How accessible is your website? Hint – try turning off images
When I worked for a very big corporate, one of my colleagues was blind. Of the many things I learned from him (besides what it’s like to share an office with a dog*) one was the importance of website accessibility.
This guy was responsible for selecting and managing service providers for this big company – to be selected to provide a service to a company this size can completely change your business. Of course, when your only contact with someone is via email, you’d have no idea he was blind. And so many of those emails would contain the words “see our website for more details” so he would.
The way this guy used his PC was amazing. He had a small Braille device above the keyboard but most of the time he used his headphones. He had software on his PC that would read out every piece of text, menu, pop-up and option box. How he coped with this cacophony I do not know!
What’s this got to do with websites?
Now, your website is your shopfront. And just as you wouldn’t open a shop with a 2-foot step at the door to prevent the disabled getting in, you should be building your website to allow the visually impaired in. There’s some very useful information at the RNIB website about the UK law for website accesibility – yes, this is a legal requirement. In fact, the RNIB started their first case against a website earlier this year.
When this guy visited a website that he couldn’t read, well, that supplier got crossed off the list. Plain and simple.
There are lots of things you can do to make your website more accessible, but three really important starters are:
- Don’t use images as text, unless you have all the text available elsewhere or in ALT tags
- Don’t use tables to layout your design – screen readers hate these. Besides, if you’re a web designer who hasn’t learnt CSS yet, get your coat.
- Don’t build your entire site in Flash – lots of DIY website tools used to be built in Flash but fortunately that is starting to die out. Not so much because they are invisible to the visually impaired – because they don’t work on iPads!
Google cares too
Google indexes sites based on their content – i.e. the text on the page. Headings and text all play a vital role in your website competing against other sites in the all important Google rank. If your site doesn’t have text and headings, it won’t be ranked highly. We all know that adding a few meta keywords to your site does nothing for Google now. And a little description tag at least gives people something to read if they do find your site on Google. But for any useful search phrases, your site will appear right down at the bottom if it doesn’t have some content.
How can I tell what my site looks like to a visually impaired visitor?
The simplest check is to turn off images – this page explains how to disable images in your web browser. Try it now and you’ll see that although it looks a lot less pretty, on this page you can still read all the content and navigate the site. That’s because all our fairly marvellous website design work is accessibility and SEO friendly.
I’ll leave you with a screenshot of a website that demonstrates this perfectly – unfortunately I probably didn’t explain the issue too well so the owner remains someone else’s client! It does look fantastic when the images are turned on though.
How not to build a website
* This dog had a habit of ignoring his basket. I would come back from meetings to find him curled up under my desk – this blonde Labrador went so well with my black suit!
Sharing the love – 10 free iStockphoto images
We love using iStockphoto – for our advertising, blogs, websites and our clients’ websites when we give them the fairly marvellous Kent website design treatment.
They have very high standards for accepting images into their library which they then combine with great pricing.
Anyway, don’t just take our word for it, sign up by clicking here for 10 free images from www.istockphoto.com
And the great thing is, if you decide to purchase more images, we get some free credits as a bonus too. How cool is that?
How easy was scrapping my car online? Very, thanks @Cartakeback_UK !
My days of driving a gorgeous Alfa Romeo, all expenses paid thanks to big Pharma, are long gone. Nowadays I prefer my driving costs lower, positively frugal in fact.
Image: think4photop / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Last year I managed to pick up an old Ford Escort on eBay, with a full year’s MOT for £400. No, it wasn’t in perfect condition but it was perfectly usable and served me well. It didn’t need to be serviced and I had no intention of trying to get it through another MOT.
So this year, once I had picked up a bargain replacement, I needed to dispose of the old Escort. I’d been offered £100 trade-in but that wasn’t convenient, but I didn’t fancy trekking around scrap yards either, so we got Googling.
I’ve tried to use webuyanycar before, and was disappointed by the ‘hidden’ costs and downward haggling you get after the valuation. Besides, this car wasn’t for sale, it was for scrap. So it was while looking for this we found Cartakeback.com – which promised to make the process easy. And sure enough, it did. I was offered quotes from four local yards but even better was the highest quote, which included collection.
