029 Standards & Accessibility
It is a legal requirment under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 to make sure your website is accessible. According to the code of practice:
4.7 (p39): “From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services.”
This legislation includes websites - which means that the majority of internet sites are in breach of UK law. 029 can offer you advice and make the necessary changes to your website to make sure your are fully compliant with the law.
Further to this, all 029 websites are standards compliant. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have produced many 'best practice' recommendations to promote effective design standards across the internet. By meeting these requirements, your website is more search engine friendly, more usuable and ultimately attracts more visitors.
Are you wondering if your site is accessible and standards compliant?
We are.
How accessible is your website to the visually impared? Do you offer a text-only alternative? These are considerations that the law dictates you must take into account on your website. 029 offer a complete accessibility audit for your website, and our sites are all constructed to conform to current legislation.
To read the current guidelines regarding website accessibility, click here
For more information about 029 Accessibility auditing, please contact info@029.co.uk
Web site usability is the science of how your website is used and understood by your site visitors. Initally thought as herecy by web designers across the globe, the principals of good design practice and thinking about how you treat your site visitors is now a recognised industry essential.
The original driving force behind the science of usability was Jakob Nielson. He saw very early on that the web design was heading down a rocky road, where websites were becoming impossible to navigate, confusing and overall unrewarding.
029 make sure the websites we build are usable from the start. We do this by working closely with our clients to ensure their potential site visitors and cutomers are not beweildered with options or frustrated by poor design. We also offer a usability audit service where we will closely analyse your website and produce a detailed recommendations report.
To visit Jakob Nielsons usability website, click here
If you wish to discuss website usability, or 029 usability auditing contact info@029.co.uk
Does the practice of adopting web standards improve your search engine ranking?
Good design practice generally means less bloated, faster loading, less complicated page markup. This means that your site is easier to index by a search engine. By utilising CSS (cascading style sheets) standards, your page design can be still be visually interesting and retain a high level of search engine friendliness.
Making your site easier to index means significantly less work for the search engine when it visits your site prior to indexing. The web spiders used are fairly indescriminate, they will follow all the links as long as nothing blocks their process. Old style web layouts that use complicated arrangements of tables and bury their content, make the whole process difficult and generally fair worse in their overall ranking. Working in combination with relevant content and navigation, the use of web standards is arugably a significant factor in the quality of your websites ranking.
029 websites are all standards compliant and optimised for search engine ranking, for more information please contact info@029.co.uk