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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.
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!
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…