Thursday, June 19, 2008

Good website design can provide better accessibility

There are hundreds of millions of people using the Web and it’s fairly easy to forget that not all of them speak English. In fact only around a quarter of Web users are native English speakers. So what happens if your website is in English and you receive a Spanish user? In this case, your website design has to support page translation. It’s important to have a website design of quality to be able to target different groups of people.

If your website is well coded and good website design solutions have been used, Google can automatically translate your site to several common languages. But you cannot expect the translation to be very good. Another alternative would be to hire a translator. He will be able to translate all the contents on your website. Then through fine website design techniques, you could allow people to view your website in the language they prefer. This option may sound very expensive but thanks to it you can reach millions of extra customers.

Millions of people around the world have disabilities that make it hard to use websites due to poor website design. People who are blind can even experience a website design through a special software called a screen reader. In this case, if the website design is poor, such users would definitely be unable to access the websites they want. This said, it is important that website design makes life easy for all people. For instance, a bad website design technique would be the use of green text on a red background. While the text may be easily readable for most normal users, people who are colour blind would find it hard to read it. Similarly, a bad website design practice would be the use of DHTML in drop down menus. People who cannot use a mouse would be unable to access such websites.

Moreover, in many countries including the US, Britain and Australia among others, there are now laws making it illegal to discriminate against disabled persons. The same applies for producing websites that they cannot access. Therefore making your website accessible through good website design solutions would make it easily usable for people suffering from disabilities. A lot of people think that accessible websites do not look good. Most of the things that make a website accessible or not are to do with the way the website design is done. Providing good website design features will make your website better for all your visitors. There are around 10 million of blind or short sighted people in the USA. Therefore, bad website design would not only drive them away but also mean that you are being rude to them, or even worse, that you are doing bad business.

So, if your website design is too bulky, its overall performance would be affected as Google would not be able to access your site easily. Good website design will not only make your website more accessible but also prove to be a steady income generator for you.

Sanjou is the website design articles author at one of the leading website design company in the UK.