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Managing Brand Consistency

There’s no debating the fact that an online presence is essential in today’s market. Indeed there are only a few niche industries that do not rely upon or are affected by the global transition from workplace to web.

When it comes to doing it right, anyone with an ounce of knowledge of the way the Internet works will agree that representing your business or product online is by no means as simple as throwing up a website and claiming your territory in a small corner of the web.

Aside from the many factors that make a ‘great’ website, such as careful usability consideration, good aesthetic design and well-written copy; there are the numerous other external variables including SEO, PR and email marketing etc that help to promote your website, and in turn your brand.

What is a brand

Well, it’s just your logo and stuff isn’t it? Not at all. A brand is the representation of a business that is portrayed through a range of mediums – logos, product names, colour schemes, slogans, the style of language used to promote a product or service and much more. For a more verbose description, Wikipedia offers us this:

‘A brand is a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer; more specifically, it refers to the descriptive verbal attributes and concrete symbols such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme that convey the essence of a company, product or service.’

It’s often found that as a company grows, the general acknowledgment of the value of it’s branding grows and becomes more apparent. Ideally this shouldn’t be the case, it’s irrelevant whether you’re a new start-up or a multi-million dollar corporation, your company’s image should always demand a level of priority.

However, creating a solid brand can take a lot of time, decisive and objective thinking, creative input and usually a lot more money. Thus many smaller business fail to see it’s relevance; ‘maybe a quick logo mock-up in Microsoft Word and some cheap template flyers should do the trick’. This is not a concept that should be promoted.

Losing sight of your brand

When it comes to web design, many businesses loose sight of their objectives and company image. I’m primarily referring to those that have transposed to the Internet, who already have a physical brand.

There are a plethora of reasons that explain this. Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding of the Internet’s potential which leads to carelessness, also the idea of building a nice new website can cloud judgement and obscure the realistic goals and objectives of a business. This isn’t helped by the appeal of free website templates and WYSIWYG editors that are far cheaper than investing in a professional designer.

Unfortunately taking this approach can cripple your existing image. Preset themes aren’t built around your branding and are almost impossible to manipulate to accurately represent your company.

At the other end of the spectrum, designers can also cause trouble. Even though we, as designers, are supposed to have a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t on the web; we can also get carried away by our own creativity and artistic input – which in turn can tar our client’s branding that they may have created and built over time, purely because we feel our method is better or our opinion more valid.

New website – let’s rebrand!

Another popular trend is to completely rebrand to correlate with the launch of a new website. It’s often unclear to see what business do this, unless the rebrand came first and a new website is therefore a necessary measure. Some people get bored of their current image too easily, some believe it a positive, refreshing step to rebrand every so often, like a spring clean. But let’s remember that building a strong company image relies on consistency and recognition, which is impossible to attain if logos and colour schemes are changing every 6 months.

There can sometimes be a fine line between evolving a band and recreating it. You must step back and ensure that, when updating your image, you can guarantee that it still reflects and resembles the old look and feel – that it maintains recognition. The process of rebranding should be done in one of two ways:

• Gradual evolution, one small step at a time, over a long period of time.
• Complete transformation – a full, across-the-board revolution that demonstrates a strong step forward.

Maintaining your brand’s consistency

David Airey’s article on the top aspects of successful branding concludes that consistency is by far the most important factor in maintaining and growing a great brand. This means ensuring that your image is immediately recognisable wherever it is, and on whichever medium it’s found.

Take some of the most globally recognisable logos:

The topic of what makes a good logo is a discussion for another day, but what has helped to establish these logos as such undeniably iconic symbols is the fact they have remained consistent on print, clothing, packaging, TV and on the Internet.

Who’s the new kid in town?

What’s your reason for changing or developing your image? Is it to help pull your company into the current times, to motivate your workforce or bring in new clients? Are you changing your corporate image to transform people’s perspective of the company, perhaps to express a higher level of quality or when trying to enter a new market?

If you choose to redevelop your branding – make sure you’re clear of the reasons why you’re doing it. If it’s a half-hearted or foolish move, it can greatly damage your image and general recognition.

Rebranding across the board

When it’s time for a rebrand, make sure it’s definitely time for a rebrand – don’t do it for the sake of it. Your first step is to decide whether to gradually rebrand or change everything in one fell swoop. Once you’re settled on that account, it’s time to get as many heads together to brainstorm and construct a solid plan for change. Make sure everyone involved in the process is on the same page, understands the end target and is comfortable to express their opinions that may contribute to the process.

• Rebranding is not just a new logo. Mocking up a new logo is not rebranding – in fact it really serves no purpose at all if it’s not backed up by a full, fresh direction that incorporates new slogans, mission statements, business and marketing strategies, colour schemes, typography and imagery usage guidelines, print media (business cards and letterheads etc), occasionally new staff members and much more.
• Project manage the rebranding process. Treat your in-house development as you would a client’s project. Set deadlines, make sure staff are sticking to the deadlines and are on task, set someone in charge of the operation to ensure it runs smoothly and this will help generate a better overall outcome.
• Aim for originality, push some boundaries. Some of the most popular rebranding campaigns have been those that have boasted originality and new ideas. This can be a case of using an arrangement of the letters in your company name to build an adaptable logo that works on several levels, like the famous FedEx logo, where the space between the E and X forms the shape of an arrow – representing direction and haste. A similar idea is used in the Amazon logo, where the arrow underneath points from A to Z and also resembles a smiling face.

The main point is that if you’re going to rebrand, do it properly – consider all the elements and ensure that they relate to each other and don’t contradict the overall message.

Bridging the offline-online gap

When taking your branding to the web, many of the same rules apply at to print and other medium. Sometimes we’re held back by current technologies or accessibility and cross-browser considerations, such as a restricted number of typefaces. However – colour, imagery, copy and print design elements can be recreated or manipulated to suit the web.

A method to help retain brand consistency over different mediums is to create a brand guidelines document. This sets in stone various rules that must consistently be applied when developing any form of branding, such as what typography to use, colours to use and on which backgrounds, the kerning and spacing around letters, block content and imagery, how and where the logo is meant to be used and much more.

When creating a website design based on a company’s current image, I surround myself in print media and any form of branding I can find to help transform those elements to the web.

Don’t forget, the objective is to maintain consistent brand recognition. When a visitor arrives at the website – it needs to be immediately apparent where they are.

On your way to creating a stronger company image

Creating a strong company image is about more than just the visual essence you project. It relies on a well-crafted product, effective marketing, good customer service, in some cases a great portfolio or catalogue and lots of time and effort.

When making important design and business direction decisions and strategies – don’t rush into anything, take your time, research and gather as much opinion (especially from within the business) as possible.

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For more ideas and information on branding visit David Airey’s blog and the Venture3 blog. I would also recommend ‘Graphic Design that Works‘ from Rockport.

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Location Independent Living (and working)

While on my little trip at the moment I met a Scottish couple and, aided by a few German beers, we got to know each other a bit. Amongst the hours of gradually blurrier conversation we talked about what I do for a living and the ability my line of work affords me to actually work anywhere in the world.

By this I mean that I could be in a small Thai village or on a Caribbean island but, providing I have an Internet connection, could still technically do my job. This may sound simple and in some aspects it is, but it can still be a scary step to take when you’re settled in a cushty regular job or of course if your line of work requires you to be within a certain location.

