Free colourful retro desktop background

Free to download.

The Spread Of The Internet

The Internet has instilled itself into many of our lives. It is the world’s largest resource where information is freely passed and distributed between millions of people. Research for individuals and businesses has become a streamlined process thanks to search engines, directories, and reference websites. Because of this interjection into our daily routine, we have come to rely more and more heavily on the Internet for an increasing number of purposes. As such, making your website accessible to as many people as possible is vital to its overall success.

Ensuring Accessibility Is Available

Fortunately, most browsers have the capability to change website settings. A simple click of the mouse and an arrow key can change text size, and software is available that turns ordinary textual content into audio content. But websites need to be optimized so that they are as easily accessible in all of these settings. Generally, this means following good design principles and meeting accessibility guidelines. These are just some of the more common examples:

Text Alternatives

Audio, video, and graphical content is not always accessible for your visitors. This can be true for visitors with disabilities as well as those with limited browser capability. The most common example of this is the image Alt tag. The contents of the Alt tag are displayed in browsers that do not have the capability to display the image.

Accessible Without CSS

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, have become popular because of the ease and flexibility they offer but they may not always be accessible. Ensure that a page renders and loads legibly without the accompanying CSS. Providing good, clean HTML has been used, this should be accomplished.

Keyboard Navigation

It should be possible to navigate around a page using just a keyboard, as well as using a mouse. Ensure that there are no traps on your page where the cursor or screen may become stuck when doing this. Some users prefer the use of the keyboard, while others may not have access to a mouse when viewing your page.

Provide An Alternative Page

There are many reasons why a page, or page element, may be inaccessible to a person, browser, or system. Providing an alternative for every eventuality is not always possible with more complex pages. In these cases, and when all else fails, provide an alternative version of the page that can be accessed by anybody. Typically, this means a text only version, or an HTML only version at the very least.

Web Accessibility For All

Web accessibility is taken seriously. No matter how small a demographic segment you may be missing, you are potentially missing out on visitors if your pages are in any way inaccessible. This will alienate possible visitors and also the people they communicate with on a regular basis.

We realy enjoyed working with Lorna on the site and hope it provides her clients with a first class source of information and provides Lorna with regular conversions.

The new site is available at http://www.westlothianchildcare.co.uk/

Lorna Smith Childminder

Free for you to download and use as you wish.

Blue bottles free background

Another free retro background from Pixelboxdesign

It’s made in widescreen format like the others.
Enjoy!

As a content creator, writing design briefs to companies handling online web design projects, you must consider the following points.

Company Profile. A brief description of your company is a must since the designer won’t necessarily be aware of your industry.

• Give a brief introduction about your company, its mission and vision,
• Talk about your products and services,
• Tell your designer about your target market and your competitors.
• Company’s Aims. Goal setting is very important and it’s important that you talk about your objectives and goals with your designer.
• Tell your web designer about the desirable outcomes that your company is expecting out of a website.
• Tell him the purpose of your website and its objectives.

Target Audience. Target audience is a group of people that a business aims at for it campaigns, because the people targeted have a strong liking for your brand. It’s important that a designer working on web site design projects is well aware of your markets demographic statistics like:

• Age
• Gender
• Line of work
• Buying potential
• Lifestyle
• Location

Website’s Role. It’s important that the designer working on online web designing projects is made aware of the purpose and the outcome that you are seeking by the way of your website.

Technical Requirements. The web developer must be aware of the technical requirements and the project constraints that your company might have.

Budget and Time. Clearly mention your approximate budget and time related deadlines.

Following the above mentioned points will make your design process a hassle free experience which will eventually save both time & money for your organization.

There are thousands of W3C standards covering all aspects of web development, and to list them all here would probably bore you to tears! Instead we are going to summarise the most commonly used standards, helping you to ensure that your chosen web developer is building you a site which is recognised and endorsed by W3C. Full details of all the W3C standards are available on their website.

Web Design and Applications

• HTML & CSS – These are the fundamental technologies used for building web pages, HTML/XHTML is used to define the structure of a page and CSS is used to create style and layouts.
• Scripting and Ajax – These are the standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for client-side Web Application developments.
• Graphics – W3C has specified the use of PNG raster, SVG vector and Canvas API formats for web graphics.
• Audio & Video – W3C approved formats for AV presentations include HTML, SVG and SMIL.
• Accessibility – The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has created and published Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAH) to help developers create content and applications that are accessible to the disabled community.
• Internationalization – web technology needs to work across all languages and cultures, and W3C has ensured this by creating HTML and XML standards which are built on Unicode.
• Mobile Web – W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices promotes the use of “One Web” and provides developers with the tools to create content which is viewable on a variety of mobile devices.
• Privacy – The privacy and security implications of the web are a crucial part of technology development and design.
• Math on the Web – MathML enables maths to be served, received and processed on the web for business reports, education materials and scientific research.

