Cre8tive Flow

It’s rare that a day goes by when somebody asks me a question, either about SEO or Accessibility, which doesn’t in some way require me to answer that “it depends.”

Sometimes, this comes across as a surprise: aren’t there guidelines which are supposed to regulate these things? Yes, there are. And, if people were to ask me “Does doing this comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines?” or “Will this be in compliance with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 1?” then I could generally answer definitely one way or the other.

Google officially stated the other day that they’ll be crawling through HTML forms. It’s an interesting move — their stated goal is to increase their coverage of the web by adding this new aspect to their crawling. I’ll note right away that this is not an immediate general addition to their crawling practices:

Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. Google Webmaster Central Blog

First, I want to make some comments on the reasoning behind this redesign. It’s not that there was particularly anything wrong with the old design — except that Wordpress is a far more sophisticated product now than it was when that site was designed, and we wanted to be able to take advantage of newer and improved features. With this new layout, we’re making use of “widgetized” space to create a more flexible and (hopefully) intuitive blog for Cre8asite Forums.

Thanks to Adrian for his work on the previous design!

Or, to be more precise, adds a “Monetizing Your Website” forum. It’s a surprising thing to note that we didn’t already have one! Thanks for the suggestion, Whitemark!

If you’re selling text links, using Google Adsense, affiliate programs, or whatever other non-commerce based means for earning an income from your website, we’re now providing an area to address your concerns. Not that you couldn’t have asked the questions before, but hey…now there’s a place to put them!

The new forum is moderated by EGOL and Black Knight, so you can’t possibly doubt the quality of advice you can get. Join in the fun! Maybe you’ll earn a buck.

It’s always a problem trying to explain to somebody how their website is going to work, at some “later than now” state of the design. I don’t know what it is, exactly: whether it’s difficult to find the right words, too challenging for people to imagine what will happen, or whether the way that websites work is simply so foreign to some people’s way of thinking that they just don’t follow you on your way from point A to point B.

(If a web developer describes a website interaction at 50 mph, and their client understands their description at 30 mph, when will web developer and client meet at website launch “C”?)

I know how to use “Page Up” and “Page Down” to navigate up and down a web pagedocuments. I know to use keyboard shortcuts to quickly enlarge text size or put it back to normal. I can disable your stylesheets with three key presses. I also know that if there’s no obvious link back to the home page, it’s pretty likely that the company logo will take me there.

I know these things because it’s my job. But not everybody spends every day looking at websites with an eye to how they work (or don’t work).

Recently, a Cre8asite member asked about the consequences of changing their interface design. They are looking at making a transition into “Web 2.0″ and AJAX by replacing their old, outdated select inputs (or “drop-down” boxes, if you prefer) with fancy auto-suggesting text inputs.

But they’re a little bit worried. Although this seems like a logical choice, there may well be some consequences! How might a user react to a radical change in the basic functionality of a site?

I’ve been considering the idea of accessible navigation recently. Not specific methods of making navigation accessible, which are part of what I discussed in a post on designing with accessibility in mind, but on the whole idea of what makes navigation accessible.

The principle behind accessible navigation is about providing access to content - not necessarily about creating a menu which can be used by people with disabilities. It’s critical to provide access to your content - but not to make a visually impaired visitor use the same method to get there as a sighted user.