This lifestyle is indeed job-specific, and lends itself very much so to online entrepreneurs and designers, SEOs etc. I’ve never met my previous 3 freelance clients, but to be honest I don’t need to. We’ve spoken over the phone and via email and the work has been completed successfully and if anything at less expense.

Full-time job – meet Location Independent Living

So – interested in becomming an LIP (Location Independent Professional)? Well, it’s still quite a relatively new and unusual concept (in the respect that not every man and his dog is doing it) and to be honest – it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. In fact, you’d stuggle to find much of a mention on WIkipedia but the leading authorative on the subject would have to be www.locationindependent.com.

Is anyone really doing this?

Why yes they sure are. Some big names to throw out would include Elliot Jay Stocks and Collis Ta’eed. Collis and his partner Cyan have been milling around Hong Kong and Canada and who knows where else while maintaing their online presence and business interests – see here. And Mr. Stocks (of Carsonified fame) took time out up in Norway earlier this year while setting up his own business – see here.

So what are the benefits?

• Live and work in exotic, different locations. Why work and/or live in the city center? You could be relaxing on a beach with laptop on knee and a cocktail in hand, or getting cosy in a cottage in the countryside in front of your iMac with a big mug of hot chocolate.
• Make the most of currency conversion rates. When I was in Thailand I offered some folks my design services, but thinking back – there’s no way they could have afforded my prices due to the value of the Thai Baht to the British Pound. But what about the other way around? By living in a different country while working for clients in other countries – you can actually earn far more, just because of different countries economic climates (etc) and could, in effect, live like a king!
• Be your own boss. This pretty much ties in with just going freelance but LIL really opens up the ability to choose where you want to work, when you want to work and the only person you really have to answer to is the client – when you want to.
• Seek new inspiration. Working in the same environment, or even culture can get repetitive at times. Imagine working from Japan or South America or anywhere really that isn’t home and all the new ideas, inspiration and people you’d meet that would help to influence and surely help improve yourself.

And of course – the negatives?

• Missing family and friends. If you decide to move away or travel while working, chances are you’ll be by yourself or maybe with a partner/friend. Saying goodbye to everyone can be pretty tough.
• Possible issues with paying taxes and bank accounts.
• Lack motivation to actually work. If you’re surrounded by distractions it can be easy to loose interest in working and go off doing something else.
• It can get lonely. The lack of a social environment supplied by working in an office or while freelancing for companies can cause some loneliness at times. MSN and Skype only go so far to compensate for human companionship!
• More expensive than living at home. Especially if you’re travelling, backpacking or moving to a new country – the costs will be a lot higher than simply retiring to your home office. The temptation with moving to new places is to get out and explore and have fun but if your living depends on continuing working then you’ll have to maintain focus – or at least save up lots of backup cash before you leave!
• Time zones! Don’t forget, if you’re working and living on the other side of the world to your client – you can’t go ringing them in their sleep! Working in completely different time zones may require you to adjust your working patterns to fit with your clients at times.

So, is it worth it?

Well I’m not intending on going anywhere soon. I’m comfortable working at Flame and am learning too much and having too much of a good time to throw it away right now. But it’s always a possibility for the future. If anyone’s interested in becomming an LIP or is already travelling or living and working ‘location independently’ at the moment – give us your 2 cents in the comments section – I’d love to hear from people with experience.

But, a word of advice I would offer anyone before throwing all their clothes and Macbook in a suitcase is to research properly before you go anywhere. Although there, quite surprisingly, isn’t much on the subject out there – the best resource without a doubt is Location Independent Living. I also recommend checking out Executive Hacks and The 4-Hour Workweek.

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10 SEO elements all websites should have

As I’m on holiday this week, tripping around Europe, I’ve little time to be writing blog articles. But fear not! Jerry Low has kindly stepped in to supply his top 10 SEO elements that all websites should have. Enjoy!

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Seriously, you don’t need an expert to optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), after all, is not rocket science. It is something you can learn and do it yourself – all it takes is some serious readings and hard work.

However, there is something we need to know before we start any real SEO work – the direction of our entire SEO campaign – What we are trying to achieve? What are our targeted keywords? Who are our competitors? That led us to the most important preparation work before any SEO campaign get started – keyword research.

Keyword research is crucial as it acts like a compass for your website or blog. A proper keyword research reveals the supply and demand trends in your industries thus giving general idea on which keyword you should focus on.

In brief, here is how you can do a keyword research:

• Get a list of related keywords using Google Keyword Tool
• Search each keyword to check how many websites turned out on the search engine result page (SERP) – this fits in as the number of supplies.
• Websites topping the SERP are your major competitors, study them well.
• To learn what are the demands, check number of searches for each keyword using keyword tools.
• Tool suggestion for keyword research: Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery – these two are my favourites.

Well, now you have a rough idea on your competition. The smart approach is to be a big fish in a small/average pond – for starters, you should focus your work on keywords with moderate demands and low competition.

Besides supply and demand, keyword research also offers valuable information for your web designs. Take example that you are selling shoes online, I am sure you’ll have questions like: What are the popular brands searched online? How shoes should be categorized – based on brand, occasion, or sizes?

All these can be answered as you run down the keyword research work. You’ll see searches come in based on brands, like ‘DC shoes’, ‘jordan shoes’, ‘nike shoes’; in the same time, searchers are also looking for shoes for different activities or occasions, like ‘ballet shoes’, ‘safety shoes’, ‘bowling shoes’, ‘prom shoes’, and so on.

By the end of your research work, you should be able to generate a list of target keywords. And now it’s the time to focus your SEO work on them. To get started, here are the 10 key elements that will improve your blog or website’s SEO quality immediately. 10 key elements that improve your website SEO quality immediately:

1. Index-able and Keyword-rich URL

The power of a keyword rich URL is often overlooked by bloggers and webmasters. In case you have yet to registered your domain name, try include your primary keywords in your domain; while for those who are already running a website, a keyword rich URL (example: abc.com/keyword) still helps a lot. One might complains that domain name with keywords faces branding problems and hard to be remembered; but that’s the dilemma every webmaster/blogger has to face.

Also, a good SEO practice is to avoid complicated dynamic URL that is hard to be indexed. Try limit your URL to 2 – 3 variables, excessive usage of ?, $, &, +, % characters as well as cgi-bin redirect will only do you harm.

2. A reliable web hosting

Website with poor uptime will never rank high on search engines. Let’s imagine that you are the search engine, how would ranking a down website on top of your search result page looks like? Awfully bad, don’t you think? Hence, hosting your website on a reliable web hosts – dedicated or shared, is very crucial.

To pick up the right web host, you can always hang around reputable hosting forums like WebHostingTalk.com or you can read my personal hosting reviews here.

3. Keyword-rich title and heading tags

A keyword-rich page title is as crucial as a keyword-rich URL for a few reasons.

One, a keyword-rich title tells the search engine bots what the page is about thus grouping your webpage into the right category; second, most search engines will bold your keywords in title whenever that particular keyword is searched. Common sense, the bolding effect will definitely draw extra attention from the searchers and thus, brings more clicks into your website/blog.

Heading tags (example <h1></h1>) is hard to be missed in old times. Not now anymore. As more and more websites are built solely on blogging software like Typepad and WordPress, heading tags are often put in the wrong use.

