Mark 2 Ford Escort jumping
Motorsport and rally specialists ‘Ralfab Ltd’ have a shiny new website.
Based in New quay in west Wales, Ralfab build complete rally cars. And also fabricate a variety of car components which are for sale on the website.
Specialising in Mark 1 and Mark 2 Ford Escorts they are happy to work on any car.
Check out http://www.ralfab.co.uk.
As a website commissioner or owner there are some ‘accessibility’ basics of which you should be aware.
Web accessibility is about providing access to information and services without restriction.
The idea is that anyone should be able to access any products and services without discrimination. In particular this is referring to disabled, blind, deaf and otherwise inconvenienced visitors. In short, everyone should all be able to use your website.
In the UK there is specific legislation, covered in the disability discrimination act (DDA) 1995 and amended in 2005, that requires anyone providing a service or product to make it accessible to all. This includes owners and developers of websites and requires them to make their sites easily accessible by all visitors.
There are established guidelines on accessibility provided by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
The DDA Code of Practice states:
2.2: “The Disability Discrimination Act makes it unlawful for a service provider to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service which it provides to members of the public.”
2.13 – 2.17: “What services are affected by the Disability Discrimination Act? An airline company provides a flight reservation and booking service to the public on its website. This is a provision of a service and is subject to the act.”
4.7: “From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services.”
5.23: “For people with visual impairments, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include … accessible websites.”
5.26: “For people with hearing disabilities, the range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible might include … accessible websites.”
The DDA does not give specific rules on the level of accessibility required. However, at a minimum level all sites should follow basic accessibility principles.
The European Parliament emphasised that European institutes and member state governments are asked to fulfill priority 1 as well as priority 2 of the W3C/WCAG guidelines.
[Priority 1]
A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use Web documents.
[Priority 2]
A Web content developer should satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents.
[Priority 3]
A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents.
There are degrees of conformance to these priorities.
Conformance Level “A”: all Priority 1 checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “Double-A”: all Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied;
Conformance Level “Triple-A”: all Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied;
The guidelines in full are at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/
An overview of selected W3C Priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints of relevance to website owners and commissioners.
Your website should conform to these guidelines;
Apple's iconic iPad
Jakob Nielson, renouned web usability expert notes on his website that users of Apple’s iPad put it down when they want to buy something online.
They use their desktop to carry out e-commerce transactions after researching on their iPad.
Another note of interest is that owners of iPads invariably share them with family members (unless they live alone of course).
Apparently many people surveyed said they’d found apps on their iPad that they didn’t know where there and must have been added by a friend or family member.
Main uses of iPad reported by Nielson:
Read the full article at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad.html
Modern websites use a variety of software tools to give users a good experience and to give owners a return on investment.
Some of the many tools we use in our web design and development processes are listed below.
Google analytics is possibly the most popular web user information tool on the Internet. Google’s tracking tool gives you in depth information about the pages your users are visiting, how long they are spending, what keywords and phrases they are using to find you and much more. Google analytics works perfectly with Adwords so you can monitor your pay-per-click advertising results and compare them against natural listings. Giving you a complete overview to reconcile with sales.
YouTube is the video tool that changed the Internet and arguably the way we communicate. Posting videos of examples from your site gives you valuable exposure to a complete new audience online. You can use low-budget videos to quickly promote your products and services. Each video page on YouTube can be deep-linked back to your site.
Facebook has changed the way we communicate. As a promotional tool Facebook gives you personal connection to customers and clients, all of whom have expressly ‘liked’ you. You can be more informal on Facebook than in other communications.
Twitter is perfect for brief messages and updates. You can use Twitter to make short, quick news announcements and give your clients and customers a place where they can ‘get the latest’. Twitter also makes it easy for you to follow others in your industry or interest group.
WordPress is our open-source content management system of choice. The functionality and flexibility of it make it a powerful website management tool and provide for many levels of dynamics and interation with users.
Magento is an awe inspiring open-source e-commerce platform. The amount of flexibility and ease of use are un-equaled in our experience of using shopping carts and online payment processing systems.
Market Mailer is a perfect tool for managing mailing lists and newsletters. It enables tracking of emails opened and tracks click-through routes as well. You can easily see who has opened your email and who has also clicked on one or more of the links.
Zend is the perfect development platform if you need to build high-quality PHP applications quickly.
PayPal is often the most straightforward method of receiving payments from your website. There are numerous other excellent payment gateways including Worldpay. SECpay and SagePay
Photoshop is still the fundamental building block for most new web designs. Also in-page graphics play an important part in creating the desired user experience on many sites.
Dreamweaver has become more of a super ftp tool than an editor but it is still the best for hard-coded web pages, scripting and editing cascading style sheets (CSS).
Orissa Designs' lotus flower logo
Our friends at Orissa Designs specialise in hand crafted, up-cycled, shabby chic furniture and Hindy deity reliefs. They also sell high quality, ‘temple-grade’ incense.
Their new shiny website is live now from today so well done to them for getting it there. All done with WordPress and PayPal.
Then there is the Facebook and Twitter – but you can spot those for yourself of course.
Orissa Designs’ website is at http://www.orissadesigns.co.uk.
