My LondonMet Student Website
Friday October 21st 2005
Well, it shouldn't really come at any surprise that I have a website devoted to my studies here at LondonMet. I mean it wouldn't be much of a course in Internet Application Development if I didn't, right? Sure enough, Assignment 1 for my Web Design & Usability module was to design and deploy a "personal homepage", with a demo registration form, personal history, and links to the module's other projects due in the coming weeks. I embelished the assignment to sort of "fill out" what would have otherwise been a fairly hollow website, so you might find some slightly more interesting information up there as well.
Having already built a few websites in my past, both personal and professional, I hoped to push some of my limits to see how far I could go. And I'm very, very pleased with the results. Just a few of the things I hoped to (and did) accomplish:
- Text resizing
- Often designs crumble when a user resizes text. However others don't budge at all--including the text, which is just as bad. This is my first site where I managed to both allow the user to resize the text, and design the layout in a manner that didn't break when doing so. This is, of course, to a point--2 steps up or down from the "medium" size of a browser default. Beyond that, and it's hard to control the layout of anything other than a single column of text.
- Keyboard navigation
- Beyond resizable text, the next best way to make a site accessible to all users of all abilities (and handicaps) is to provide alternative means of navigation. I accomplished this through "access keys", which assigns a shortcut key to a link, and tab ordering, enabling a specific order of tabbing through the site's links. Both techniques were applied to the main navigation links for the site.
- Windows IE-Friendly
- In case you haven't yet heard, Windows Internet Explorer isn't as perfect as Bill Gates would like. Among the various security holes, it also gives often poor support of CSS, which is THE standard technology by which a web developer can separate content from presentation. In the past I strived to simply avoid these "poor support" pitfalls, limiting my designs and techniques. This time however, I decided to go around them. So for design elements or techniques that IE gets wrong, I simply didn't "serve" them to IE. The result is that IE users will simply know what they're missing--but none of what they're missing is critical to accessing the content.
- Separating content, presentation, AND behavior
- I have been using CSS and pure "table-less" XHTML to separate content from presentation for a while now, so nothing new here. However behavior, such as validating a form before it is submitted, has always been mingled with my previous code. But not this time. Again, this is something the user will likely never notice, but the benefits to the developer are huge. So I'll just pat myself on the back for that one.