What Makes A Good Web Site?
"When Web Accessibility is mentioned, people tend to focus on how it can help disabled people -- without looking at the bigger picture."
Having a good web site means making sure the site is easy to use and the information easy to find and understand. This can be accomplished with the basics (HTML/XHTML and CSS). JavaScript should only be used where needed, not to just to do tricks that can be annoying at best, or — at worst — make the site impossible to use without it. Dynamic sites built with PHP or ASP, and databases have their places; but it’s still important that the site be easy to use and maintain.
When Web Accessibility is mentioned, people tend to focus on how it can help disabled people — without looking at the bigger picture. Accessible sites are better for everyone. Even those without disabilities may be having trouble using a web site. Maybe a Flash or JavaScript element is preventing the site from being indexed properly. Old, out-of-date code with depreciated tags could be causing more problems than people realize.
Often times JavaScript menus are hard to use and can become useless when JavaScript is turned off or otherwise unavailable. Using images for navigation without proper alt text only adds to the problems. Even worse is the use of Flash in the site navigation, which usually means users will have to install a Flash player just to navigate the site. These issues don’t just affect visitors, but search engines as well. The web crawlers used by search engines to index a site are essentially blind and cannot interpret images or JavaScript. Without any text to read, they cannot properly index a site.
Some may worry that these changes will take too much time, cost too much or mean that their entire site will need to change. This is not necessarily true. Updating the code is relatively easy and doesn’t have to mean changing the look of the site. Yes, the navigation might need to be changed and maybe some different colors would work better; but these are still small changes, relatively speaking. Some sites will, of course, need more drastic changes — but it all depends on what is there to start with.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: September 17th, 2008 at 12:34 pm →
Well put, Jen. This is the type of reminder that I’m realizing needs to be told over and over again so people will get it. The most recent post on my blog indicates that even some gurutastic experts need the basics poured over their head time and time again. It’s almost frustrating (actually, it is frustrating). Keep up the good work spreading the word. It is needed and appreciated.