Take Wordpress (WP) templates for example, WP themes designers often use heading tags for sidebar titles without relevant keywords (example: Achieve, Categories) which bring no SEO value at all. To make sure your blog is well SEO-ed, one top thing to do is to remove or modify these headings into keyword-rich headings.

4. Alt tag on images

In term of SEO, putting descriptive alt attributes with your image places additional relevant text to your source code. Search engines like this and the more relevant text you have the better chances you get to rank higher.

As an additional benefit, a descriptive image alt tag helps users to understand your image when it fails to load.

5. Proper structured internal linking

Search engines pay a lot of attention to links – both internal and external. As internal links are those that can be controlled by you, make sure your website internal linking is proper structured and filled with relevant descriptive keywords. A plain anchor text like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’ are not clever; ‘click here for more Jordan shoes’ and ‘read more about ballet shoes’ are.

For website owners, make sure there are plenty enough of internal links pointing to your primary pages; for bloggers, mentioned and linked to your previous blogpost whenever it’s appropriate, this give extra link juice to your previous blogpost (hence better rankings) plus it enables your readers to catch up what they missed.

6. Inbound links

Link development is an inevitable process if you want your website to rank high. The keypoint, however, is not to obtain links blindly from spammy websites and directories. Always emphasize quality on top of quantity when you’re building links.

There are wide options for your link building campaign: from submitting your sites to reputable directories to asking for a link exchange; from buying text link ads to writing guest blog post in your industries – some of these methods can be risky (of search engine’s filter and bans) and some are not. What you need to do is to pick a series of method you feel comfortable with and pour some sweat in the link building campaign.

7. XML sitemap

XML sitemaps is used for search engine bots indexing. It runs as a list of all pages and posts along with related information like priority of each page and the date of creation. These elements help search engine bots to crawl your websites/blogs as well as learning the importance level of each page.

While XML sitemap is not a must for a website to rank high, it is however good practice for web and blog owners to have it on site.

8. WWW/non-WWW Canonical Issue

Originally, all websites built can be viewed in two versions: the WWW and the non-WWW version. In normal cases, the search engines should be able to recognize the issue and rank the websites accordingly but occasionally it fails. This led to serious problem where websites are penalized (especially on Google) due to content duplication. Even if there’s no penalty imposed, the web page indexed twice will have hard time to rank high as the back links are (PR/anchor text) shared over two web pages.

The solution of this problem is simple. One, you can login to Google Webmaster Tools and tell them which version (WWW or non-WWW) of the website is preferred. Alternatively, a simple 301 redirect code in your .htaccess file is sufficient to solve the problem.

Example code:

To have your website in WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com $
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

To have your website in non-WWW version

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^ example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http:// example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

9. Robots.txt

Robots.txt simply tells search engine bots what to crawl and what not to. It might not help that much in website rankings but it prevents irrelevant objects to be related to your website – which is good for your website to look focus (in search engine eyes) and professional.

10. Content is king

Users do not search for fun, they search for information and solution to a problem. If your website or blog does not offer what the users want, they will move away. As what had been widely covered by Nathan’s post about increasing and maitaining blog traffics, you should know attracting traffics via SEO is just the beginning; the key point of having a successful website is always having an informative website that solves human’s needs.

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About the author

Jerry Low is the guy behind Web Hosting Secret Revealed. He offers unbiased hosting reviews to help make your decision easier. In case you are looking for a web host, why not start reading his recommendations – Hostgator now?

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Buying and Selling Blogs

Initially, the concept of ’selling’ or spending large quantities of money on a virtual database-powered 2D on-screen entity may seem absurd. But let’s face it – blogs make money, therefore they have value and in turn become a commodity that can be sold or used to make more money!

Although the blog marketplace may seem like a far off notion to most bloggers, there is a surprising amount of currency to be made by building up high profile, high traffic blogs and trading them off for a tasty sum. Take this story from Problogger for example. And there are similar stories of bloggers selling off their hard work for up to millions of dollars.

Before you get carried away, creating a worthy blog that draws in mass traffic becomes a full-time occupation and can even require several writers. It takes time and hard work, but the pay-off can be huge. Here I’ll discuss some of the pros and cons of buying and selling blogs, whilst examining the market in more detail.

Selling up

For many of us, especially part-time and one-man (no sexual discrimination intended) writers – the concept of selling sounds far more appetising than buying. This could be down to the vision of a huge paycheck, and also based upon a love of blogging – why buy someone else’s work when you can create? The flip side is why sell a blog that you’ve put so much love into and that’s probably already making a consistent profit through advertising and whatever other means?

Often, the idea of selling their blog may never even cross people’s mind – until someone pops up with an offer, then everything changes…

…Sell your blog, buy a new car and take a break on a cruise then come back with some extra pocket money and start again. New blog, build it up and maybe sell that?…

…and thus it practically becomes a business.

Sometimes the primary objective from the start is to develop a blog and sell it, yet sometimes the blogging process just becomes too time-consuming, tedious or difficult and instead of letting their blog go to waste – it can be worth trying to reap some reward for the time and energy put into it. At some point hosting fees, domain renewal and advertising fees will creep up, and if your blog is losing traffic or making less revenue then the practical option is to try and sell up.

Buying blogs

Selling your blog seems straightforward enough – it’s about making money. But at the other end of the spectrum, someone has to buy what you’re selling, so why buy?

The target is still to make money. So expelling intial capital sounds like a step backwards? But there are indeed many great reasons for buying up blogs:

• Fast-track ahead. No matter how diligently you work and how good your SEO skills may be – building up blog traffic and recognition takes time. Buying a blog that already has a consistent reader base and high regular traffic gives you a head start.
• If a blog is already making money, this assures a cashflow from day one. You then have the ability to work and improve the blog to increase traffic and income. A lot of the initial hard work has already been done for you.
• Obtaining another advertising platform. If you already have other blogs or products making money, buying into a popular blog provides you with a means to reach far more people for free to advertise and promote your other products.
• Buying security. Aside from just obtaining an asset, you’re also getting the knowledge and security that it works. It’s not always as simple as creating a new blog and it will develop in time – some things don’t work out. By buying into a proven concept you’re negating that risk.

Well, that’s all dandy. But it can’t all be great? Of course plenty of downsides and risks to buying a blog:

• Obviously – the cost element. Spending a lot of money doesn’t always guarantee a continuously successful blog with a promising future. At least starting a blog from scratch can be almost free and allows more control over it’s image, direction and target audience.
• Typical online sales risks. Selling a virtual creation can always be a daunting task. A very secure and agreed transaction should take place, yet it’s still so easy for someone to run off with the details for a site after being paid, or misrepresenting a blog’s true value. It’s essential to research both the blog and the seller well before parting with any money.
• Keeping loyal readers happy. Regulars are regulars for a reason. They like the style of certain blogs – perhaps it’s the design, the tone of voice, the quality or quantity of the articles or the community it promotes. If you storm in and change everything – you may loose lots of valued visitors and regular traffic which can undo all the hard work of the previous owner, and potentially destroy your investment.

So, when buying – research well, respect the theme and readership of the blog you’re buying into and be prepared to work hard to keep it running at the same, or a better pace.

How do you value your blog?

If you’ve decided to sell, or have been made an offer – that’s great. But how on Earth do you value a blog? You can’t exactly take it down to the local jewellers or do an Ebay search. You can however glimse the competition at sites such as Performancing.com and the Sitepoint Marketplace.