It’s things like this that make using the internet to do business so good. They take a, lets be honest, nasty task of scrapping a car and make it a simple process. I entered my details on Wednesday, they called me to confirm on Thursday, on Saturday the lorry arrived to collect – the driver had a nice fresh cheque in his hand – and on Monday I received the DVLA Certificate of Destruction by email.
That’s exactly how this online life should be.
P.S. they gave me £170, so that car cost me £230 plus petrol and tax for a year – I think that’s pretty good!
Need to brush up your language skills? New website launch!
We’re a bit behind on our updates – they say “the cobbler’s children never have any shoes” and it seems this applies to web designers too.
However, even if it was a month ago, we’re still very proud to add First Contact Languages to our fairly marvellous Kent Website Design portfolio.
Tired of dealing with mopheads? New website launch!
Our web design arm, fairly marvellous, have been pretty busy lately. Their portfolio is expanding at an incredible rate and it’s proving difficult to keep their website up-to-date! However, no problem this time, as they are proud to announce the launch of another client’s website.
So, if you’re looking for commercial or domestic cleaners, and you don’t want mopheads, go to eXtreme Clean for professional cleaning services in Kent.
Made up for you? Actually, we’re made up for them
Sometimes the most satisfying part of building a website is not completing the design, not carrying out the implementation nor finding some particularly groovy way of doing something. It’s the bit when you let go, you’ve trained the client on how to update it and the next day… things have changed.
The client now really owns their site, it’s their content and they are in charge.
What is behind the scenes of your website?
A few months ago, a client came to us because she was having trouble with her website.
The Problem
She loved the design, the look suited her and her business perfectly. She just couldn’t update it. It had been set up as a CMS so that she could, in theory, change it whenever she liked. It’s just the CMS was so complicated, the site so awkwardly designed that she couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
At first we took a look at it to carry out the updates for her but when we started to dig a little deeper it was not good news. Entirely Flash based it was far from accessible and not at all search engine friendly. The limitations of the CMS had meant the designers had to fudge the content so that it looked good.
The Solution
So, we gave her two quotes – one to carry out the changes, one to completely re-engineer the site on a platform that would be far easier to maintain and far better at giving her the site she needed.
It would cost a little more at first but she could see the benefits, so we started to implement the design she liked in a far better tool – CMS Made Simple, to be precise. In the meantime, her previous website designers, who were often hard to get hold of, usually impossible, popped up demanding money for hosting costs that had never been explained to her.
She took great pleasure in telling them her plans and exactly where they could get off. She is now very happy with her site, Fill Your Face Cosmetics.
All’s well that ends well?
Time has passed and her site continues to grow, regularly updated with the content she needs and costing her less to maintain. So much so, she has already saved the cost of us re-implementing the site.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Yesterday she was contacted by some friends who had also had their websites designed by the same people. It turns out that the designers and their company have disappeared. Their website is down, and so are all the websites of their clients.
So all the clients have to convince the hosts of this particularly strange system to re-instate their sites, then decide where to go from there. We have a suggestion…
…but until then, what can we learn from this?
What should you know about your website?
If your designers are also your hosts, you need to ask them a few questions…
1) Is my domain name registered in my name?
2) Where is my website hosted?
3) Is my website backed up?
4) Can I make changes to the site myself?
5) What are my user names and passwords, including ftp access to the site?
A decent designer should have no problem sharing this information. After all, they will want you stay with them not because you have to, but because you want to.
Wanting the answers to these questions doesn’t mean you are thinking of leaving, it just means you’re being careful – what if your designer gets hit by a bus tomorrow?
If you don’t like the answers they give, it’s time to start hunting for a new team to work for. Just don’t hunt too far, eh?
Mrs Dear Geek’s business is fairly marvellous – a Kent website design company that specialise in helping small businesses get big websites from small budgets.
CMS – Content Management System – a way of building a website where the content (words and pictures) are kept separate from the design and software. That way you can easily change the bits you need without having to understand things you shouldn’t have to worry about.
Flash – Adobe Flash – a system for delivering applications and multimedia like animations across the web. Can create great looking sites that do nothing for your search rankings or accessibility.