Website design accessibility

1. Does My Website Have To Be Accessible in 2008?

You do have a responsibility at some level, whether or not you are the designer or the commissioner of the website, to ensure your website design does not discriminate against disabled visitors to your site.

2. So what happens if your website design is not accessible?

Unsurprisingly, you leave yourself open to criticism, bad press and and more seriously legal action if your site is not accessible.

3. What level of compliance should your website design meet?

No case has been brought to court in the United Kingdom to date, so there is no case law guidance. In any event, case law can only provide broad guidance – what websites have to do may vary from site to site. What is important, however, is the outcome: the DDA requires that you make what it refers to as “reasonable adjustments”, to your services to ensure that a person with a disability can access that service. This means making changes to websites – which offer 24 hour service, and a variety of features not available via, for example, a telephone service – so that disabled people can use them.

4. Web Accessibility Opinion

Basically, you need to make sure your site is built to W3C standards for good website design. That means valid html and valid css. It means passing Priority 1 W3C WCAG (Google it!) at least. It means well formed website code (i.e. without errors) and simple and correct use of technologies. Actually – this is fairly simple to do for an experienced web designer – do not accept that you need to pay more for accessible web design – it should come as standard, part of good practice web design. You could go one step further and ask “vision impaired” testers to test drive the site. Finally, you need to listen to your web site visitors. If someone contacts you about the inaccessibility of your web site – then fix it!

There’s a business case and moral obligation to make your site as accessible as you can. There are over 8 Million people registered as having a disability in the UK, and a lot of them use the net – do you really want to ignore them? Prosecutions have been successful in Australia and the US – it will happen in the UK, just not any time soon – so don’t worry too much about prosecution – and don’t listen to the snake oil salesman who want your hard earned cash for total website redevelopment!

Secret To Increased Sticky Visitors, Better Search Indexing & Higher Quality Score

There is no denial that one of the most vital factors that determine online success of a website is whether the site attracts a constant flow of online visitors.

With consistent and repeated traffic, you can naturally expect increased conversion – whether it is a lead you are attempting to capture, or a sale you are attempting to make. There are a variety of paid ways in which you can instantly attract traffic to your site, but unless you structure the site to make it attractive for your visitors as well as optimize the site to make it index-able by the search engines, you are only attracting one time visitors.

So, how does one make the site visitor friendly as well as search friendly, so that one-time visitors turn into repeat visitors (and hopefully repeat buyers) as well as search engines prioritize their indexing of your site so you appear in organic search results which translates into no-cost traffic for those interested visitors?

Needless to say, you will always need to depend on certain level of paid traffic, such as Pay Per Click, even if you get your site indexed well for higher placement in organic search results. In today’s competitive pay-per-click marketing, the major search marketing providers, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, through their Adwords, Search Marketing and AdCenter offerings, focus significantly on “quality score” of your landing page and related campaigns, to determine how much you pay per click. As you may know, if the quality score of your landing page is not high, you will end up paying significantly increased amounts each click. It rapidly becomes unprofitable to use PPC as a means of attracting traffic.

So what can one do to better the visitor loyalty, the search indexing and the quality score? One way is to ensure that the Content that makes up your site is targeted, of quality, and from sources that both visitors and search engines trust and find attractive. Let’s call this “Good Content“. Good Content sounds good, however there are a variety of issues that ones needs to consider while actually implementing. Here’s a list of important ones:

• Content needs to be targeted, i.e. should be relevant to the theme of your site. As an example, if your site is based on “dog training”, any included content should provide valuable information on “dog training”.
• Content needs to be fresh, i.e., should be relevant to the time in consideration. As an example, if your site speaks about “acne cure”, any included content should provide current methods that “cure acne”, not something that was available years ago, or worse still, a technique that no longer is applicable.
• Content needs to be index-able by search engines, i.e. to ensure that the search engines can include the relevant content, they need to be able to crawl the content and include in their database index. As an example, javascript code cannot be indexed, while HTML code can be. Included content, if in HTML format, can be indexed by search engines.
• Content needs to be auto-updating, i.e. you should not have to manually delete old content and replace it with new content each day or worse each hour as fresh, relevant content is made available.

Good Content is available in various forms and from a variety of sources. These include Blogs, Web 2.0 Communities, News Sources, Social Networks, Shopping Sites and various other Information Sources. These also manifest in a variety of forms including Videos, Audio Podcasts, Images, Text etc.

Ensuring that your website features relevant fresh “Good Content” can make a big difference to how your site performs and ultimately how your site converts and what profitability you achieve. The question is “how can you include “good content” on your site so you achieve increased sticky visitors, better search indexing and improved quality score”?

ContentBit is an offering that might just be your answer. With unlimited targeted SEO web content on any keywords of your choice for your website that are visitor friendly, search friendly and 100% automatic, you could achieve true “get set forget” implementation with much ease.

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