S3 Web Design

Come on I need some fun - a good joke!

Do yu know what mate I agree with you! When i first came on this forum everyone raved about firefox and its add-ons but you know me - i checked them out, of course! But to be honest they gave me nothing I could not already find and in fact were often wrong. There are lots of good online tools but it takes an age to find them and to be honest you can only be sure of an online tool when you have checked and double checked it against lots of other things including your own brain - much as mine is a bit mushed at the moment I will try the one you suggested and let you know what I think. I am updating my seo4all site to wordpress tonight so have to go back to work - it's a nightmare!

Sam that one looks ok, have you found it makes errors? One I use similar but maybe not as much detail is http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/web-seo-analysis.php

I use loads of tools and check them against each other, some vary, but here is one http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html and for quick reviews Hubspot is OK. Oh and the reaction engine but sometimes it cant see the page text, not often but sometimes http://www.reactionengine.com/.

Hi apparently you can download a free screen reader from here http://www.nvda-project.org/wiki/Download. I am hoping to try it out this afternoon. David the bloke who is blind who is working on accessibility with me said to try using it with the screen of your computer covered up as otherwise you are tempted to look! Let me know how you get on with it. Gill

I have pm'ed you

I'm not sure whether I have understood correctly but, all text should be on the page but decorative text just doesn't count - is that the right way to say it? I take it you are concerned about the words WIDGET LTD on the graphic not being readable by a screen reader, if you use it as a background to a header it doesn't matter and if you use it in the html add the alt text. I would imagine people will know they were still on the same site because if they had been redirected the screen reader would tell them?? I will check with David. In your page text you are bound to refer to the companies name so I don't see there should be a problem unless someone can point out something I am missing. Thanks for the tweet, I saw it! You are a mate.

My head is fit to explode! How about 1. put the pretty text in a pic - use css to make that the background of the div for the header or whatever and use nice fonts in the pic to say WIDGETS LTD 2. then where the body text starts put an h1 with the title for that paragraph using 2 or 3 keywords for the page 3. further down the page use h2 and h3 to highlight changes of topic. 4. if you use an image in the html always fill in the alt with something that describes the picture but do not put the words "picture" or "image" in the alt text otherwise you will fail the accessibility test. There you go - the solution in 4 easy points! This thread has wandered a bit. Anyway if anyone can tweet my accessibility report or forward it to anyone who is into this sort of thing please do, many many thanks Gill

Its a pleasure

Well why not put your "about me" page content on the home page, it says who you are and what you do. Then just get rid of the about me page - you dont want duplication.

I am with Charlie on this. And as I have said many times before, web pages are essentially documents so need headers in a logical order that makes sense. Alts for images are vital for images as both search engines and screen readers just see a big blank on the page if there is no alt text. Plus of course alt text is another way of getting your key words and phrases onto the page.

Digg and facebook have do follow links, so yes they will help. Twitter and most forums are nofollow so dont provide incoming links but can drive traffic to your website which hopefully will then lead to others linking to your site. Page rank takes into account the number and importantly, the quality of links to your site.

Apparently the automatic set up of Wordpress when you unzip it on your domain does not set the read writes correctly - you may already know this but I didn't. The wp-config.php file needs to have the permissions manually set to 640 otherwise apparently anyone can access the file which is where the password for your database is stored in simple text. I know nothing about this topic at all so do correct me if I am wrong, I am simply relaying some info I found out.

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it but am I having a blond day - which other 3 parties??? Re the h1, and headings generally, I did a post yesterday about a chat I had with David Reynolds a blind internet user who said it is vital for there to be headings regularly down the page highlighting any change in subject otherwise he cannot in effect "scan read" the page using keyboard short-cuts. Back to the h1 - Matt Cutts answered this point specifically in one of his you-tube vids and said it was viewed as hidden text. Why not set the site up all pretty THEN as you start the textual content put in an h1 heading indicating the subject of that paragraph? I read somewhere that 7% of the population have some impairment that means using the internet like the rest of us is impossible - web designers are required under the DDA to make their websites accessible and it seems pretty wrong to me that such a large proportion of the population are being ignored by some designers. One thing that really struck home when talking to David was the fact that people with sight problems and other disabilities depend on the internet and websites MORE than the normal population as the internet is the ONLY way for them to get information independently without having to rely on other people. David said that if he could choose he would want 1. validly coded sites - errors badly affect the screen readers, and 2. Headers h1, h2 etc used heirarchically down the page showing any change of subject so he can scan read, in effect, the page like the rest of us otherwise he has to wait until the screen reader has read all the way through the page. As people with disabilities rely on the internet more so than the average person I think we should all be designing with accessibility in mind. Gill PS and another point - I have recently noticed a few sites using the alt attribute but leaving it empty - so the site validates, yes - but this is in my mind underhand as without the alt tag the screen readers have nothing to read and to be honest its a waste of an alt tag for keywords.

I know Sam - its not our websites specifically, the Namesco system was being changed - the admin panel I think and the whole thing was hacked. We are just removing the alien index.htmls now and changing passwords etc. Its back up now.

Hi Tobes look at the 2 links below my name, I write 2 blogs, one on each site, there are links to quite a few online tools on there plus on the seo4all.co.uk site there are lots of hints and tips about seo. Dont give up on seo completely - go for some longer phrases. Good luck and pm me if you want any specific help.

Namesco is now back up, so if you want to read my link it should be ok.

Absolutely excellent - Namesco appear to be changing their admin panel tonight and as a result it seems something has compromised security and so they have taken the server down. So no-one can see my link anyway, oh well.... Fantastic! they have obviously opened a big viral hole as my website now has a japanese page on it!

Thanks! I needed something nice - life's like that isn't it. You're like me then - I crash my browser so many times...

I wrote an article on the accessibility etc of the main 3 political party websites and thanks to a couple of suggestions from Charliesaidthat was happy with the end result, however I am even happier now as Mencap have decided to link to my article and a bloke who is involved with accessibility and the blind called me and has emailed my link to everyone on the mailing list for the organisation he runs plus he said he will, for free, check any website I build as he is himself blind. So I am chuffed, just wanted to brag a bit, sorry

I have always got work from business networking events but that might be difficult if you are working full-time, but have a search there may be evening events. Your local FSB might be worth contacting or try a local new business start up scheme and see if they can put you in contact with new businesses who need websites.

All the above especially the ones that think I know all about blue widgets and so can fill in the content myself but especially the ones who love the new clean design I show them then try and tweak it all the way back to their original site which wasn't even fashionable in the 90s!

I would have used divs not tables plus for SEO you need to use h2, h2 etc and a meta description will encourage people to click through from search results. Me I am not keen on moving bits like the flash but each to their own. You have some html errors too. Your page title is 117 characters and I would reduce that to about 60. Your top keywords on the page are Word Count Density design 10 6.67% vibration 9 6.00% year 4 2.67% years 3 2.00% commerce 3 2.00% finally 2 1.33% 2010 2 1.33% If these are not the major keywords you want to be found for I would suggest you rewrite your content.

Add a blog to your site and write lots of entries on "how to...". Or alternatively do a real time search and grab peoples twitters that are about your subject and have a natter or help them out with whatever their problem is ..... or just go down the pub!!

I think it would be best for you to search the forum, there are loads of relevant threads, plus of course read my blog, there is a link below, plus Google stuff.