Valuing your blog is not something to rush. And as blog sales aren’t feverishly common – there’s no set RRP or rules that dictate exactly what’s worth what. Valuation is subjective and so the selling process lends itself to auctions and even bartering. However, there are still plenty of factors to be taken into account to help reach realistic values.

• Traffic. One of the best measures of a blog’s success is it’s traffic. The 2 key aspects to consider are consistency and rate of growth. If traffic is still on the up then it’s most likely a good time to pitch it to a potential buyer. Use an accurate, unbias analytics package. I’d recommend Google Analytics because as well as being a fantastic piece of free kit – it’s a reliable name that should ensure a level of confidence.
• Readership and Subscribers. The other respectable method to analyse a blog’s popularity is it’s audience. Not just random traffic, but regular, repeat traffic that have a purpose in visiting your blog. The best way to assess this is through RSS subscribers, registered users and email subscribers.
• Inbound links. The more high quality inbound links – the more alternate entry paths to your blog. Don’t just aim for the homepage but try and obtain recognition for deeper level pages and important traffic sources that will aid your search engine rankings.
• Current earnings. If your blog is already making profit through whatever means, this will be a huge selling point and seriously help to assess your blog’s value in it’s rawest format – money.
• The full package – design and content. Aside from all the statistics – when you’re selling your blog, you’re also selling all the design work, code and developement that’s gone into it. If you were to build a website for a client and charged a £1,000 – a similar sized blog should effectively hold such a value. Don’t forget this when valuing your blog or website, it’s not just about traffic and popularity. The chances are a better design and more considerate, functional blog will fetch more money.
• Domain name. A single string that may have cost no more than £5 originally can become extremely valuable when paired with a recognisable brand or website. Domain names alone have been known to go for millions. An easy-to-remember, snappy and recognisable domain name can contribute immensely to a site’s success and it’s worth.

Adding it all up

The way I look at it, the way to calculate a blog’s value is to estimate how much it would cost to create everything again from scratch – if every element had a value. Without trying to get too mathematical, my personal formula works out something like so:

But, before you rely on the above diagram it’s worth noting that I’ve yet to sell a blog and will most certainly not be selling Redswish any time soon – so experts on the subject may use different techniques.

My key advice would be research, research, research. Don’t rush into anything.

Considerations when changing hands

When selling, the main concern is receiving the money before full control is handed over. When buying, it’s more complicated. Transferring a sum of money can be a simple procedure, but transferring the keys to a blog requires several considerations:

• Domain and hosting will need to be transferred.
• Whois information requires changing.
• Site information will need amending, such as about and contact page and any mailto links.
• CMS access, database and possibly server details may need to be changed or transferred.
• Any external accounts that directly tie in with the blog will need to change hands. Eg – Feedburner, Technorati, BlogCatalog etc.
• Google Analytics or tracking scripts may need to be changed to the new owner’s details.
• Advertising accounts, adwords etc need to transfer to the new owner’s bank details.

So – before buying or selling, bear in mind the many other factors in the transaction. Could you imagine spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a blog, only to forget to change the affiliate account bank details over and the revenues continue to go to the previous owner?

Keeping in touch

Selling your blog isn’t always the end of the line. You may be kept on as a writer, or have to teach the new owner’s how to use the CMS or blogging platform. However don’t forget to charge for this. Bigger blogs with regular visitors may miss your blogging style or presence and may not care much for a direct changeover.

Blogs represent a lot of different things to different people. Some are purely to present information make money, whereas some are an outlet of personal expression and opinions that contribute and help others. Think before selling – is it really worth it? Think before buying – can you continue to make this work and recoup your intial investment?

Play safe, have fun! Discuss…

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A note on accessibility – body background colours

Accessibility (dare I say it) guru (oh dear I said it) Jeffrey Zeldman recently pointed out on his blog that very few (and I’ve tested this, it is very few) websites actually specify CSS body background colours. Some of you may think “What? How stupid of them!” and some of you may think “What? Why the hell does that matter?“, well believe it or not it does matter.

Users, and I do not mean disabled users, visually impaired users or accessibility freaks but all users have the ability and many take advantage of the ability to specifiy default body background colours, font colours and font sizes among other things. This can aid readability, help colourblind users, satisfy personal preference and hell; some people just love to mess around. The problem is, by forgetting or neglecting to specify a body background colour – your website could appear as so:

An exaggeration? No, not really. If you don’t believe me check out some of the reliable comments on the respective article. A surprising number of users choose to maintain a default browser background colour other than white.

Good news!

Let’s face it, all you have to to avoid this (assuming your site’s background colour is white) is to slip the following into your CSS:

body {
background-color: #ffffff;
}

No way! Yes way. Just a little something to remeber.

A note on font sizes

As I mentioned above, users can specify default font sizes and colours as well as background colours. So it’s also important to take this into account. The chances are you’ll specify a font colour naturally to suit the site, but people often dictate font sizes in pixels (and yes, I’m no exception). Always try and use ems to describe your font sizes – for more information on typography accessibility you can check out my recent post on Accessible Web Design or this fab article on A List Apart.

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Growing for Movember

Image courtesy of www.biggerbetterbeards.org
This month me and the fellows (males) at Flame will be growing moustaches, while trying to refrain from letting loose our uncontrollable natural beards (well, if I could grow one!)

Why are we doing such a crazy thing? Well, for charity of course! Allow me to indulge you…

The men in the office are growing fine moustaches throughout the month of ‘Movember’ (as opposed to November) in support of the Movember Foundation – an Australian based, not for profit, charitable organisation that creates awareness around men’s health issues, with a focus on prostate cancer.

So, why do I bring this to your attention? 3 reasons:

1. Because it’s cool, and I’m spreading the word about a good cause.
2. To explain to those who may meet me over the next few weeks why I will look so ridiculous.
3. Ahh, that’s right – I want your help!

How can you help?

All we ask is for a monetary donation to go towards the foundation. We’ll be looking ridiculous for 4 weeks while you can do a little bit to help a good cause.

How much? Anything, anything at all from 1p to ‘ridiculous figures’. Every little helps and no donation will be considered too small.

Sounds great – cash or cheque?

In this modern day we don’t even need sponsor forms. You can go straight to the Movember site and donate to our team – The Mo Fo’s…

So, get your wallets out – meanwhile we’ll be keeping our razors away!

For more information on the Movember Foundation visit their site at www.movember.com.

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Designing with data

The amount of information we come into contact with every minute on the Internet is absolutely staggering. Both consciously and subconsciously we are constantly absorbing tons of data; whether it be in text form, imagery, video, or audio and regardless of whether it’s been actively seeked or encroaches in from the sides.

Everyone knows that people don’t read web pages, they scan them. Therefore prioritising the information that really matters should be the primary goal when designing. However some designers get lost when trying to either squash too much information in or by loosing sight of what’s really important – why the visitor is there, for the sake of adverts or bombarding them with splash information to try and draw them further into the site.

2 important points before I go further:

• Sometimes it’s not the designers fault. Pushy clients can lead to bad design decisions that are either difficult or impossible to avert.
• Prioritising information does not mean minimalistic design, but applying a level of usability consideration.

Introducing a concept: Information Design Prioritisation

Of course this already exists in different forms. I’m simply labelling it in a way that corresponds well with this particular topic.

