Readings

Flash 99% Good
http://www.flash99good.com/
Everybody loves a flashy web site, right? Wrong! In careless hands, Macromedia's Flash technology can render a site almost unusable.

More information

Usability.gov, the National Cancer Institutes' outstanding usability Website:
http://usability.gov/

Designing more usable Web sites
http://www.tracecenter.org/world/web/
An excellent compilation of Usability resources, from the "Designing a More Usable World" folks at University of Wisconsin's Trace Center. See their main Website at http://www.tracecenter.org/ for some great information on usability, from general concepts to consumer products to ATMs, and a lot more.

Usability news:
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usability_news.html

Usability pundits

Two individuals in particular have made a good living out of bringing the concept of usability into popular culture. Although it's easy for people to fall into the trap of simply following Jakob Nielsen or Jared Spool in their "recipes for a usable Website" rather than doing your own user testing, their work can be a thought-provoking start for your own design and user testing.

Jared Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com

Jakob Nielsen
useit.com
http://www.useit.com/

Test your Website in other browsers

Many people use a text-only Web browser called Lynx. This "emulator" shows what Web pages would look like in Lynx, as well as what they would sound like to vision-impaired users who have software to read the words on the page to them:
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

See how the Web looked in earlier browsers: emulators for line-only browsers, and for NSCA Mosaic, Mosaic Netscape, Netscape Navigator, Lynx, Internet Explorer, and HotJava.
http://www.dejavu.org/

Check your html documents for accuracy

HTML validator:
Dr. HTML

HTML validator from the people who wrote the standards
World-Wide Web Coalition (W3C) (Warning--this one is very picky!)

accessibility

ADA HTML checker: "Bobby" is a Center for Applied Special Technology program that will help you make web pages accessible to those with disabilities and help you make your Website compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, aka Section 508).