Tag: webdesign

Are you a therapist wondering what makes a good therapist website? It can be difficult to know where to start when you are building your online presence and knowing how to improve it. Perhaps you don’t have a website but are considering building it yourself through a drag and drop builder, or maybe you are considering hiring a professional? Whatever your situation, in this article we discuss ten of the top tips to build an amazing website that helps you and your users! Continue “What makes a good therapist website?”

Many companies like to add some Christmas sparkle to their brand during the festive period to show their warm wishes to their customers and it can be a great way to put an extra smile across the faces of your consumers. In this blog post, I will briefly discuss several ways for you to make your WordPress website Christmas themed. Continue “How to make your wordpress website Christmas themed”

Future tech, it seems, is often inspired by the movies or the Hollywood directors who know something we don’t. Movies are the place of fantasy and desire and movie buffs being able to bring some key technologies of our favourite films to life is really a motivation of every film lover. From the Back to the future time travelling car, to the Tron Legacy Light Cycle so many key technological film props capture the imagination of us all. Continue “Future Tech Products that are straight from the movies!”

You’ve finally bought your very own CMS website and it runs on WordPress, people keep telling you about content marketing and how blogging is a great way to enhance your organic search and build a fan base. This is very true and thus why I am going to be creating several blog posts and vlogs (on The Change Creative YouTube Channel ) about how to use WordPress and what you should be considering every step of the way so you never get lost. In this post I will discuss how to create a successful blog post that will get attention.

Continue “How to create a successful blog post using WordPress step by step”

If you regularly visit my website or blog you will have noticed that I have made some changes ( and one reason why I haven’t blogged as much as I used to over the last two months). Before I allowed myself to take my local site to the live server I had to do some basic testing and every website should go through this same process to ensure as few problems occur so your users can enjoy your experience to its fullest and also make sure your business looks professional. In this blog post, I will discuss 5 areas that must be tested before you allow yourself to let the website into the public domain.

Continue “Testing a website before it goes live”

This is a really quick blog post, it’s been far too long since I posted last and I am sure you are hungry for some more content. Recently, I have been conducting a redevelopment of migsolv.com and to help us design a better website for our users we asked users to test what they liked and disliked about one of the most successful data centre companies in the UK. It was quite interesting watching the videos back and listening to what they had to say, the people are very frank and straightforward and make it clear what is well designed and what could be done better. In this post, we share how you can get involved in usability testing as someone testing websites.

Continue “How to get involved in Usability Testing”

If you would like the first part of this guide/blog post please click this link and it will take you through to the local wordpress installation part 1.  Once you have installed xampp then you will need to do the following things to have WordPress work on your PC. Continue “How to install a local WordPress installation to your Windows PC – part 2”

When a lot of creatives read this blog title I imagine a combination of fear, disgust and anger will be running through their veins at the suggestion of such a thing but in all honesty, even though I am a designer and creator of branding there is a place to using templates. In this blog post, I discuss several places when and where it is okay to use a template for design of a new digital presence. Continue “Is it ever okay to use a template for design”

Blog post to perfection, learn how to create the perfect blog post with this step-by-step guide.

With the help of this step-by-step guide, you will soon become a master blogger of supreme SEO goodness. The first two stages I have created are for those who just want to get started in blogging and the stages after that are for those who want to take their blog posts that step further and make them super-powered to boost traffic to your website. Continue “How to create the perfect blog post, a step by step guide”

Web design isn’t just about putting your message across to as many people as possible it should be attractive, provide useful information, creates enquiries/sales, attract your right target market and be easy to navigate. As we all know we are all individual with unique characteristics, beliefs and abilities and it is important to make your website accessible to EVERYONE! It is part of the law that you consider the accessibility of your website in the perception of the able and disabled people in the world. Visit the W3 where they have put together documentation about web design accessibility.

Different disability accessibility in web design

Visual accessibility in web design

Visual ‘disabilities’ can range from blindness, to being short sighted, to being colour blind on varying scales and when designing a website you must keep in mind how different people see and access your website.

Images

How do blind people see images you may ask? Well there are two ways they are able to understand the context of images on websites. Firstly in every image there SHOULD be an ‘alt’ tag, this alt tag is to allow screen readers to describe what the image is displaying. For example if you have a picture of a cat wearing a tutu you don’t put ‘a funny animal picture’, it simply isn’t descriptive enough, put exactly what is in the picture ‘ a cat wearing a tutu’.

It has been common practice for a lot of web designers to use the alt tag to put the main keyword of the webpage into the alt tag which is fine (to some extent) as long as it is still descriptive enough to explain to those who need the alt tag to have a good web experience.

Ease of reading through contrast

A lot of people, in particular men, suffer with some form of colour blindness. This can range from not seeing one or two colours correctly to seeing everything entirely in greyscale (black and white). It is for this reason that there must be clear contrast of colours for those with colour blindness to be able to understand visual layouts correctly otherwise important information may get lost.

Is the text and the interactive features large enough?

Another disability that needs to be considered is partial sightedness. Sometimes a person is not entirely blind and can see some visual information, this should be considered when not only selecting the font size of the typography but also when designing the clickable areas of buttons and interactions.

Tools to test your website’s accessibility

A tool you can use to see if your site has considered visual accessibility in web design is a tool called spurapp.com. This tool takes your website and gives you all the scenarios to understand where your website could improve upon its visual design in terms of accessibility.

Access to photo editing software?

If you prefer you can do test with any photo/graphic editing software by taking a screenshot of your website and taking away the colour to see how the contrasts of elements look, use the Gaussian blur tool to see how readable the website is for someone whom may be short sighted.

Hearing accessibility in web design

Something you may not have considered is hearing accessibility. If your website has podcasts or videos you are going to need to consider how you are going to communicate the information to those whom are hard of hearing.

If you are creating podcasts it is quite important that you also include a transcript. Although this can be time consuming it is not only helping everyone be able to access your fantastic information, it will also be highly beneficial and also have the effect of helping you be indexed by Google if it is written in html with the correct syntax.

Likewise, if you have a YouTube channel for your business there is also the option to include ‘auto’ subtitles. This is fantastic that YouTube are trying really hard to include accessibility and make it as easy as possible for video creators to include them but sometimes the words are just plain wrong and can confuse matters! Instead, I recommend taking the time to write your own subtitles to ensure the ‘write’ words are shown .

Device Accessibility

And last but not least is device accessibility in web design. For quite a few years now responsive design has been at the forefront of designers who care about doing a good job. If a business has a responsive website it shows that they care about their users experience and not just about having a digital presence.

With more and more users now using mobiles and tablets to acccess website it is important that pinching and squeezing to read and view information isn’t a part of the user experience. It is uncomfortable and may give the wrong impression to visitors.

If you already have a website with lots of content it may be a little difficult to include responsive css code but if you are creating a new website it is much easiser as you write the html and then add css with something like @media screen and (min-device-width: 481px) and (max-device-width: 768px) {enter styling here}. It is quite easy to learn how to do this but if you need help you can find lots of information throughout the web but personally, I recommend using Teamtreehouse.com, i’ve been using it for over 6 months now and good practice of web design/development is made quite clear and easy to comprehend through the platform.

Accessibility is good for everyone

When you start putting accessibility at the forefront of your mind when designing websites and user experiences then not only is it going to benefit people with disabilities but it will also have the benefit of making your website more compliant with w3c web standards, making your site easier to index, improving organic search results and making your site run as efficiently as possible so remember, accessible web design is good web design.

If you have any extra points please feel free to leave a comment below.

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