Pontbren Web Development

Flexibility

The explosive growth in mobile computing means the way potential customers view your website is changing, and it's changing fast.

Many people now browse web sites using devices such as the Kindle, Sony Reader, the iPhone, other smartphones, web-enabled tablets, GPS systems, video games, wireless home appliances and TVs.

We can design your web site for optimal performance independent of the device or screen size it is being viewed on.

See how this works by resizing this window or view on your mobile phone or tablet. Consider the example below.

On the left is one of our websites optimised for any screen width. The text is readable without zooming or panning and the links (blue buttons) are easy to operate by touch. It is equally usable on a tablet, iPad or desktop computer.

On the right is a national website. The text is unreadable and the links too tiny to select. The page can only be read in small sections by zooming and panning. Although usable on a tablet or i-Pad the user will need to scroll both horizontally and vertically to access all the content. This is not a mobile friendly website!

With the rapid expansion of high quality small screens mobile devices coupled with 3G connections and soon broadband speed 4G, websites that do not cater for this market will lose out to those that do.

Usability

Usability and utility, not visual design is the main factor in determining the success or failure of a website.

Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. If users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.

Usability is the process of making a website easy for customers to use. It encompasses the heuristics of the site as well as the methods that people use to manipulate the site. In simple terms a website is usable if the customers can find what they need and accomplish their goals a quickly and efficiently as possible.

Heuristics are the rules surrounding usable Web pages - basically “rules of thumb” because they are familiar and well-understood by most users.

Here are some of the ways we build our websites to improve usability:

• Work in any browser
• Use of familiar terms (Home, About) and conventions (indications of links and user actions)
• Fast loading
• Validation to web standards
• Contact information
• intelligent printing (print preview these pages)
• Automatically resize (resize your browser window to observe)
• User control of text size
• User control of navigation - any combination of keyboard, mouse, or other pointing devices
• Hypertext help text (tooltips) where link meaning is not obvious

Accessibility

This website, and all those we build, are designed to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

It has been argued that the Internet has been the most important information sharing invention since the printing press, putting the “world at your fingertips” – if you can use a mouse, see the screen and hear the audio.

Aside from the moral and legal¹ reasons for building accessible websites the business case is overwhelming.

According to the DWP there are over 10 million disabled people in Britain, with an annual spending power of over £80 billion.

Potential customers who benefit from accessible, flexible and usable websites include:

• People surfing the web using mobile phones and PDA's. These people are amongst most affluent and technically advanced group affected by web accessibility issues.
• People using old web browsers or old computers. Many companies and public bodies still use legacy hardware and software.
• People with slow internet connections.
• Older people - a growing sector. These people may have accessibility issues such as reduced mobility, reduced hand-eye co-ordination and poor vision.
• Blind, partially sighted and the colour blind are frequently affected by accessibility issues. This group also makes up a very large percentage of web surfers.
• People with physical disabilities, such as those with impaired mobility.

How we remove barriers to accessibility

We use a number of techniques to ensure our websites are accessible, many of which you can see in action on this site:

1. Navigation without a mouse: you can access all the menus and pages on this site using the TAB and ENTER keys, you can scroll through our portfolio using the arrow keys.
2. Resizable text: All the text is sized in scalable units (ems) and this allows users to resize the text on the page to suit their preferences (even in Internet Explorer). We also support the The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard.
3. We write our websites in modern, semantic, validated HTML5 in accordance the standards dictated by the W3C: Try validating this page!
4. Responsive layouts: All our web sites are created or can be adapted to respond to the device on which they are being viewed. This is particularly important for sites likely to be viewed on a mobile device or phone such as those for hotels, restaurants, social media, news & weather etc. However, as more and more people access the web with alternative browsing devices, companies from all sectors benefit. Resize this page or view on your mobile phone to see how this works.
5. Sensible print: How often have you printed from a website only to find it doesn't fit on the page, includes superfluous information (adverts, menus etc) and uses up all your ink? We design our pages for the printer as well as the screen - it's not perfect, especially with images - but we're sure you'll agree it's better than most. To see this in action do a Print Preview of this page (File|Print|Print Preview)
6. Javascript: Some users turn off javascript and some devices to not support it. We use Javascript to improve the user experience (for example on this page, the portfolio and contact pages), however all the content on this site is accessible with javascript turned off or not available.
7. Testing: We test all our sites in multiple browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Lynx (text only). We use multiple emulators to test usability / accessibility on different phones and other devices and do checks on a desktop, laptop, notebook, tablet and smart phone. We don't know what you or you clients use to view the internet but are determined to give you the best possible experience.