Sometimes the content of a site can dictate it’s own design. Wireframes can be developed easily and sensibly from the initial information provided by the client. However some sites hold so much data that needs to be accessed quickly and painlessly by users. This is where the challenges can arise. Throw in advertising and meta-data and simple designs can easily get crowded.

So, IDP (Information Design Prioritisation). Take the elements that are required on a page then decide what takes priority and score the different elements depending on how essential they really are to the user experience. If you’re redesigning a site and using the same information; use Analytics results to see where users are clicking the most and eye-tracking tests to decipher their routes and the hot spots on the page.

Clients have their own agendas as to what takes priority. Naturally it’s normally whatever leads to the money. Sometimes these are adverts, sometimes it’s the product a site is selling. What’s imperative to realise is that, in terms of the design, it’s not the necessarily about what the client wants but what the user wants.

If a blog offers financial advice, the chances are that the visitor is looking for financial advice. So – what takes priority; the informative blog articles or the Google adwords and big banners advertising IFA’s and cheap consultancy services? My bet is that the user wants to read the articles, the site owner wants to earn a few extra bucks through adwords. Often good design ethic and good business ethic can go hand in hand.

Secondary and tertiary priority information

On a shop search results page, the results are by far the most important elements because this is information that the user has requested personally. ‘Featured products‘ or ‘Latest deals‘ are secondary or even tertiary priority information; they may apply but haven’t been directly requested so should be smaller and less obvious than the search results.

Don’t use it? Lose it.

Sometimes it’s required to be strict. Like having a house cleanup – do you really need that old hamster ball or foot massager? Get rid! Assess the relevance and necessity of the site elements on a design, if they’re not required or will rarely be used – either ditch the entire thing or hide it. This can sometimes be a difficult decision to make, especially with pushy clients – but have the guts to say no, use your creative instinct to work out what needed and what’s just getting in the way.

Condensing the visual presence of data

When the primary priority information is built into the design, the various secondary priority information still needs to be easily accessed, but just not as obvious. In the case of blogs – this is normally where the sidebar(s) come into play. Information can be condensed and immediately concealed using some of the following methods:

• Select boxes. A list of links, options or answers might be better held within a <select> as opposed to a static list or radio buttons.
• Drop down menus. Secondary and lower-level menu items can be stored in CSS drop-down menus, where the information is accessed by the user only when it is needed. IDP can also apply here – does certain information really require it’s own page, are 3/4 levels of navigation really necessary?
• Javascript/Ajax effects. jQuery accordian menus, content scollers, big fancy tooltips, content areas that appear on cue etc are all great methods of hiding information until it’s requested. Don’t forget to consider users and browsers without javascript. These types of elements and effects are also useful for SEO – the content’s still there for the search enginer spiders but is tidied away visually for a cleaner user experience.
• Pop-ups, such as lightbox, fancybox and all the other many spin offs are great for displaying large pictures, iframes, video etc without taking the user to another page and saving plenty of page real estate that can be used for other information (or maybe just whitespace!).

Applying the theory

At Flame, we were recently involved in the pitch for a new website design for a popular British holiday parks business. We’d designed their exisiting site a few years ago and it was time for an upgrade. Although we didn’t win the pitch, we learnt a few lessons whilst working on the designs and realised the importance of information design prioritisation. We had to design several pages, but for the purpose of this example I will use my homepage design.

The pitch was really a straightforward redesign, but to tidy the layout up and incorporate more user-centric features. The design brief specified that the design style was to remain similar, and perhaps incorporate elements of their other branding and print media. I stuck to the same width and kept the logo and general colour scheme.

Out with the old

In with the new

How I used IDP to create a more usable layout

On the old site layout, Google Analytics results told us that the location-specific deals on the right were clicked less than 2% of the time. So first step – ditch them. They took far too much real estate for their value, however I did condense them into a ‘latest deals’ scroller in the left sidebar.

I then moved the main navigation from the left to a horizontal, drop down menu at the top of the page. Being in the red banner seperated it from the rest of the content so it’s immediately recognisable and easy to find wherever you are on the site. The incorporation of drop-down functionality also created easier deep linking.

The new real estate allowed me to bring in the ‘Find a Park’ map. This is big, clean and visual and provides an alternate way for users to find parks. Javascript pop-ups or tooltips can provide more information.

The ‘Book your holiday’ block was one of the most important elements by all accounts. On the existing site it’s crammed into the content area and doesn’t stand out. So I brought it up to the top left and built it into a large blue block that can appear on every page with a bright yellow ‘Book Now!’ call-to-action.

Judgement call: the design brief specified a strong use of imagery. Hence the reason behind such a large banner image. For what it’s worth, I feel the image on my design may have taken up too much space in relation to it’s importance.

I also removed other small clutter elements that were crowding the design, for example the ‘Jump straight to a Park’ select box is catered for by the drop-down main menu.

Alas, the design obviously didn’t tickle the client’s fancy, but I still learnt a lot in the process.

Quick Case Studies

Just a quick look at a few examples of sites offering similar data and amounts of it, but offering it through different layouts, primarily clutter vs clean. These thumbnails may not do justice to the cause, so check out the site’s themselves to see what I mean.

Just a pompous catchphrase or a genuine usability consideration?

Even though a lot of the aspects of information design prioritisation seem like common sense (which they are), there’s no shaking the fact that they’re often overlooked. Sometimes greed or misguided commercial targets can affect not only the design, but in turn those targets through creating bad user experiences and pushing visitors away.

I hate using MySpace. It’s cluttered and ugly and on the off chance that I do have to visit a MySpace site, I’ll get whatever information I need and get the hell out of there. And this happens all the time every day across the web – we are bombarded with data that we don’t need, that isn’t relevant; and this can hamper our online experiences.

I feel that a crucial skill that any web designer should posess is the clear ability to develop layouts that can manage large amounts of data without breaking and without making the user struggle, or even have to think!

On that note, check out Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think (after you’ve left a comment of course!).

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Improving yourself as a designer

I’m never happy with my current skill level, I never quite feel like I’ve reached a particular stage that I’m aiming for. Maybe it’s just me; maybe I’ll never quite be happy with myself. Maybe that’s a good thing… maybe not.

But one things for sure – I’m constantly improving and bettering myself as a designer and much more, which is a good feeling. To be able to look back over the past 6 months and observe what new skills I’ve learnt, bad habits I’ve dropped, speed, accuracy and imagination I’ve gained and generally concede that I have improved in more ways than one is pleasing.

So, I’d like to offer some tips and ideas that may help others help themselves more, hopefully provide some inspiration and educate. And I’d sure like to hear what you think, if you’ve got anything to add please comment.

When learning: Read, Meet, Talk, Listen, Teach

And further verbs. Although it sounds cliche and quite extreme, if you want to get ahead in your game (and this doesn’t particularly relate to web design), you have to eat, sleep and breath design. Make contacts wherever possible, let people know what you do – you never know when it might come around and help you.

Reading

Resources for web designers are hardly scarce. Get subscribing to RSS feeds, get a good selection of favourite sites with regular news and tutorials and visit them regularly. I make an effort to spend a good 30-40 minutes (more if I get to the office early) every morning checking my feeds and bookmarking new sites full of inspiration.

Then don’t forget the print world, there are still a fantastic number of great quality web design, development, graphic design, copywriting and project management books popping up all the time. Hit up Amazon and see what tickles your fancy. Then don’t let them gather dust on a shelf – have them open on your desk, read on the train, in bed, wherever… you’ll be surprised how much information you can pull out a book if you take the time to actually absorb it.

