Beantin

James Royal-Lawson

accessibility

5 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 13, 2010)

Consistency: Key to a Better User Experience

I’m a big fan of consistency. It’s an essential factor in having a successful web presence. This UX Booth article covers a number of ways in which your site should be consistent.

A beginner’s guide to blogging for business

Some sensible advice here from Kevin. A useful post to send to a manager/executive when the blog discussion comes up. (or at least to read before talking to them.)

The Social Media Bubble

Whether you agree with the article or not, I find it always refreshing to see buzz-topics being subjected to a bit of economic theory. Some good points about relationships; particularly that many online social relationships are one-sided and lack mutual investment in the relationship.

Step away from your site, I dare you

With the changing way the search engines are looking at how serve the searchers, website owners have to change with them. Universal or Blended Search, together with social media, has changed the game.

How Accessible is Your Website? 8 Tools to Analyze Your Website’s Level of Accessibility

Useful collection of resources; some validating tools, some monitoring & finally some Twitter accounts to follow – 8 Tools to Analyze Your Website’s Level of Accessibility

For your reading pleasure (week 3, 2010)

How Google ranks Tweets

A little bit of an insight into how Google ranks tweets on Twitter from a Google Engineer.

The Case Against Vertical Navigation

Yet another detailed and well argued article from Smashing Magazine. This time covering the use of (left hand side) vertical navigation menus on web sites, and arguing the case for horizontal menus instead.

Öppna länkar i nytt fönster?

A request to have pages opening up in new windows (or tabs) came up yet again this week from a client. This is a useful page covering many arguments – not all of them against. Although in almost all situations, I am.

Preventing Spam in Form Submissions without Using a CAPTCHA

A clearly written guide to how you can do almost the same job as a CAPTCHA, but without using a CAPTCHA and all of the problems it causes people.

Social and Mobile Lead in Nielsen Annual Intranet Report

Bill Ives gives a summary of Nielsen’s latest Intranet report. The tipping point for mobile web, could tip over into Intranets too during 2010.

Färdiga SEO-paketlösningar rekommenderas inte

Niklas Lindh explains why you should use SEO consultants rather than throw money at pre-packaged SEO services./

A Brief History of Eye-Tracking

UX Booth provide us with a nice read about the history of eye tracking, without getting to the whole love/hate eye tracking debate.

For your reading pleasure (week 2, 2010)

Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998

This Nielsen Alterbox article from February 2009 is worth re-reading. There’s a lot of talk about the mobile web right now, including my own babblings about 2010 being the tipping point. I don’t agree with all of Nielsen’s recommendations, but don’t let that get in your way.

2010 Intranet resolutions

Still, after all these years, “making it easier to find information” is still right up there on the intranet wish-list.

Technology, the intranet, and employee productivity

In short, the corporate intranet (and use of the Internet for activities such as research) can be a tremendous productivity gain, not a drain.

Open access is smart business, not an employee entitlement

Another article, rightly, arguing against organisations blocking websites.

Almost 8m UK Adults Struggle To Access Websites

Low levels of accessibility creates a needless block to the possibility of doing business with a sizeable group of people. This article gives an overview of a recent report as well as giving 6 concrete bits of advice to make your site more accessible.

Using the ALT and TITLE Attributes Properly

Another year-old article, but a lot of people out there publishing content still have very poor understanding of these two attributes and how to use them.

Why Redirect old content when Changing domain or Server?

Jesper Åström publishes a series of three articles covering one of my pet issues – redirecting pages.

5 reasons your web presence misses the mark

DDB Stockholm have been behind some excellent creative work, including some fantastic viral videos (Who hasn’t seen the piano stairs?). Their new website is a step forward showing that they understand that your website is just one part of your web presence – one part of your distributed website that exists across multiple platforms and services.

But, it falls short of ticking all the boxes. Here are 5 examples of where they have missed a trick…

1. Flash based

A similar result could have been achieved (plus improved performance/less CPU-drain) with other technologies (eg html, css & ajax). For a recap of this bugbear of mine, see this post on Why flash based site suck.

2. Loading time

We may not be using 56kbps modems anymore, but loading times are just as important as ever.
It’s not only humans that bore whilst waiting for pages to load (and we bore very quickly), search engines bore too. Slow to respond and slow to load pages will be penalised.
Just the index.html file on ddb.se is 148 KB. The entire start page (non-flash version) is 1231 KB (1057 KB of this are the various images used)

3. Accessability

OK, perhaps not up their amongst DDB’s target audiences, but making a web site accessible isn’t an optional extra.
It should be standard practice for everyone producing web sites. Granted, a non-flash version of
the site exists, which of course is a Good Thing, but accessibility doesn’t stop at “alternative content when flash disabled”.

4. Sitemap.xml

An easy win. All the major search engines love eating up sitemaps. Combine a sitemap.xml with robots.txt and you’ve made it so much easier for your content to be indexed. A valid and correctly linked RSS feed is an important part of the package, but it’s not a sitemap.

5. Microformats

rel=”me”. This is just as important for companies as for individuals in order to consolidate and confirm official identities across multiple sites and platforms. By cross referencing your various pages, you help join the dots for search engines (and visitors). Other microformats are of increasing importance; Geo-tags, contact details, product information. The sooner you make use of them, the quicker you’ll have the data indexed.

What is required…

These things are not overly complicated, new, expensive, or unavoidable. What is required is a web project manager with a good broad knowledge of the how the web really works, plus a quality web master/web manager. A web site manager isn’t a code-monkey or a copywriter, but someone who understands your web strategy, your target audiences, and the Internet – and who can make sure your web presence keeps on ticking all the boxes long after launch.

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