Ensuring a website can be accessed by those with disabilities has been widely discussed and many public sector organisations are following the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) guidelines on accessibility when developing their web-based services. However, how does accessibility impact usability? Is there any need to distinguish between the two? What about the wider experience of interacting online? ....

full article here

Share this post :

Every so often, I decide to switch my home page from a basic Google search box to something else - whether it is another Google service such as iGoogle, another search engine, such as Microsoft Live, or another portal service, such as My Yahoo! - because:

• I want (believe?) that I should be using a service that aggregates the information I use most often, onto a single page;
• I need (really?) to use additional services (such as currency convertors) on a regular basis;
• somebody has recommended a site as the answer to all the problems of the Internet;
• at heart I'm a techie, and I want to make sure that I'm not missing out on a service that's better than Google;

And invariably each time I end up switching back, normally within a few hours, for one (or more) of the following reasons:

• Speed - I've yet to find another website that loads more quickly than the Google search page;
• Performance - in part related to speed, but more about the quality of results that are returned;
• Need - when you get down to it, how often to you actually read every item in every RSS feed you are subscribed to, or use every widget on your customised homepage?
• Aesthetics - even though Google makes its money from advertising, its home page is conspicuously clear of adverts, and in particular, adverts served from third party services;

Are there any lessons to be learnt from this?  Perhaps not; after all, this is my personal opinion, and I know plenty of other people who are more than happy with their content-rich services (such as Netvibes), but for me, I think Google have the right approach:

• keep the first page as clean, functional and fast as possible;
• let users find content easily;
• resist the urge to provide a page that tries to deliver everything, and overwhelms the user with information.

I recently asked a question on LinkedIn asking

“What do you consider to be essentials criteria for a web redesign and how do you test these criteria for effectiveness in producing a successful site?”

I was interested to see how the wider professional community saw the subject of successful web design, what where the points that needed to be addressed and even what did people consider to be ‘design’.

I know when I use design in reference to a project I mean the information, the structure and the function of the site, but others think code, or images or possibly something else.

The answers I got where all extremely well thought out, eloquent and I couldn’t argue with any of the points put forward, mainly because the respondents where answering from the point of view some focused on code or user testing or graphics, some even looked site visits as their metric and all fit the bill, but none focused on the structure of the content, the architecture.

One answer caught my eye from AZHAR SAEED in Toronto,

ESTHETICS is the key.
UPDATED INFO most important.
SEAMLESS is the skill.

Well kinda, structure is the key, findabilty the ease with which the visitor can locate the site and its contents, the aesthetics of a site is in reality secondary, if you can't find the content then it amtters little how it looks...

It’s the simplicity of the answer that caught my eye; he managed to answer a deceptively complicated question in 3 lines! Wonderful!  The simplicity of structure the answer is itself uses indicates a key point of all web design, If only all answers was as simple.

In short I guess there is no one right answer to a successful web site (re) design, there are however many many wrong ones.