Website Accessibility
Monday, September 1st, 2008 | Web Design, Web Development | No Comments
One of the most important considerations for every web design project is the target audience. Whilst in the past a lot of people were content simply to identify the main demographic such as “male teens” or “IT professionals” and to design accordingly, with technology such as screen readers becoming readily available for those with disabilities to get online much easier these days, it is important to take them into account as well. In fact, if you don’t take the needs of disabled users into account when building a website, you might find yourself getting in trouble for discrimination.
Web accessibility is about making your websites accessible to the largest possible audience, and this includes taking into account the many different devices the website may be accessed with, and the ways in which you can allow users to customise the content. For example, even just designing your website so that it can easily scale when the user increases the font size can make it much easier to use for those with a visual impairment.
There are many organisations and agencies attempting to standardise web accessibility to make it easier for the designers and developers to integrate accessibility into their sites. This is all happening alongside the standardisation of XHTML, CSS and the other web technologies, and you may find that you only need to make a few changes to bring your sites up to scratch. One great resource for accessibility information is the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). You can find a copy of their guidelines at Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and a more specific list at Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 which sorts the guidelines according to priority. Priority 1, for example, are all those guidelines that a web designer or developer must adopt in order for their website to be considered accessible. Priority 2 includes all those guidelines that should be implemented and the final priority is for those that a designer may include.
Putting in the time and effort to make your websites more accessible should be one of your top priorities when building new sites. Not only will this broaden the websites potential audience, but it also shows that you are a considerate designer and that you care about the people who view your work.
Light vs. Dark Websites - What should you use?
Friday, August 29th, 2008 | Art, Design Inspiration, Photoshop, Web Design | No Comments
There has been a lot of discussion since the spawn of web design about what colour schemes are better. Light colour themes? Or, dark colour themes? Here’s my opinion on the matter.
Firstly, ill just go a head and say it. I do, slightly, prefer light coloured web themes over dark ones.
Light Themed Websites
I think lightly themed websites, ignoring the ones full of bright multi-colours look very professional. I am talking about the typical plain websites with a lot of white space. If you think about, virtually all the major big professional websites such as Amazon, Google, eBay, PayPal, etc (the list can go on forever) use a very light colour scheme and are full of white space (which will be discussed in a future article in this blog).
I think light themed websites are better suited to websites which needs to convince their visitor that it can be trusted. For example, PayPal and eBay deal with customers’ financial information such as credit cards, bank accounts, etc. If the website used a dark colour scheme, naturally, the website would look ‘dodgy’.
I think lightly coloured themed websites, with a lot of white space, are better when used with websites like online shops, business homepages, company websites and so on.
Dark Themed Websites
Dark themed websites actually look quite cool. I think websites that use dark colour schemes are better suited to entertainment related websites. This includes gaming sites, film websites, online gaming websites, etc. One of the largest and most popular gaming websites on the internet (GameSpot.com) uses a dark colour scheme and it pulls it off very well while at the same time looking incredibly professional.
Dark themed websites also look good on ‘underground’ sites such as small message boards with online friends and any other websites that are supposedly cool.
Conclusion
If your thinking about what colour scheme to use for your website then think about what was mentioned in this post. Think about what type of website you have. And then honestly think about what would suit it best.
At the end of the day don’t be afraid to experiment. You never know what might actually turn out good.
Coming Soon: The White Space - Good or Bad?, Great Web Design Resources and more PhotoShop Top Tips.