Designing your Website

The design of a product or service is very often a subjective decision, beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all. However, what this does not mean, is that the design of your site won't affect it's accessibility - Looking nice and being 'accessible to all' should be the goal of all sites, but, especially with outsourced solutions - is rarely the end result.

If you're designing website solutions for business 'Accessibility' should be your mantra.

What is Accessibility?

A definition of web accessibility is "enabling as many users as possible to get the most out of your website, regardless of viewing medium, disability or technology"

Accessibility is championed by a number of key organistaions, including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), WebAIM and Bobby - Watchfire

Their aim is chiefly to encourage and enable web developers and designers to use best practice accessibility guidlines in their work.

So What's Involved?

As mentioned previously, at MCD all our code is hand written, using hand written code is a great start to increasing your sites Accessibility levels, if the code is well formed, it will keep the file sizes low, which in turn enables low-bandwidth users to get the most of the site (not to mention making the site incredibly fast for high-bandwidth users!)
Some other items which should be considered when designing your site;

• Is your your site cross browser operable? Does it work well on MSIE, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla (amongst others) in all of their various incarnations?
• Is your site as easily used on a Mac as a PC? How about WAP phones and Internet enabled Kettles (you just wait!)?
• How does you site look to the visually impared, can they easily re-size the text to make it larger?
• Does your site incorporate Access Keys? Has your current web provider ever heard of Access Keys
• Is your site viewable of various screen resolution sizes?

The list goes on, and so does our commitment to ensuring that all our solutions meet Accessibility guidliness as far as is possible given the brief of the site.