Maybe you have heard people mentioning usability and accessibility together with websites. You might think that this is all a bit “Over The Top” and need not really bother you, but that is not quite right.

The UK DDA – Disability Discrimination Act – came into force in 1995. The DDA makes it unlawful to discriminate against people in respect of their disabilities in relation to employment, the provision of goods and services, education and transport. This means that any organisation which provides products and / or services – both profit AND non-profit organisations – must comply with the DDA.

For example, website, intranets, extranets have to be accessible too. Business websites providing information online must comply with the usability and accessibility guidelines.

Big Advantage

If your website can be accessed by people with disabilities, your website and ultimately your products and services information is open to a much wider audience.

DDA changes in October 2004 for websites?

Changes to the DDA are made almost on an annual basis. It is a wrong belief that from October 2004, websites must comply. Websites have had to comply since 1999! The DDA requires that reasonable adjustments are made to your services to ensure that a person with a disability can access that service.

What happens if my website does not comply?

A disabled person can make a claim against you or your organisation if they cannot access information or services via your website or your website makes it impossible or difficult to access information and services.

Therefore, if you have not made reasonable changes and cannot show that these changes are being made, then you may be liable under the DD Act, and may have to pay compensation and be ordered by a court to change your website.

Has anybody been sued yet?

In 2000, the Sydney Olympics Committee in Australia was requested to amend their website so that it can be accessed by people with disabilities. The changes were not made and this resulted in a decision against the website owners where they had to pay $20,000 Australian dollars.

Read more about the Sydney Olympics Committee…

Levels of compliance

There are three levels of compliance: A, AA and AAA. You can find out about the compliance levels by accessing the WAI pages (Web Accessibility Initiative) on the W3C website – www.w3.org/WAI.

RNIB – the Royal National Institute of the Blind – recommends that websites exceed the basic level of compliance that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend in their Website Accessibility Guidelines (WAG) version 1.0 and aim for double AA compliance.

How can I test it if my website complies with the guidelines?

There are different tools available online for testing your website’s accessibility. You also need to make sure that the website is developed using valid HTML / XHTML. This can be checked on the W3C website.

• W3C HTML Validator

What if my website does not comply?

If your website does not comply with the recent guidelines or if your HTML is not valid, simply get in touch with us. We can provide a website analysis and undertake necessary steps to make your website legal.

• No-obligation consultation
• Suggestion of possible website structure
• Homework you have to do
• Homework we have to do
• Provision of first design options
• Design Sign Off
• Implementation of website
• Free updates of up to 6 weeks after Go-Live

Before we design your website, we will have a conversation with members of your business in order to find out what your organisation specialises in and what your business is all about. We will ask many questions about your products and your services. We will try to find out what makes your company successful.

We will discuss different website structures and only start the design of your website once we have an understanding of your company and its products and services. During that conversation, we would also like to establish what you want to achieve with your website.

• Do you want to raise awareness or
• do you want to sell products online for example?

From the outset, you will be very involved in the design of your website. It is your website and you are working with us on developing the website to your requirements.

We can provide several website design options and you can then decide which one you like best. You can still decide to change any colours, positioning of logos, navigation and so on.

Marketing Matters in West Lothian strive to provide website designs that look professional and are easy to navigate. Our main aim is that your website visitors can find information very quickly without getting lost. Navigation will be clear and always consistent across your whole website.

And now the boring bit…

Websites developed by Marketing Matters comply with recent accessibility and usability guidelines in accordance with the Disability Discrimination Act. By this, your company information is available to a wider audience. CreatWeb aims to develop websites that reach the AA standard.

We provide a number of important features as standard, such as initial search engine optimisation, contact forms, and the organisation of hosting and domain names.

In February 2005 our web designer was rewarded with Best Web Designer West Lothian by West Lothian Council.

• Do you want to sell more?
• Do you want your business to get noticed?
• Do you want to provide a better service or better information than your competitors?
• Do you want to make it easy for your clients to find out about you and your products?
• Do you simply need to update an existing website and make it “recession-proof”?

