Blog
The Doublespark blog is the place to discover what we’re up to. Read our posts to see what we’re currently working on, what or who’s inspiring us and other inside stuff from all our Doublespark locations. We blog in refreshingly non-geeky technical language and will - from time to time - post tutorials and other useful web design and SEO information on this page. You can subscribe to our RSS feed by clicking here.
Being Up to Date With Content
For people who maintain blogs, it would be fine to write about anything you wish. But bear in mind, people today are after updated information. Preferably, you should have a reliable source such as Google or Yahoo news to which you can use as reference. You don’t have to rewrite what you read.
Accessibility Tips Part 3
Perhaps the tip that beats all accessibility tips is the simplest one - to test your website using a screen reader. Even if you do follow accessibility guidelines chances are something will get overlooked. Testing the site with a screen reader is plain common sense.
Accessibility Tips Part 2
Keep empty form fields empty - Although I have observed the trend of inserting sample text into empty form fields as placeholders there are still websites that do this. This shouldn’t be done since most screen readers (except the very old models) are able to recognize form fields and so prompt users to enter the required information. The problem with putting placeholders inside the form fields is that screen readers usually do not even read out/mention the existence of these placeholders so that users end up not deleting them and thus end up submitting incorrect information when they simply add the right information at the beginning or the end of the placeholder. Note that this is true only for supposedly EMPTY form fields (i.e. name, address, username).
Accessibility Tips Part 1
Last time we talked about the importance of accessibility. This time I’ll be giving some tips that should help you avoid making mistakes when implementing accessibility.
Web Design Book Review: Don’t Make Me Think
No I’m not trying to wiggle my way out of listing the best web design books. The post title is actually the title of one of the best web design books anyone can read - Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.
Mobile Web Design Tips Part 3
Allow misspellings in search - It is harder to type using the small keyboards found in mobile devices resulting in more typo errors made by mobile users. Because of this you should make sure that if your mobile site has a search function you should factor in incorrect spellings so that users can easily find the information they need even with a bunch of typo errors.
Mobile Web Design Tips Part 2
Highlight selected items - Navigating through a mobile site is usually not as easy as doing so in a normal website on your PC. One reason for this is that unlike with PCs where you can easily tell where your mouse is, allowing you to simply hover and click with ease, cursor control in mobile devices is not as easy. It often leads to confusion resulting in irritating wrong clicks. To help users avoid this problem make sure you provide a way for them to determine where they are at the mobile site page. You can do this by highlighting the part of the page where the cursor is currently pointing. For this very same reason it is usually good practice to make the background colour of the mobile site white so that whatever colour you choose to highlight items you can be sure that the item will stand out.
Mobile Web Design Tips
When designing mobile sites one of the biggest limitations everyone should remember is the size of the screen. The small screen size limits the amount of content that can be viewed at one time.
Designing for the Learning Disabled continuation
- Use visual illustrations - Present visual illustrations whenever appropriate and/or possible. Use pie charts or bar graphs when quoting statistics instead of simply discussing it in paragraph form or listing it down in tables.
- Break information into small chunks - Bullet points are good. Avoid long sentences and paragraphs.
- Good spacing - Use adequate spacing between lines of text as well as between paragraphs. The spacing between lines of text usually depends on the font used so make sure you use a font that is easy on the eyes.
Read more … Designing for the Learning Disabled continuation
Designing for the Learning Disabled
Below are a few tips on designing a website for the learning disabled.
- Be consistent - Make the buttons, links, and the whole appearance of the website as consistent as possible. Aside from the appearance clickable elements should behave as consistently as possible. If you a new tab opens when a button is clicked then use pop-out tabs all throughout. If you make use of drop down menus use them all throughout instead of mixing drop down menus with expandable menus.
- Do not use idioms - Idioms can be confusing and taken literally. Instead use simple everyday language using words in their literal context/meaning.
