Example Site
Usability Audit - (click the images below to
see the report pages)
Accessibility:
It is necessary to ensure users can accessibly navigate sites
easily and extract the relevant information.The World Wide Web
Consortium's (W3C) leads guidance for promoting a high degree
web site accessibility. Royal National Institute of the Blind
(RNIB) is an active member of the W3C, and most of their guidance
is based on the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), recommendations.
The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 makes it unlawful to discriminate
against disabled people in matters such as recruitment and employment,
the provision of services and the provision of education. The
Disability Rights Commission is an independent body established
by Act of Parliament in April 2000 to stop discrimination and
promote equality of opportunity for the 9.8 million disabled people
in Britain. It supports disabled people in getting their rights
under the Disability Discrimination Act.
Where non-text elements are used, the same information should
be provided in a textual format, to enable all users to access
it. For example - an option available to people with sight problems
is to use a speech browser or a screen reader. This software will
read out, in a synthesised voice via the sound system on the PC,
the contents of a web page. Graphic images are obviously not directly
accessible to this kind of software, but the addition of a text
alternative through the use of the ALT attribute provides text
which can be accessed by speech browsers, screen readers and text-only
browsers. The addition of meaningful alt text to images is one
of the most basic techniques for making the content of a web page
accessible to a wider range of users. Modern accessible design
techniques, for example use HTML DIV tags and Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS) rather than HTML tables to achieve positioning.
Search
Engine Marketing (SEM)
Most
of the spend on the Internet is on search engine marketing.
Search
Engine - Pay Per Click (PPC)
This
is when companies pay to advertise their site on search engines
such as Google or Overature.
Important points to note are that the amount paid for the keyword
or phase(s) selected is optimised. Most of the larger SEM companies
have a Bid management function which monitors what the next lowest
price is. Therefore it's not always the best strategy to say "Oh
yes, we want to be at the top of the list". Well, you can
but you can also pay over and above for it.
Watch your copy, change it and keep things current.
Search
Engine Optimisation (SEO)
A
well ranked site, brings in traffic at zero cost. This is called
natural rankings or organic optimisation.