Any good marketing consultant would tell you that, in today’s market, the most important selling tool is your website. Especially in the current economic situation, people more and more search the web for relevant information and learn about products and businesses before they spend any money.

Your business cannot really loose out by not having an online presence!

More and more people use Google and other search engines to give them the anwers. You cannot really afford not to be there! Provide your customers with the information they are after and they will gain confidence in your business and services.

With your website, you not only reach local markets – such as customers in West Lothian for example – but also worldwide markets. It provides a service to all those potential customers who access your website. No other marketing medium offers this flexibility.

A website is now the most cost-effective method of promoting your business – and it does it 24 hours a day – 7 days a week.

For a no-obligation consultation, please give Marketing Matters a call on 01506 66 86 85

Content Content Content

Imagine your company specialises in selling snowboards for children. There are probably quite a few companies out there who do the same – selling snowboards for children. Maybe your company plans to sell snowboards online where people can make credit card payments online. Therefore, you need to convince your website visitors that your snowboards are the ones they should buy, and not your competitor’s! How do you do that?

Imagine you have 2 children you want to introduce to snow boarding. You go to Google and you enter “snowboards for children”. You look at the first few results (made up examples here):

• UK Specialist for Snowboards for Children – Company XYZ
  Online store with extensive information on safety and snowboarding for children
• XYZ – based in London, Snowboard by BRAND
  BRAND-X A2, BRAND-Y 4B, company existed since 1984.

Which link do you click on? Most likely on the first one because it is tailored around you and your concerns.

The following page will discuss a few points why your great website appears in Google and how you can improve your product / service pages.

People visit your website because they want to find out more about the product they want to buy or the service they are looking for. They don’t have enough information to make a buying decision, they want to inform themselves and find a company which offers the product they are after. There are two different kinds of clients out there:

• Visitors who are looking for information, but are not ready to buy.
• Visitors who have enough information and are ready to buy.

Visitors who are looking for information

Many people search the web to find information about products and services. Some people want to figure out different product options available, others want to compare prices, or they want to know about advantages / disadvantages of a certain product.

You need to cater for website visitors who are just browsing. If you don’t give them enough information to stay, they won’t even consider your company when they are ready to make a buying decision.

Back to our snowboard example. The website should have a clear structure with information about snowboarding which is free and which can be read by potential clients without them having to submit their details. The free advice can already recommend certain snowboards for certain needs – beginners, advanced, certain sizes etc. The free advice can also provide links to particular items in the online shop. The website should then contain an online shop which lists available snowboards and accessories in a logical order. The shop should be easy to navigate and it should encourage visitors to include additional items other than just a snowboard (such as suits, gloves etc.).

An individual product page should include a photograph of the product – or maybe even more than one photograph. The product page should include a clear headline which includes not just the brand and model number but also the generic term of the product – ie. Snowboard. So a typical headline could be: “BRAND-A 123XL Snowboard” rather than just “BRAND-A 123XL“. Some of your visitors will be completely new to your products. To give you another example – if someone wants to buy a bike, and has not cycled for a long time or never before – they won’t be able to distinguish between a “Hybrid” or a “Mountain Bike”.

The product description should be quite comprehensive. It should include a description – which in turn can include a number of keywords and key phrases, it should include sizes, colours, materials etc. compatibility if required – all depending on what you sell. The more information you provide the better. You keep your website visitor on your site. They will acknowledge that you have provided lots of information and they will read the information – because that’s why they visited your website in the first place.

Big bonus – you will keep the search engines happy – because they are able to pick up the keywords in the product description.

If you only provide a small bit of text, visitors can look at it and will immediately leave, because there is no reason to stay, nothing to read, nothing to look at. Search Engines have no content to add to their databases and your site will most likely not be listed in the results.

Have a look at the Amazon website. Select any book and have a look at the product page of a particular book. You will see that they include masses of information about every book they sell. The number of pages, if it’s a hardcover, the author of the book, the category of the book and so on. They also include a summary of the book and reviews submitted by readers. All these things lead a website visitor to a buying decision. They feel they have gathered enough information to buy the desired item.

