November 2005 Newsletter

Case Study - LPR Mortgage Services

We are proud to announce the launch this month of the LPR Mortgage Services website, developed by Studio 2 Online.

Based in Warwickshire, LPR Mortgage Services provide mortgage advice to home movers, first time buyers, clients looking to remortgage and buy-to-let investors. They approached us in July of this year, having heard about our excellent reputation. They felt that the majority of mortgage related websites out there were fairly dreary and felt that Studio 2 were the right company to provide them with a fun, colourful and attractive yet professional website that would help attract more business.

After producing a number of initial concepts for the client to review, a design was chosen and work began to implement it.

The design uses a carefully chosen colour scheme that is eye-catching but classy at the same time. The home page makes a bold statement with the dark background colour and image, which is then echoed more subtly on the secondary pages. Headings, photos and styled text boxes have been used to break up the text on each page, ensuring that it is engaging to the user.

www.lprmortgages.co.uk

Case Study - Merchant Gourmet

Merchant Gourmet are a London based online retailer of gourmet food products from around the world. As well as selling online they also supply to major supermarket chains including Sainsburys, Asda, Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons.

Merchant Gourmet chose Studio 2 Online for our ecommerce expertise after becoming dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by their existing hosting provider. Studio 2 took over the hosting of the website and were immediately able to implement a range of improvements including changes to the functionality and interface of the online store.

Following on from this we were able to give the site a major design overhaul to tie in with the company's new corporate identity. The combined effect of these changes has been a significant increase in traffic. Visitor numbers for October showed a 162% year on year increase with a 135% uplift in unique visits.

www.merchant-gourmet.com

Sasha's Web Advice: Web Accessibility

Recently, 'accessibility' has become something of a buzz word (or 'woof word' as I like to call it). But what's all the fuss about, and what does it have to do with the web?

Back in 1995, when I was still a puppy, the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) came into force in the UK, with the aim of ending discrimination against disabled people in the areas of education, employment and public services.

Under the DDA Code Of Practice "a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for disabled people to make use of its services." An obvious example is the installation of wheelchair ramps and lifts in public buildings.

But what's all this got to do with the web, I hear you asking?

Well, due to a recent tightening up of the law, website owners now come under the category of public service providers, so if you own and run a public-facing website then you need to take seriously the requirements of the DDA. In fact, websites are explicitly mentioned in the Code of Practice as an example of public services that need to be accessible.

In order to comply with the DDA, websites that provide any kind of public service should be designed and built in such a way that people with disabilities are not excluded from using them. This includes people who use assistive browsing technologies such as screen readers, speech browsers, voice activated input devices or Braille displays, as well as people using conventional graphical web browsers but who have, for example, sight-related difficulties (short-sightedness, colour blindness, etc).

But all this is only one side of the biscuit when considering web accessibility.

While it might be nice to imagine that your website appears identical to every web user, the reality is often quite different. This is one of the areas where web design differs markedly from traditional graphic and print design. There are literally thousands of factors determining how each web user views your site: platform, operating system, web browser, monitor resolution, window size, display settings such as font size, contrast, colour settings... and that's just the users who are accessing your site from a conventional desktop computer!

In addition, the last few years have seen an explosion in new ways of accessing the web, including mobile phones, PDAs, WebTV, even games consoles. Each of these devices has its own limitations regarding how it is able to display web pages. Available fonts, colours, screen resolutions and plugins differ from one device to another. User preferences also have to be taken into account. Many mobile web users, for example, choose to disable images to reduce the time and cost of downloading.

Web accessibility is all about about making sure that your website is as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. If you think about it, that makes good business sense.

Personally, I'm still waiting for them to bring out a dog-friendly web browser - preferably chewable. But that's another story. Woof woof!

I'm off to search the office for food now, so I'll leave the last word to Studio 2...