Don’t forget magazines and journals, although we’re rather deprived in the UK of any decent regular publications.

A few sites I’d recommend:

• Smashing Magazine
• CSS Drive
• A List Apart
• Web Designer Wall
• Design Float
• DesignM.ag

And a few books to check out:

• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design (Jason Beaird)
• Designing with Web Standards (Jeffrey Zeldman)
• Web Design Index by Content
• Bulletproof Web Design (Dan Cederholm)
• Web Standards Solutions (Dan Cederholm)

They should keep you busy for a while. And that’s before we even consider the various branches off web design itself. So get yourself an RSS reader like Bloglines and get into the routine of checking decent sites regularly and sourcing as much valuable information, resources and tools and inspiration as possible.

Meeting / making contact with people

Making contacts within the industry can only benefit you. It may lead to job opportunities and work but also creates new avenues through which to learn from others.

You can meet new people through all sorts of mediums, such as:

• Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter (follow me!) and Digg
• Contacting other designers through their contact pages on their sites
• Attending web conferences and meet-ups. In Manchester 2 popular regular meet-ups at the moment are GeekUp and Northern Digitals.
• Bringing other people in on jobs can teach you a lot – sometimes it’s better than struggling to work out how to do something when you can pay someone to teach you or help out.

I talk – you listen

I know, it sounds ridiculously obvious but get talking. To mates, to people you know in the industry, to colleagues or fellow students. Ask questions, try to help each other out and share intersting new finds with others. Share the wealth!

Teach

Doesn’t agree with the idea of ‘improving yourself‘? On the contrary, teaching is one of the best forms of learning. Whether you’re teaching a friend how to use Wordpress, writing an informative blog article (as I am now), lecturing a class or giving advice in a forum; the processes you have to go through to gather the information in the first place, then absorbing the feedback and further questions that develop, creates a perfect environment to learn so much more, almost subconsciously.

Blogging

Blogging helps to improve yourself not just as a designer but in so many various ways. Redswish has forced me to learn new things to create interesting articles, my writing style has improved and my understanding of the ‘blogosphere’ and social web has improved.

What to blog about

It depends on what you wish to achieve from your blog, whether it be commercial or personal gain. If you want to make money from your blog, prepare to work hard writing regularly and building your site to pull in traffic. But if you just want to ‘express yourself’, promote yourself or just want to write and pass on knowledge to others – then do it as when you feel like it. Don’t feel pressured to blog.

Blogging isn’t for everyone. It takes a lot of time, energy, focus and dedication. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off, but it’s always worth giving a shot.

Taking criticism

This doesn’t just refer to blogging but all forms of criticism. However if you go out on a limb and broadcast your views and writing to the world – you can rest assured that some people are compelled to spite you, whether it be justified or not. Prepare for a few off-colour comments.

Criticism isn’t always constructive, but try to imagine why the comments have been made and consider how you can improve on this and try to avoid it happening again. Do not react harshly – angry retorts can drive visitors away and do nothing for your profile. Words can easily be misinterpreted on the web so be careful.

Useful input from commenters

The main benefit of comment areas on blogs is the opportunity for readers to contribute and provide their own expertise and insight. Take full advantage of this, promote it and try to generate conversation with your commenters. Doing so will help to increase the chance of more input in future.

Pushing yourself when working

All the above are examples of ways to learn new tricks and skills, expand the imagination and develop a better understanding of the industry. However, improvement can be established constantly while working in your existing environment. A few tips:

• Working for an agency. Working in an environment with other professionals is a perfect environment for absorbing new tricks and ideas, as well as sharing. Since I started working at Flame Digital 4 months ago I’ve progressed in leaps and bounds and can honestly say I’m loving it!
• It’s never too late to go back to school. More and more web design and development related courses are popping up – you’re never too old to mooch along and check out the benefits.
• Find ways to measure progress. Set targets, aim to reach them in 1 month/6 months. This will help to push you to develop, and acts as a measure to observe how much you’ve improved.
• Money is a motivator. Let’s not lie, we can design for the love of design but if you do it for a living – money is essential. Loosely speaking, the better a designer you are – the more money you’re likely to earn. It’s not always as simple as that but money is certainly a powerful motivator – perhaps the thought of that salary raise will entice you to push that little bit harder.

Explore other avenues of creativity. Design doesn’t have to remain in Photoshop on your monitor. Grab a camera and go for a walk to capture some photography, or grab a sketch pad and relax in the garden and swap the mouse for a pencil! Try to seek creativity and inspiration in different forms.

Focusing on design

I’ll hand you over to a nice article on a new website, Web Design Ledger, written by Adelle Charles, that covers ‘10 easy steps to become a better web designer‘.

The article outlines ideas and techniques that should be considered constantly and should be second nature to designers:

• Build a toolbox. Create a tidy catalogue/toolbox or resources, scripts, background and stock images, bookmarked sites, tutorial files, plugins, .psds etc. You never know when they might come in handy.
• Think on paper. Always default back to paper before you start squiggling away with the mouse.
• Keep up to date with trends. The web is like the catwalks of Milan and Paris – new fashions are revealing themselves all the time. Keep on top of what’s cool, or even get a step ahead and set the trend!
• Know your audience.
• Ask other’s opinions.

Read the full article here.

Self-improvement

‘Improving yourself as a designer’ requires a lot more than reading books, toiling through tutorials and blogging around. There are so many contributing factors that make a good designer, and these vary from person to person.

Perhaps it’s a case of building confidence, or even suppressing an ego. You can never have too much inspiration and in such a fast paced industry – there’s never any way you can know everything.

Whether you’re a student doing a part-time course, an experienced industry veteran, an up-and-coming design superstar or a jack-of-all-trades; I hope there’s something in this article that may have proved useful to you.

Never settle for second best, and never assume you’ve covered all the bases – there’s always room for improvement.

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Long time no see, and other bits…

For the past few months I’ve been blogging on a regular basis, usually between 1 and 3 times a week, even 4 times if you’re particularly lucky, or if I’ve been particularly bored. However since my previous post at the start of the month, Redswish has been left neglected by me and kept busy by the loyal readers popping back to seek new news, and perhaps a few new readers who’ve managed to source the site through whatever means.

So, nearly 3 weeks since my last article, it’s surely time for something fresh, new and inspiring.

Err, well no. Not really.

With full honestly, I have been immensely busy this past few weeks. Yep, even too busy to blog! ‘Heathen’ I hear you cry. Alas, it’s true. And I assure you’d love to return with an unbelievable article of only the highest quality, but I can’t even stretch to that for you. So to keep you busy for what will hopefully be no more than a few days, I will offer you the following:

Fifty People, One Question

The wonder that is Twitter offered me a little jem today. I can’t remember who it was who recommended this short viral video, but I thank them for it.

Fifty People, One Question is a beautifully crafted 8 minute long short where random people are grabbed on the streets of New Orleans and asked the question ‘What would you wish to happen by the end of today?’ (or something very similar). The idea is so simple it could almost be ridiculed, but the outcome is so fantastically composed, the emotions so perfectly captured and every aspect of the film including the editing, soundtrack and photography so considerately pieced together that the outcome is just superb.

Good eh? But seriously, please don’t just comment here (obviously do comment here, but follow the link through as well!) Check out the Fifty People, One Question website for more information on the video and other people’s responses.