Each of the major search engines works in a different way to the next.
What they all share in common is the aim of delivering relevant and timely search results for their users.
Some of the search engines use software spiders and robots to crawl through content and index it. They actually copy the entire Internet onto their own hard disks.
Other search engines use real people to look at web pages and then decide whether to include them in search results. These sites have lost prominence in recent years due to the increased dominance of companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
They key principle in making your website rise in the listing pages is to make it a relevant one.
You must know your subject and make your website about that subject.
When you add content; text, images, video, or audio, make it about the subject of the main website.
Don’t get distracted and go off the point. Keep focused on what you’re trying to achieve.
Make your text easy to read and comprehend. Avoid using long sentences and paragraphs.
Use titles, headings and sub-headings in the right way throughout your pages.
Meta tags are useful but are secondary to what is actually on the page itself. There is no point in putting key words into meta tags that are not included on the page.
Where possible avoid using tables for your site layout. If you have a designer working for you make sure you point this out to them.
Get to know your visitors and what they like and use on your site.
Research and develop using the keywords people use to find your site. Also research associated key words and phrases and develop content to attract searches around these terms.
A very important factor in determining your website’s position on the search engine results pages is how many sites are linking to you. Not just how many, but also how good or authoritative they are on a given subject.
If you have a few ‘quality’ links this can be more effective than lots of low-quality or irrelevant links.
Please drop us a line if you want to talk to someone about your website and search engine optimisation – contact us.
Is this the most asked question, I wonder.
The other most asked question is. “How do the search engines work and decide which websites to put at the top of their lists?” (I’ll answer this one in the next article.)
The simple answer to the question of how to make money through your website is – there are lots of ways.
A few proven methods include;
How you make your site pay is the next question.
Success in this involves understanding your visitors and what they are looking for on your website.
You can benefit from knowing how many visitors you have and what pages they are looking at. Also what search terms are they using to find your website.
Ask yourself some questions. “Is the site communicating with the right target audience? Is it giving the responses I’m looking for? Am I getting the number of sales I need to make a profit?”
If you’re unsure about what you could do to monetise your website have a look at some of these sites for ideas:
EBay – sell things and make money. http://www.ebay.co.uk/
Amazon – more than just books. You can affiliate in several ways. http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Google adsense – display Google ads on your site to earn revenue. http://google.co.uk/adsense/
Chitika - display user targeted ads. http://chitika.com/
Quick tip for free:
When people put the term ‘buy’ or ‘shop’ into a search engine they are usually ready to part with their hard earned cash.
So for example; If you sell hand made furniture you might put on your homepage a phrase like. “Buy hand made furniture from our online shop today.” You may also put in the page title. “Hand Made Furniture Shop – Buy Online Today”.
When I first started my own business I asked my late father, an IBM exec for 25 years, if he had any particular advice about information technology (IT) that he could pass on to me.
He told me that the single most valuable thing he’d learned in years of creating computerised systems for manufacturing and industry was simply the importance of backing up computer data every day.
Each new client would have to be shown the risks involved in not backing up regularly. The potential disaster in terms of loss of business data and sheer time trying to recover or restore data could be averted by simply carrying out the basic procedure of backing up.
External hard disks provide an easy and quick way to back-up data.
You may have already experienced the sinking feeling you get as you realise you’ve just lost that document you were working on because of the computer freezing.
Worse still you may have experienced your computer actually appearing to blow up during an electrical storm.
If you’ve backed up your data you’re in a position to get “back up” and running again without major stress and anxiety.
Nowadays all the major operating systems come with back-up software built in. Do you use yours?
The best standard is to make three back-ups of your data.
One can be kept on-site, the other two ideally would be stored remotely in two different locations. This is in the event of some sort of major event like your office burning down or your being burgled.
Recently we had another look at the email marketing tool ‘MarketMailer’ (http://www.marketmailer.co.uk/)
Since first using it several years ago the software has improved in almost every way possible. This is a great credit to the developers.
Market Mailer is more than a list manager it also is a newsletter creation tool. It enables you to target your messages to the right people.
As they say themselves:
Marketmailer is: “a full featured email marketing solution, allowing businesses to create, send and track email newsletters in a cost-effective and anti-spam compliant manner.”
The pricing structure is varied to suit a wide range of requirements either paying monthly or annually.
And there is telephone support there when you need it.
All very impressive and user friendly.
The other major piece of software that compares with Market Mailer is Mail Chimp which we will look at later in the year.
It is now the intention of ours to develop the Tusler-Design web site as a business resource: both for owners of sites and people working on sites on behalf of the owners.
This means we intend to post regular, weekly updates to the new website.
Each week we post;
All aimed at giving you new and interesting angles, viewpoints and understanding.
In the course of our every day work we are constantly learning about ways to improve websites, attract more visitors, convert more visits into sales.
As the Internet becomes busier with more and more websites, site owners need to know how to keep improving.
How to get their staff to develop their websites to achieve the best results possible, and then improve again.
The reality is that the Internet is constantly changing as it grows and diversifies. Asking new questions of developers and designers to meet the desires of users.
It is often in facing and overcoming these challenges that progress is called and technology advances.