Visitors who have enough information and are ready to buy

You can distinguish between the price hunters and the visitors who only buy from established websites / companies. If you sell products online, you will most likely have a price displayed for each product. The visitor has gathered enough information – either on your website or elsewhere – and is ready to buy, to spend money.

If you have a good price for your product, you might catch the price hunters, but you won’t impress people who want to buy from a website that looks established and well-looked after. So in any case, providing more information is better than doing a quick job and your website will do better in search engines.

The homepage is the last page you write

When you have a new website developed, the designer will show you an example of your website design which most likely contains words that cannot be read. This text which usually starts with the words “Lorem Ipsum” is called “greeking” and it is not a language. It is simply dummy text which allows you to take in your website design without being distracted by meaningful text. The design is about the layout of the website, not the content. That’s the reason why no real text or content is used so that you – the client – can concentrate on the look and feel of your website. Have a look at this example so you understand what we mean.

Example of Greeking

Once the design is signed off, the developer can go ahead and start developing your website. Some developers will ask you to provide all content at the start of the development. It’s sometimes better to hold back until the website is almost ready to go live.

The website structure has to be discussed first before you start developing the site. For industry sites for example – the smaller the number of clicks to the information the visitor wants the better. Your website visitors don’t have any time to look for the information. Give them the information they want – fast.

Think about what your company offers, what is your most important service / product – and who is your most important type of client – this will help you guide into the right direction for your site structure.

If a company deals mainly with architects for example, having a link called “architects” on the homepage will greatly please any architect that visits your site, because they immediately feel welcome.

The most common mistake some companies still make is adding lots of content on the homepage which is about the company and not about their products. This puts the company in the center rather than the client. This should be avoided and a summary of the services and/or products you offer should be highlighted on the homepage.

Websites follow the same structure as authors who write books: They write the book first and then they write the introduction – the first page. Once your website is almost ready, you will know the content of the different pages and you can better provide a summary of your main products / services.

The best thing is to test-drive the site with web visitors who know nothing about the product/service your company offers. Ask them – without clicking on any other pages – if they know what you do and what you specialise in just by looking on your homepage.

Keywords are King

So you company develops blue medium-sized widgets. Put yourself into your clients’ shoes and visit open up Google. In order to buy blue medium-sized widgets, what would you enter in Google to find a website that sells blue medium-sized widgets? – Yes, correct – you would enter “blue medium sized widgets”. That’s why you need to include keywords into your content, exactly those keywords your website visitors would use in Search Engines to find websites like yours. So if you have content on your website that describes your company history, you missed a big chance, because the company history will not highlight blue medium sized widgets.

Keywords vs Key Phrases

What’s a keyword? – A keyword is a single word such as “photography“, or “design“, or “website“.

What’s a key phrase? - A key phrase consists of several keywords, such as “web design west lothian“, “commercial photography Bathgate“. When people perform a search in Google, for example, they have learnt that key phrases will give them a better result rather than just single keywords. If you are trying to find a web designer, and you only enter “web design” in Google, you will spend the next year trying to go through the millions and millions of result pages that are displayed. However, if you enter “Web Design Bathgate“, you will more likely find a web designer that is located in Bathgate.

Homepage Content – Examples

Have a look at the below examples for some homepage content.

CreatWeb is a web design company based in Bathgate, West Lothian who specialise in website design, website maintenance, website updates, search engine optimisation, website translation, and commercial photography. CreatWeb have developed an impressive website portfolio which clearly demonstrates the diversity of industries for which we develop websites.

This small paragraph summarises what CreatWeb do and where we do it. If you are a national company, you can re-phrase this:

CreatWeb is a web design company in the UK who specialise in designing websites, website maintenance, website updates, search engine optimisation, German & French website translation, and commercial photography.

The keyphrases used in the two examples are as follow:

• web design company
• West Lothian
• website design
• website maintenance
• website updates
• search engine optimisation
• commercial photography
• web design company UK
• German & French website translation