Day 1 in the Big Blog House ...
... standards are being ignored, common decency in design is abandoned and .NET is rampant.
Let me take a second to introduce myself. A "Manc Manx", I moved to the Isle of Man from the great city of Manchester, UK. Having left Salford University in 2001, I have worked for a number of companies including one specialising in collective purchasing and e-billing, one specialising in web design and accessible web sites for the NHS and now for a major Powersport company that operates from the "Home of Road Racing", The Isle of Man.
From the depths of VB6, to the heady heights of ASP.NET with C#, I have had the opportunities to find my niche, which is accessibility and web standards.
Why Accessibility is Important
Accessibility is not just about letting disabled people use your site. It is about taking the time to consider those with other browsers, other platforms and other footprints. Loading a site with widgets, blinkies and tickers is not, in my opinion, a great step in creating an attractive and stimulating site.
Web Designers often fall foul of basic gotcha's in poor site design:
- Use of tables for formatting
- Use of tags for styling instead of what they actually mean, eg. heading tags should start from 1 and increment - not jump.
- JavaScript is all very good, but it is a pain to get to work on all browsers and if it provides functoinality, rather than complements it, then people lose out.
- Reliance on poor standards implementation by a certain browser - and forget anyone else!
- .... and when the rules have been broken, achieving immunity by adding "This site is best viewed at 800x600 in MS Internet Explorer v6", with a big button to download the latest version!
I will doubtless evangelise about these points and more as and when I find the time.
This blog will probably name and shame sites that are not up to scratch, it will spout personal opinions that will probably be entirely unreliable but I think it needs to be said.
Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you soon ....