All posts by Emily Coward

2nd March 2009 by Emily Coward | Web Design

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of visitors to a website from search engines. Pages which are optimised effectively come higher up in search results listings and are likely to receive more visitors from the search engine. Making sure your pages are optimised successfully involves understanding how leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft work and what people are searching for.
This article looks at some of the most common SEO terms and what they mean for your website.

24th November 2008 by Emily Coward | Web Design

Creating an accessible and flexible layout for a website can be a difficult task. More often than not web developers encounter problems with the flexibility of the design they are trying to produce as HTML/CSStemplates . Designs should be flexible enough to work at a variety of resolutions. However some designs produced at a width of 1024px just don’t translate well to a width of 800px. The limited amount of space available at 800px often means the content on the page is too close together or text overlaps ridiculously when the font size of the page is increased. This means that the display of content on the page can be difficult to comprehend when the browser window is narrow, but looks great when the window is a lot wider.

3rd April 2007 by Emily Coward | Web Design

One of the main tasks web developers face on a regular basis is the challenge of turning a design storyboard into accessible HTML/CSS templates for a website. This task is made more difficult when the web designer has not thought about accessibility. Trying to create accessible templates from a poorly thought out storyboard can be a frustrating experience. It is one that can be easily avoided if the web designer has thought about the medium they are designing for, the web.

30th September 2006 by Emily Coward | Web Design

We all use the Web for different things whether it’s to check bank statements, check the weather forecast or book concert tickets.  We do all these things relatively easily by interpreting and processing information on web pages represented by natural language, graphics, multimedia and the design and layout of the page.

2nd December 2004 by Emily Coward | Web Accessibility

Skip links are internal page links which aid navigation around the current page, rather than to completely new pages. They are mainly used by screen reader users for bypassing or ‘skipping’ over repetitive web page content. Skip links are not usually visible on a web page for sighted users as these users can easily skip over any information such as navigation to the specific content that interests them. Screen reader users, however, can not easily do so unless provided with a specific link to the main content. This article outlines what skip links are, what the issues are with current approaches, and a best-practice method of implementing them.