Web Architecture

• Architecture Principals – provide guidance and information to design web technologies.
• Identifiers – web items are identifiable by their names – URLs, URIs and IRIs are all WC3 approved web names.
• Protocols – HTTP is the web’s core protocol and is the vehicle used to exchange ideas.
• Meta Formats – Extensible Markup Language (XML) helps developers efficiently and cost-effectively build new meta formats.

XML Technology

• XML Essentials – infoset and namespaces are some of the essential XML technologies which address XML issues in specific application contexts.
• Schema – SML (W3C’s XML Schema) provides quality control tools for XML data.
• Security – XML signature, xkms and encryption can create the and integrity and privacy focused secure environment for XML.
• Transformation – XSLT and XPath have been created to allow developers to transform XML content into other recognised formats.
• Query – XQuery is used by web developers to extract data from XML content.
• Components – Further components such as style sheets, xlink, xinclude, xpointer, xforms and xml fragments have been created to provide a better environment to use and manipulate XML content.
• Processing – Defines the operation which need to be performed in chronological order on an XML document.
• Publishing – W3C have created XSL-FO for developers to publish large, complex or multilingual XML documents to HTML, PDF and various other formats.

A lot of designers put the little “W3C compliant” image or text at the bottom of their page even though the website isn’t valid but that’s another article.

What is W3C Compliant? What’s the big deal? W3C is an acronym for the World Wide Web Consortium, or a group of web and other technology professionals that set standards for how web pages should be developed. Because all web browsers handle certain code differently, the W3C’s function is to develop methodology that ensures that web sites are “Cross Platform Compliant,” or, in simpler terms, that the websites work the same way on all browsers.

So why do we want W3C compliant websites? Well probably the biggest attraction to making sure you validate your website is accessibility. Websites that are complaint will be more visible to search engines, and of course, the more visibility, the more traffic the site will get. Also, in relation to that, browsers that are developed for special needs people (screen readers, voice browsers, Braille browsers, etc) will be easier to read by their software.

Another advantage to W3C compliant websites is the reduction in development time. A website that is coded from the beginning using W3C standards is less likely to run into problems. You will find yourself spending less time debugging your code, and more time focusing on the site itself.

Stability is another tenet of W3C compliant websites. The standards that are developed by the W3C are developed with a lot of thought and design for both forward and backwards compatibility. In other words, as browsers progress in their development cycle, sites that are W3C validated will be less likely to run into problems in the future. Your code will be stable for years to come.

On the developer side of things, using W3C standards will help you develop a smoother workflow when developing your websites. The standards are put into place to help teach good practices when developing websites. The W3C has created validation tools that will help even the newest HTML developer easily spot mistakes and even show methods of correction.

Lastly, W3C validation is a sign of professionalism. Today, there is no “official” certification for HTML and CSS design. Sure some universities teach the coding techniques, but only as part of a larger scale program, and there aren’t very many, which leaves a lot of would-be coders left in the dark and having to learn themselves. Validation methods and W3C standards allow new developers the opportunity to be more successful in their development careers.

When you look at the advantages of W3C Compliant websites and Validation techniques, you can see how learning these simple systems can help you become a better web designer, and ensure that your code will be used for a long time.

What Are Web Standards?

Designing with web standards is a general term used to mean that you use the following technologies, and that you use them correctly:

• HTML or XHTML to contain the content,
• CSS to hold all the styling,
• JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM) to take care of any scripting.

In the bad old days, HTML was used incorrectly. Objects like tables are meant to be used to hold tabular data but instead they were (ab)used to hold background images and other components just to artificially create a layout on a web page. Style information was mixed in along with the content making the code bloated and inefficient.

The web standards project seeks to:

• persuade browser makers to support the standards, as they were intended and
• persuade web professionals to use them that way.

Why Should I Care?

There are numerous, tangible benefits to designing with web standards, not least of all, financial savings.

Lower Costs

Separating the content from the styling makes your site easier to update and maintain. This makes it less expensive for the developers as less time is needed to add new content, update existing content and test. Also, your site will be future-proofed. All compliant browsers will always support your code, you do not need to have the developers retest every time a new browser releases a new version just to make sure that the pages still look the same.

If your site is large then separation will also mean a substantial savings on the bandwidth, which in turn translates into lower hosting costs.

Increased Findability, Improved SEO

If your site uses meaningful (X)HTML then your site’s content is easier for search engines and therefore customers to find. Some search engines score pages on how well-structured the markup is, your Alexa ranking is affected and other SEO metrics are also improved. For example, when you separate the site’s content from the styling, your site gets lighter because there is less code. This means that your site loads into browsers faster and provides a better user experience, this represents an SEO benefit as search engines like Google score pages on their load time.

Gain a Wider Audience, Find More Customers

When your site complies web standards, accessibility is improved. That means that not only people with disabilities will be able to access your content, but also your site will be available to the new generation of mobile browsing devices automatically. In other words, new potential customers for free.

Designing with web standards is not about adhering to a set of rules just for the sake of it: the benefits are:

• real improvements to your site and
• real financial savings.