A selfish note

I think it might also be worth noting that I’ve been asked to write for a Web and Graphic design tutorial site based in Manchester, for money. Don’t worry, I’m not selling out and will still be focusing on Redswish, but may throw the odd article out in exchange for payment.

The reason I’ve brought it up is mainly to thank the readers of this site who’ve helped it grow over the past few months and to reach the attention of a wider audience. It is only through this that the effort I’ve put into my writing has began to pay off, but it has also inspired and urged me to write to a constantly better standard.

So, once again, thanks all. I promise I’ll get something out again soon.

Nathan x

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Accessible web design – The How

In the predecessor to this article, ‘Accessible web design – the whats and whys‘, I discussed the advantages of building accessible websites, what accessibility is and why we should be taking it seriously. In this article I’ll be running through some of the primary tasks to consider when building accessible sites.

Images

Images are often the first element considered when we talk about accessibility. Images feature heavily in web design, whether they are used in the construction of the layout or to aid the content – few sites are image-less. However, these images may prove useless to visually impaired or blind users, or anyone using a device or browser that doesn’t render imagery. In these instances, images can become hurdles as opposed to aids.

The alt attribute
The alt attribute provides alternative text to describe your images. It is placed within HTML elements just as any other attribute:

<img alt=”Descriptive text goes here” />

Describing images is important, especially if the image has a purpose (eg. logo, complimenting the copy, image link). If you don’t describe the image, it will make no sense to anyone who can’t see it.

null alt
If a particular image is meaningless, for example if it’s purely for decoration or to space layout elements, use alt=” “. There’s point describing an image that doesn’t have any purpose (ie ‘Spacer image’). This will just hassle users.

Common sense?
When describing your images, give them sensible descriptions which make sense and convey valid meaning. This doesn’t mean lines of text, just something short and sweet that makes sense. If the image links somewhere, describe where it links, for example:

Bad: alt=”logo_small_80×60″

Good: alt=”XYZ homepage”

Where’s my image!
Ah, the other benefit of the alt attribute is for those times when the images just don’t load. One of the great mysteries of life – everything else appears, the image is there on the server (or maybe it isn’t) but it sure as hell hasn’t popped up on the screen. So the alt text kindly steps in to replace it. It may not be sexy but it will provide insight into what should have been in that big white space.

Alt text for background images?
Well, if you’ve built your site semantically using CSS then all background images should be called through the stylesheet, therefore no alt text is necessary. In fact it’s impossible anyway. You can only apply the alt attribute to <img /> elements.

Links and Colour

When creating styles for links on a page, consider that not everyone can see colour. I, as you can tell by this site, am not currently practicing what I preach but will be taking it into account in the future.

If you use colour to denote links or click-able content, reinforce it with other methods such as emboldening or underlining. Otherwise colour-blind users may see no difference between standard copy and click-able links. However you go about doing it, it’s important to highlight links with more than one method.

Also, be careful that your copy and links don’t blend in too much with the background colour. Some people can’t pick out contrasting colours as well as others.

Don’t rely on colour to guide users. Methods such as ‘click on the purple box’ or ‘follow the red line’ may be deemed useless to colourblind users.

Flash!

EEk, there she is. You may or may not be surprised to know that Flash is actually quite accessible on some levels. It meets several Section 508 requirements including:

• Content magnification and scalability. Flash is predominantly built with vectors objects and so can often be scaled without distortion.
• Mouse-free navigation and keyboard accessibility. Flash offers tabbed browsing like in HTML but also provides a higher level of keyboard interaction.
  
• Visually/audibly engaging. Flash uses interactivity, dynamic visual effects and audio that may appeal better to younger users or people with cognitive disabilities.
• Custom colour palette support. Flash isn’t restricted to web-safe colours as with CSS, which of course can be taken advantage of to aid colourblind users.

Of course Flash still, being Flash, has it’s disadvantages.

• Some devices, such as the iPhone, plain don’t support it.
• Without captioning, Flash may prove completely useless to blind or deaf users.
• Flash can’t always be read by screen readers.
• Strobe effects and fast moving objects may prove difficult to understand or see clearly to anyone, not just visually inpaired users.

When it comes to Flash, I’m no expert. For more information on accessible Flash development check out ‘Creating accessible Flash content‘ and Macromedia’s white paper on ‘Best practices for accessible Flash design‘.

Structured Markup and CSS

I’d love to think that eveyrone was building semantic, well structured XHTML and CSS websites today but they’re really not, it’s a great shame. I haven’t got the time here to launch into a full article about semantic markup but I’ll touch on a few points.

Why? Oh yeah. Not all browsers use stylesheets so ensuring your HTML is valid, semantic and well structured will ensure it looks perfectly ledgible when the CSS is on vacation. Using the correct formula of HTML and CSS will also help to ensure that your site doesn’t break in different mainstream visual browsers (although it by no means guarantees this), it will make it easier to implement new content, scripts, imagery and more than anything makes it so easy to change massive details with one or two lines of CSS.

Lose the tables.
Use tables only for tabular data. Websites should be structured with divs, headers, paragraphs, lists and the odd spans and bits here and there.

Use lists for menus.
Whenever you have a menu, a list of links or even just a list – make sure it’s displayed that way. Use <ul> and <ol> to create lists, this will render as nice bullet points when no CSS is available. Chances are it will make your lists a lot easier to style up anyway.

Avoid ‘divitis’
Yep, divs are great. But you really don’t need loads of them. They contain blocks of content and are required for the central areas of your layout. However, most HTML elements can be individually styled and don’t need wrapping in extra layers of divs. This will reduce the file size of both your HTML and CSS and will clear unnecessary code.

No inline styles
Firstly, you don’t need to – get them all tucked away in the stylesheet. They add weight to the file size and aren’t always rendered correctly by different browsers.

Sure, there’s a wealth of information on this subject. If you want to learn how to build websites properly, aside from the plethora of information you could gather from a quick Google search, I would also strongly recommend Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘Designing with Web Standards‘.

Cross-browser compatibility

So you’ve added your alt attributes, checked your links, and you reckon your markups pretty bob on. Your site looks great in Firefox (because that’s the coolest browser, of course). So what about Internet Explorer 6, and 7, which hold an estimated nearly 80% of browser market share?

When considering browsers, the main contenders on the market are:

• Internet Explorer 6
• Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox 2
• Firefox 3
• Safari
• Opera
• Camino
• Chrome
• Soon – Internet Explorer 8

To be honest – the list goes on. Personally, I’d recommend you always check your sites in IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3 and Safari. I know budgets don’t always cover it but they should do, and it may seem like a lot of effort and it can be. But regardless of accessibility, from a general Usability point of view – can you afford to lock these users out?

When tweaking your sites to render well in other browsers, don’t be tempted to use invalid CSS or HTML – this may affect other browsers that don’t render styles in the same way or even at all. I can assure you that all the main visual browsers can be catered for while using valid markup.

Validation

I’ll shamelessy tell you here and now that validation isn’t imperative. The majority of modern browsers can pick up on slight errors and either work out what you’re trying to do or produce an adequte alternative. Your sites do not always have to pass the W3C HTML and CSS validators, or Bobby or another generic ‘Accessibility test engine’ to be accessible. But to be honest, is it so much to ask to write your code correctly?

