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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.
Shiny New Website For Seven Seas
This morning we launched the Shiny School website for Seven Seas, the UK’s largest vitamins and natural supplements supplier. The site is the focus of a campaign to promote healthy eating among children aged from 6 - 12, which is being run in association with Haliborange, one of Seven Seas’ leading cod liver oil brands.
Our development of the website was completed in just a few days using WordPress as the underlying engine and content management system. We built a completely bespoke WordPress theme from the ground up based on a design visual supplied by global agency McCann Erickson. WordPress comes off the shelf with an extensive set of functionality that can be easily extended with various plug-ins, making it a very cost effective framework for certain web applications.
With the WordPress CMS in place, the maintenance and ongoing content management was handed over to JCPR who are running the Shiny School campaign. It is hoped that the campaign will engage kids and parents, and to encourage participation the website is linked with a Shiny School YouTube channel and Shiny School Flickr group. Using tools provided by the WordPress CMS the site moderators can easily incorporate photographic and video content contributed by children and parents taking part in the activities and initiatives promoted as part of the Shiny School campaign.
Another Cool Product
Here’s another quick turnaround flier for Shave Ice. This time it’s a six page third A4 flier extolling the virtues of their flagship product Hawaiian Ice® to prospective customers. The flier design follows the theme of previous materials we have produced for Shave Ice, focussing on the Hawaiian ice® brand we developed for them. The product illlustration takes centre stage on the inner spread of the leaflet demonstrating the Hawaiian Ice® profit model. The raw material costs are just 11p per serving for the flower cup and straw spoon, and 22p for the flavour syrups. With a recommended retail price of £2 each portion of Hawaiian Ice® sold represents a typical gross profit margin of 83.5% for the retailer.
Web Design For Designer Cakes
Wedding and celebration specialists The Cake Room have finally got a website. Launched this afternoon the site features a number of portfolio pages showing the diversity of cakes they offer, as well as background information about the company and an interactive map pulled in from the Google Maps API.
The site has been a while in development, simply because the folks at The Cake Room have been so busy baking and decorating the finest party cakes in East Yorkshire. As a result the design and development of their website came fairly low down their list of priorities. The absence of an online presence meant that prospective customers trying to track them down in Google were clicking through to our own site.
The case study elsewhere on our own website covering the corporate identity we designed for The Cake Room has been achieving high rankings, driving their customers to us in the search for contact details. Hopefully the website will now top ours in Google searches, and the busy bakers will be even more so as a reult!
The Cake Room web site can be visited at www.thecakeroom.co.uk. Don’t forget to tell ’em we sent ya!
Flash CoverFlow For St. Stephen’s
St. Stephen’s is Hull’s (relatively) new flagship shopping centre. They have recently launched their new website with front-end design by our good friends at Bryce Mennell.
Rear entrance to St. Stephen’s shopping centre in Hull city centre.
The website is driven by Vicinitee Retail, a content management system (CMS) used by several shopping centres and retail parks. The website design features an iTunes style CoverFlow widget which allows users to scroll through the logos of the various retail brands represented within St. Stephen’s, clicking through to the corresponding store’s web pages.
We were called in to provide the Flash expertise. The basic coverflow application was provided by a royalty free Flash component. Although the component was developed to be user-configurable it didn’t fully support dynamically generated content out of the box.
After a bit of hacking we persuaded the Flash component to accept a fully dynamic data source, proving once again that we are East Yorkshire’s go-to guys when it comes to tricky Flash problems!
We Don’t Usually Cut Corners But…
IT services and products supplier Contrac came back to us to freshen up their sales folder which we first designed for them a few years back. They wanted an informal feel based on their corporate bluey-green.
The Contrac IT Source folder and inserts - a friendly little number with pocket and inserts die-cut at a jaunty angle.
The folder is die-cut using a custom cutter with pocket at a jaunty angle to match the four die-cut inserts. The four inserts stack up in the folder pocket, with titles set across the corners and each cut slightly smaller than its sibling.
Design On The Fly
Shave Ice are at Northern Restaurant & Bar 2009 this week, a trade show for the hospitality industry. They are promoting their new CE certified ice shaving and blending machine to the bar and cocktail market. It was all a bit last minute but they needed a flier to hand out at the exhibition. The brief came in last Wednesday and we had artwork out of the door for Thursday afternoon.
The flier we designed for Shave Ice to promote the Hatsuyuki SB-20N at Northern Bar & Restaurant 2009.
The whole process went smoothly. In just 48 hours we produced initial visuals, sourced illustration and commissioned photography. Minimal art direction was required on the shoot and with a spot of post processing the images were dropped into final artwork and the files went off to print without a hitch.
Cool!
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…