Cleaning up the internet
Top Left Design has a mission - to clean up the internet. As anyone who has spent a significant time online would agree, the internet is littered with badly designed, inconsistent and out of date websites. It would be nice if many of those were taken down - and perhaps replaced with simple “holding pages” that just have the company name, logo and contact information.
A few simple changes and updates are often all that is needed to fix up a website - for example:
- updating the copy
- upgrading the design
- improving the quality of images
- updating news
- adding current articles and installing customised blogs
- updating the copyright date in the footer of the website
- making more prominent calls to action and more easier to access contact information
- replacing a huge sprawling site with a condensed one that only has information relevant to the target market for that business, individual or organisation.
W3C accessible rebuild
At other times, however, a more extensive overhaul is required - such as a complete rebuild of the site to make it W3C accessible and make it conform to accessibility guidelines. There are many advantages to updating the site in this way:
- the fact that there is a need for a rebuild means there could be a new design and structure - a good time to rethink things and make sure the website is in line with the current business's personality and objectives. Have a look at Our Portfolio for some examples of the possibilities of design.
- A newly built W3C accessible website is much more search engine friendly. This is because all the formatting is stored in a central file called a “style sheet” and the HTML pages have less “gobbledygook” and more text, headlines, keywords and links.
- W3C accessible websites are much quicker to load and much easier to update
- Because of the central style sheet, one change can be made on this file which will go through (or “cascade” through) the entire site - for example, you may want to change the colour of the main navigation links. This can be done very simply on a site built in this way.
- There is a law called the Disability Discrimination Act which says that all websites need to be built to conform to certain guidelines so they are fully accessible. So, you would be complying with the law - and if you are the law-abiding compliant type, this should be an appealing reason to do it!
- A newly rebuilt W3C accessible site, if we were to build it here at Top Left Design, would be more accessible to those who are visually impaired, colour blind, learning disabled or who are unable to use a mouse.
The most common problems online
As we at Top Left Design have created more than 200 websites, and have worked with over 350 clients on their websites, we are very experienced - and have had many “learning cycles”. Here is a quick list of the things we have been called in to clean up most often:
- inconsistent and confusing navigation
- shifting of graphic elements between pages
- out of date information
- hidden contact information
- bad quality images
- “cheesy” images
- too much text
- poor formatting of paragraphs and headings and links (yes, even this is an art)
- inconsistent spacing of images to text and headlines to text
- amateur websites created by people's nephews/nieces/sons/daughters/uncles etc who have not really had enough training or experience - and it shows - we call this “Relativitis”
There are more but we should stop as we don't like to overdo it!
Please get in touch if you have any questions about the above and would like to help us in our mission to “clean up the internet!
