Hi Kriss,
As you have probably gathered by now I work for a web design company that does a lot of work in the HE sector so have encountered both of these problems.
Let me take each in turn:
HOMEPAGE TEXT
I would agree with your web design company that a short paragraph of text on your homepage is a good idea from a search engine point of view. I would highly recommend this.
FIXED OR VARIABLE WIDTH
This is one of the biggest debates that exist on the web and one where people never agree! However, from a purely accessible point of view fixed width can prove a problem if you are going for more than single A compliancy.
Checkpoint 3.4 (Priority 2) says:
Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and stylesheet property values.
Our interpretation of this is that you cannot use pixel values to fix the width.
You may find this page from our new site useful:
http://headscape.headscapedev.com/text/159/our_accessibility_policy.html
Please note this is not a live site so do not pass the url around.
However, to complicate the issue still further there are some who argue that pixels are not an absolute value! See:
http://blog.fawny.org/2005/09/21/measures/
As normal, if you want to chat this over give me a call on 01258 453889.
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: Managing an institutional web site [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of K Fearon
Sent: 07 December 2005 11:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Two queries
Apologies for cross posting.
We're having our web pages redesigned at the moment and a couple of issues
have arisen on which I'd appreciate some feedback.
Firstly, the designers have advised us to have some intro text on our main
welcome page to make it more friendly to search engines. Currently we only
have links to content, and meta tags. We'd originally cut any text on our
home page as it tends to be uninformative and people don't really read it,
but we might reconsider if they're right. Any comments?
Secondly, we're having a discussion about fixed width vs relative width
designs. They are keen for us to go for fixed width, but this goes against
accessibility standards. I know a lot of university pages are designed at
a fixed width - was this a point you decided to compromise on? Was the
compromise worth it?
Thanks
Kriss
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University of York, UK 9-5.15, Mon-Fri http://www.york.ac.uk/coord/
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