A Bit About This Site
We wanted a fully accessible, ultra-usable and highly flexible website that showed designing with standards doesn't have to involve compromise.
Fully Accessible
This site meets the highest recognised levels of accessibility. This means that every visitor to this site can easily access and read the content no matter what their ability or how they browse the internet. Examples of the sorts of groups that can use this site and who are hindered or prevented from using other sites include blind people, people with reduced vision or motor difficulties (for example, the elderly), people browsing the web using WAP, a PDA or other non-traditional method - digital TV, cars, kiosks etc. Why is it so important? Aside from the ethical implications of ignoring these groups, it makes no business sense to block your site for up to a 25% of surfers.
Valid Code
The Internet would slowly become useless without valid, standards-compliant code. These standards ensure a consistency of development across the web and allow for secure future development.
Our site contains valid CSS and valid XHTML. These links take you through to an automatic validator which gives you information about this page. Unfortunately, the CSS validator throws up an error because of a recently-developed CSS3 styling we use for the print style sheet. We are confident however that the validator will update in time.
Flexible Design
Because the content and the visual style are completely separate, we have the flexibility to apply any look-and-feel we like by just editing one file. Try the style-switcher on the right - this simply switches the current style sheet, for another and places a session cookie on your computer to 'remember' the choice as you pass from page to page. As you can see from the text-only version, our content can be accessed very easily and could be used on any number of different platforms with very little work.
The construction of this site also allows for the design to be user-orientated. Through various browser controls, the end user can manipulate the page, resize the text, turn off the images - or whatever their own browsing preference leads them to do - and our site will still be usable and accessible.
Finally, we created a print style sheet to facilitate easy printing and produce pages that were actually useful outside the environment of the screen. So our print-outs contain page and date information and every link has the full URL next to it. Again, the content of the page is always the same; only the style sheet changes.
If you've read this far, then we guess you're pretty interested in style sheets. If that's the case, then take a look at CSS Zen Garden for an idea of just how powerful style sheets are. This site invites its visitors to submit style sheets to be applied over its own content.
