Webmasters listen if you want traffic in 2008

An accessible site means making it available to be used by all. It's too easy to think that what looks ok to you on your screen, with your browser settings, will do for all. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple and this is why....

Websites are no longer just looked at by people sitting down in front of a Personal Computer. Today, websites are viewed on Pda's Phones, Library PCs, laptops, palmtops, all manner of mobile devices, digital TV, they are viewed by non-human automated systems or robots and are read aloud by special software to the visually impaired. If your site cannot be used by all these browsers you are reducing your audience and it's not a small minority you're losing.

Q.What one thing should i work on?
A.Content is king

The main purpose of accessibility is to put the content of a web page first and the design second. This is why CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) were introduced whuch has led to a great improvement of separating content from design. As an example, if you want to find out the opening time of a shop, you go to there web site, navigate to the opening times page from the home page and read the time. You've got what you came for. Whether the times are set out in a table, in a stylish font with an attractive colour scheme really isn't that important to you.

This time, taking the same example above, you're looking at the same site from your mobile browser. You type in the shops site's address and it connects. Anooyingly this time all you can see is the very top left of the page, the size of a postage stamp. You need to scroll across to find the navigation section. And then when you do find the opening times link it doesn't work. You can't find the information you need so you decide against going to the shop that day, they have just lost there business. You can see the impact this could have on your business sales if yourr not too careful.

Q.So how do you make a site accessible?
A.It sounds scary, but it isnt so difficult, when you have the free tools available (see my footer for the tools)

There are lot of things you can do but the simplest method is to use CSS. For each section of the page you can preset a style (padding, position, colours, fonts, sizes, etc.). When the customers browser comes to the page it displays the content first and then according to its own settings accommodates the styling as best it can. You can see that using this 2 tier system, content first, styling or design second, the information is always accessible and adapted to the vistor.

Now this is the icing on the cake: Making your site accessible not only means you are able to reach a greater audience but also helps with search engine rankings. The top search engines' robots such as Google , Yahoo and MSN scan through your pages on a regular basis. They're trying to establish the content and relevance of your site in order to rank it. Some robots are set to place more emphasis on the opening section of a page, for example, the first 25 words it finds. If your first 25 words are bogged down with instructions on which fonts to use, table widths, etc. it stands to reason that your page won't do as well as one with 25 first words of pure content. So do make your site accessible, even for the sake of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

Conclusion. If your accessible, then your probably enjoying the traffic entering your site as the search engines catch up and continue to work towards pushing accessible sites to the #1 in the results page, but if you haven't then rebuild it now and use the free tools availble. If you don't, you will loose out in the long run, and may not even see 2008 as a profitable business year.