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.