. I don’t necessarily buy this reason though, primarily because there is no getting around the fact that most people’s eyes tend to move to the center of a web page at first glance. Why fight against that natural movement?

Why I Lean to the Left

When you look at this website, one of the things that you might (or might not) have noticed is the position of the sidebar. Throughout all of the pages on my website, it’s on the left-hand side of the page, with the main content area on the right side of the page.

Although most blogs put their sidebars on the right, I found that having the layout this way just felt better and was more conducive to having the sidebar on the left instead.

How does this work in action? Well, when you take a look at my blog page, at first glance did your eyes will tend to go to the center of the page? If so, then putting the sidebar where I did worked as I had intended. But where your eyes first moved to isn’t solely a function of where the sidebar is. There are other things I did to help guide your eyes there, like using some subtle visual cues to your eyes notice the center of the page first, such as:

• Using a much darker color for the post titles
• Putting a bright red calendar icon next to each post title
• Making the main content area wide than the sidebar

Which Way Do You Lean?

So what’s your take on this? If you have a website, where did you put your sidebar, and did you put it where it is on purpose?

If you want to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, you can do so here.

Keyboard Shortcuts

It might take you a little while to learn these shortcuts, but once you do, your browsing will be that much quicker. Here are some of the more common shortcuts:

• Alt+Home (Go to your preset home page)
• Alt+Right Arrow (Go to the next page)
• Alt+Left Arrow or Backspace (Go to the previous page)
• Home (move to the top of a page)
• End (move to the bottom of a page)
• F5 (reload the current page)
• Ctrl+D (bookmark the current page)
• Ctrl+F (find)
• Ctrl+O (open a new website or page)
• Ctrl+N (open a new window)
• Ctrl+T (open a new tab)
• Ctrl+W (close the current window)
• Alt+D (select the text in the Address bar)

Tab Navigation

(Note: these shortcuts apply to IE 7.0 only; version 6.0 does not feature tabbed browsing.)

If you’re like me, sometimes you have a lot of tabs open at the same time. Instead of using the mouse to select between the different tabs that you have open, use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• Ctrk+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
• Ctrl+Shift+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
• Ctrl+W (close the current tab)
• Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)
• Ctrl+Alt+F4 (close other tabs)

Mouse Shortcuts

If you’re already using your mouse and it would be easier for you to use a mouse shortcut instead of switching to the keyboard, here are some quick shortcuts. Note that these shortcuts depend on whether your mouse has a scroll wheel built into it or not.

• Shift+scroll up (go to the next page in that tab)
• Shift+scroll down (go to the previous page in that tab)
• Ctrl+scroll up (increase text size)
• Ctrl+scroll down (decrease text size)

Auto Complete

While not as well known as the shortcuts above, this can be very useful.

Go to the address bar (Ctrl+L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there – like magic!

Thoughts?

I’m curious to hear whether you find these tricks useful or not. Or, maybe you have some of your own that you’d like to share. Either way, good luck as you use Internet Explorer more efficiently!

Keyboard Shortcuts

It might take you a little while to learn these shortcuts, but once you do, your browsing will be that much quicker. Here are some of the more common shortcuts:

• Spacebar (scroll down on a page)
• Shift+Spacebar (scroll up on a page)
• Ctrl+F (find)
• Ctrl+D (bookmark the page)
• Ctrl+T (open a new tab)
• Ctrl+K (go to the search box)
• Ctrl+L (go to the address bar)
• Ctrl+ (increase text size)
• Ctrl+ (decrease text size)
• Ctrl+W (close tab)
• F5 (reload the page)
• F11 (view in full screen mode)
• Alt+Home (go to your preset home page)
• Home (move to the top of the page)
• End (move to the bottom of the page)

Tab Navigation

If you’re like me, sometimes you have a lot of tabs open at the same time. Instead of using the mouse to select between the different tabs that you have open, use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
• Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
• Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)

Here’s another neat trick: if you want to view different pages on the same website but in two different tabs, simply hit Ctrl and drag the tab (in the tab bar) to the right.

Mouse Shortcuts

If you’re already using your mouse and it would be easier for you to use a mouse shortcut instead of switching to the keyboard, here are some quick shortcuts. Note that these shortcuts depend on whether your mouse has a scroll wheel built into it or not.

• Shift+scroll down (go to the previous page in that tab)
• Shift+scroll up (go to the next page in that tab)
• Ctrl+scroll up (decrease text size)
• Ctrl+scroll down (increase text size)

Auto Complete

While not as well known as the shortcuts above, this can be very useful.

Go to the address bar (Ctrl+L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there – like magic!

For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.

Thoughts?

I’m curious to hear whether you find these tricks useful or not. Or, maybe you have some of your own that you’d like to share. Either way, good luck as you use Firefox more efficiently!