Web accessibility is one of those areas of web design that is vague, hard to understand and, to a lot of people, hard to implement. With the range of browsers, mobile devices and huge numbers of people searching the internet every day, how can you design an attractive, usable site that is also accessible to everyone?
The answer lies in how you work and how a new website design is formed, from the initial mockups and design through to templates, coding and the final, live site.
At Best Served Cold we start the design process with a knowledge of web accessibility and strict xHTML/CSS coding in mind. From the beginning of each website build we look at how the site will need to work with different technologies and what we can do to make those technologies accessible.
By using a system called semantic markup we ensure that each website is readable by all web browsers - even PDAs and mobile phones. This system of coding a website coupled with the strict use of xHTML and CSS gives our sites a great start towards full accessibility standards.
By coding to WAI guidelines we also give all our sites a headstart with SEO as many of the best practices used to optimise for search engines are also at the heart of a fully accessible website.
If you’d like to know more about accessibility please contact us. We are also available to consult on all aspects of web accessibility from initial design and code through to recommendations on existing websites.
Over the last 6 months we’ve been working a lot on WordPress sites - designing, templating and coding new sites and working with existing sites to integrate seamlessly. This site is WordPress based and we try to keep it up to date with the latest accessibility and xHTML/CSS standards - even if the news isn’t updated as often as we’d like!
We’ve noticed that there are a lot of WordPress sites that deal with themes and plugins but not many people talk about converting an existing design or bespoke solution into a WordPress template.
By working with a new design or integrating an existing website’s template into WordPress you end up learning a lot more about the background code than you would otherwise. With this experience we’ve found that WordPress can be used to power much larger and more complicated sites than just a simple blog.
With some judicious use of pages, categories and sub-categories and a bit of tweaking of the background code we are now able to design and build quite complicated, fully updateable sites with WordPress that are easy to navigate, accessible, use strict xHTML/CSS standards and can be updated very simply.
If you would like to know more or find out if we can do something similar for your site, please contact us
Probably not required by many, but I was working on a site recently which had been built totally in Server Side JavaScript (SSJS). It took me about an hour to work what SSJS is to begin with! But it appears that Server-side JavaScript refers to JavaScript that executes on the server rather than client side JavaScript (CSJS). Quite old and not used frequently, the first implementation was Netscape’s LiveWire which was used in the Enterprise Server 2.0 released in 1996.
The key advantage of this setup is for asynchronous interaction with the server (AJAX), however ASP and PHP can handle this type of interaction sufficiently now-a-days.
The client I was working for had most of their system set up in SSJS, but had a Wordpress implementation on the same server using PHP and the client wanted to display their articles on their pages. So the issue I had was using two languages in the same page. After a day of fiddling around and working out the syntax of SSJS, I came up with this:
<%
Response.Buffer = true ;
var objXMLhttp = Server.CreateObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP') ;
var URL = "http://www.yourdomain.com/yourFile.php" ;
objXMLhttp.Open("GET", URL, false) ;
objXMLhttp.Send() ;
if (objXMLhttp.status != 200) {
// fire some sort of error exception
} else {
Response.Write(objXMLhttp.responseText) ;
}
%>
To briefly explain, using XMLHTTP, we create an object using the URL reference, if there’s an error (..status != 200), spit something out, otherwise display the content. You could of course close the object at the end of the script for good measure.
So you can call in any PHP or ASP file and plonk it in your SSJS page. You could of course do the same thing with a little JavaScript, but that wouldn’t show up in the source code of the page and would be very bad SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
