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Archive for October 2009
It’s A Fair Cop
On Tuesday we launched a website to promote the Regional Policing Programme, a collaborative venture between the four Police forces of Yorkshire and Humberside targeting organised crime. Technically speaking the site is straightforward, comprising predominantly static text and image content. The website features a media resources page with press releases and media images available for download, along with a short video promo produced by the guys up the road at JayJay Media. The video is delivered in FLV (Flash Video) format via the almost universal Flash Player.
The biggest challenge we faced was dealing with the large volume of content presented to us by the client. Most of it was derived from various printed documents and press releases. Our first task was to assimilate the content into a meaningful, non-linear structure which would work on the web. The visual design of the website was kept clean and uncluttered to eliminate distractions from the information-driven content. Moving forward the website is expected to grow and evolve, so it was important to provide a high degree of flexibility in the website design so that varied content can be included in the future without a major design rethink.
www.PolicingYorkshireAndTheHumber.co.uk
Accessible Website Design For HERIB
My first post for some time - phew, it’s been a busy Summer. One small job we launched back in September was a brand new website for HERIB - the Hull and East Yorkshire Institute for the Blind.
A large proportion of visitors to the HERIB site are visually impaired, so accessibility was a key consideration when designing their new website. The site is available in two colour options - the HERIB corporate blue and white, and a high visibility yellow and black. Accessibility was designed in through the use of larger font sizes and clearly defined blocks of content. The fluid layout resizes with the browser window, which helps to ensure that the page scales elegantly when users increase font sizes using browser-native text zooming.
Having the opportunity to see a screen reader in operation gave us a valuable insight into some of the accessibility problems often faced by visually impaired web users. Imagine how much extra scrolling is required when text has to be enlarged to such a size that just a few words are viewable on screen at a time. To help with navigation we included in-page links so users can easily jump back to the various navigation menus from key points within the page. These little additions are simple to implement yet they can make all the difference to some visitors.
The website also features a simple content management system (or CMS) so that HERIB staff can update the News and Events pages themselves. The CMS provides tools to upload images to include within posts. The CMS supports basic text formatting using Textile - a lightweight markup language which gives users elementary style controls without the overhead of a complex WYSIWYG system.
Subscribe »Why Do We have A Blog?
There are several very good reasons why we have incorporated a blog into our web site. It’s relatively simple to do after all.
- A blog is great tool for quickly adding new content to a web site. We chose WordPress, and its ease of use means we are more likely to keep updating the site on a regular basis, whenever one of us has ten minutes to spare.
- Visitors like fresh content. Keeping the site updated will encourage people to come back again and again. It all helps when building an online presence and winning customer mindshare.
- Search engines like fresh content too. As long as we keep it relevant it all counts towards ratings.
- We’re creative types, and blogging is form of self-expression. When we’ve got something to say it won’t do to bottle it up.
- We’re good at what we do, and blogging about it is way of proving it to the world.
It all makes sense doesn’t it. Perhaps you should have a blog on your web site. Don’t think about it for too long though - give us a call…