But don’t think for one minute that just because your HTML is valid and you’ve slapped a pretty little W3C ‘valid xhtml 1.0′ badge at the bottom of your site that it’s accessible. These validators don’t take into full consideration what font size you’re using in the text, the fact that your header colour may be low contrast against the background colour or whether your alt attributes acurately describe their parent image.

Scripts

There are 2 definitive rules to bare in mind when incorporating Javascript into your site.

1. All scripts must be stored in an external Javascript file. No inline scripts unless absolutely necessary.
2. All Javascript must be degradable so it doesn’t affect users who don’t have scripts turned on.

When developing in Firefox, I’d seriously reccommend you get hold of the Web Developer Toolbar plugin. This allows you to easily check how your site looks with/without scripts, CSS and has lots of other nifty features.

With Javascript languages such as jQuery and Mootools getting real popular – designers are spicing up their sites with non-intrusive and majoritively accessible Javascript, which is good! But always check that your site works full with all the scripts off or some users may get a nasty surprise.

Typography and Font Size

The area surrounding choices of typography, web-safe typography and scalable font sizes can get quite deep. Current browsers will only render fonts that are also present on the users system. So if you go designing and building a site with a great looking downloaded font – chances are only a very, very small fraction of visitors will actually benefit.

Web-safe fonts

Unfortunately, advances in general web font support have been small. We still have our hands tied dealing with the same default fonts as we were years ago. There are 3 main methods of dealing with this:

• The good way – the CSS ‘font-family’ property.
• The bad way  – “Download this font here”
• The cool way – sIFR

CSS: font-family
When specifying your website’s fonts with CSS, you can specify multiple fonts for particular elements in order of preference. Therefore, if the user doesn’t have the first font installed, it will default to the next in the list and so on. This property looks as so:

p { font-family: Calibri, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; }

In the instance above, users with Calibri installed will see the paragraph fonts in Calibri. If not, it will default to Tahoma which is a relatively safe bet. Failing that, Arial will be used and in the most basic scenario the generic sans-serif font will be used.

“Download this font”
This is seen very rarely in modern design. But some designers force visitors to actually download the actual font file and install it on their machines so they can view the site in the designers selected font.

Not only is this completely inaccessible and unusable, it’s damn right unethical in some cases illegal.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)
A popular option for text replacement is sIFR, pronoucned “siffer”. This is a Flash technology that replaces HTML text with a Flash rendered object, pulling in the required font from a .swf file.

This is great because it maximises the range of fonts that can be viewed on sites, breaking the mould of the restictive default fonts. And it’s completely accessible! If users don’t have Flash installed, they have Javascript turned off or their browsers plain don’t support Flash – it degrades to perfectly clean text that can be styled with CSS.

The only real downsides to sIFR are that, for the moment, it can only replace a single line of text so is only really useful for headings. Plus it can sometimes be a hassle to install and configure but if you do it enough times you’ll surely get wizzy at it.

It’s all well and good ensuring that your typography looks nice (as it’s an essential element of design) while still being accessible by all. However accessibility isn’t just about the typeface – you have to consider font size.

Em’s and Px’s

When specifying font sizes in CSS, the only units to consider are px and em:

• px (pixel) = static unit of measurement, corresponds with monitor resolutions.
• em = relative unit of measurement that equals the vertical size of an element’s text.

Assigning your font sizes with pixels ensures that they will be that exact size across the board. When visually impaired users wish to increase the font size, modern browsers feature the option to increase it, which will automatically increase or decrease the pixel size of fonts. (You can normally check out this feature somewhere in the ‘View’ menu under ‘Text Size’ or ‘Zoom’.)

The problem with this is that Internet Explorer 6 and certain other browsers don’t change the size of fonts set in pixels. IE7 features a page zoom function which does the job but this still doesn’t excuse sizing fonts with pixels. Instead we have to look at ems, which are relative.

The safest bet
The safest approach to styling your typography so that it displays at the size you want, while still being scalable by different browsers, is to set a default size in the body element. This is normally around 11px or 12px. Then use ems for the rest of the elements in your site.

If you set your default body text size to 10px, this makes it far easier to work out the sizes of other fonts as they will all be round decimal units. So:

• 12px will equal 1.2em.
• 35px will equal 3.5em.

You get the idea…

The tabindex attribute

The XHTML tabindex attribute allows your to specify the order in which keyboard users can tab through different elements on the page. By default, users who use the keyboard instead of a mouse to navigate website will tab from link to link in the order they appear in the source markup.

To apply tabindex just add the following HTML:

<a href=”#” tabindex=”2″></a>

and so on through the different elements you wish to prioritise:

<a href=”#” tabindex=”1″>Home</a>
<a href=”#” tabindex=”2″>Search</a>
<a href=”#” tabindex=”3″>Articles</a>
<a href=”#” tabindex=”4″>Return to top</a>

The benefit of using the tabindex means that users without the ability to navigate with a mouse can access the most important areas of your site faster, instead of tabbing endlessly through every link and active element on the page.

Accesskeys

Accesskeys are similar to tabindex. However, instead of specifying an order to travel through, accesskeys dictate a letter or number that represents an element. Different browsers interpret accesskeys differently. Sometimes you can simply press the number or letter while on a page but in most cases you have to either press alt/ctrl and the value to access it.

Apply accesskeys like so:

<a href=”#” title=”Return to the homepage” accesskey=”h”>Home</a>

The problem with accesskeys is that more often-than-not they’re not accurately depicted. So users don’t know what to press. It’s often a case of common sense – usually the first letter of the link title or the number of the item in the list in the case of menus. Sometimes a visual guide is given, yet sometimes they prove compeletely irrelevant.

Just don’t even do it.

To be honest, if you’re still designing websites with the techniques below… why? These were dirty elements that were on their way out when I first started playing with Freewebs and Dreamweaver MX.

• Image Maps – No. There’s no reason to be using image maps anymore. Opt for Flash or Javascript to really do justice.
• Table Layouts – No. Le’ts get semantic guys! Lose the tables and get with the structured XHTML and CSS.
• Spacer GIFs – No. Real simple – CSS > margin-top: 15px; = no pointless, bandwidth hugging, inaccessible spacer images.
• Frames – Absolutely Not.
• Applets – Nope, not here.
• Flashing and blinking elements – Most definitely not. Next time you create that family business site with some cheap WYSIWYG site builder with built in ’snow effects’ or ‘flashing banners’ – go and knock your head on the wall and see the error of your ways. Do I honestly need to hold your hand to help you realise how inaccessible and darn right ugly these elements are.

On your way to becoming a better designer

Accessibility isn’t something you pick up over night, or indeed simply from a blog article such as this. In fact, it’s not a strictly defined set of rules or protocols that can just be learnt then adhered to and varies with every website you will build.

People such as the W3C, The Web Standards Project and the WAI are working every day to push for new changes and to evolve the mindset and general acknowledgment and acceptance of Accessible web design. It does benefit you as a designer or developer. It may not necessarily mean your designs look any better but will ensure that more people will gain access to your work, and demonstrates good ethics and consideration as a forwards-thinking member of the industry.

Where to next?

I’ll leave you with a few places to check out for far more information. If you wish to add anything please take full advantage of the comments section:

• The Guild of Accessible Web Designers
• W3C
• WAI
• Section 508
• The Web Standards Project
• A List Apart
• Web Content Accessibility Guidlines 1.0

• See full article »