Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [40]
The checklist will provide specifics, as will Chapter 15, which is more relevant and important than you may think, so don’t skip it! For this review, I want to focus on the user’s view of your site. Focus on the graphics and the readability.
Contrast Is Critical for Readability
Of specific interest are the checkpoints of using color to communicate information and measuring the contrast level of the text and the background color. These elements are almost always overlooked, because there is no automated test that will cover this area. It needs to be properly evaluated, tested, and audited. If you ignore this area, you could lose business, even with good rankings, powerful persuasive content, and award-winning design. Contrast problems are a killer.
This really jumped out at me when I worked on a website that was designed to target affluent women, ages 65 to 80. Of course, the designer chose pink as the primary color, and in doing so defaulted all the text color to gray. It was a beautiful site. I was struck by the color scheme and the softness of the approach. However, the target audience reacted very strongly and negatively. Unfortunately, they did not take kindly to the color scheme. Gray text on a muted pink background was very difficult to read, especially when the text was made a smaller font size in order to fit the content.
The target audience could not read or understand the content, because it blended together. At that age, the retina naturally absorbs more blue, and areas of low contrast become yellowed and more difficult to discern. The result of a beautiful design that worked for younger eyes was a pinkish mess with blobs of gray for the intended audience. The contrast was so low between the pink background and the gray text that no one in the target audience could make it out.
I even had to admit that my 40-year-old eyes were tested with this design. The artist showed me his basis for the design. It was a magazine ad that pulled a great response, so the artist used the same color combination for the website. So, the company relied on taking the printed piece that worked well and using the same color combinations for the website. Unfortunately, you just can’t re-create color combinations that work in a printed document and repurpose them for digital media. The intensity of a monitor blends the contrast, making it much more difficult for the eyes to read.
Look at your website. Is the most important information contained in an area of high contrast? Or is your most important information hidden or disguised in a low-contrast array of muted colors (gray on green, red on yellow, blue on black, and so on)? High-contrast text gets attention.
Friday: Test Human-Friendliness
The W3C accessibility checklists lead directly into the evaluation of human-friendliness. By considering accessibility, the W3C is at its core defining human interaction with websites and web-based applications. I find these checklists to be some of the most instructive and informative for developing websites. The amazing side benefit to accessibility is that it benefits everyone. By making functions easier to see, everyone can benefit. By adding captioning in your videos, the search engines can index the content while others can watch the video without sound being necessary. Accessibility raises the interaction of a website for everybody, not just a small percentage of people. Beyond simple checklists and guides, the best information you will ever get about your website is a human test. Most of the W3C checklist items can’t be tested with software; it requires human interaction for the final assessment.
I find that most managers and website owners make many decisions based on assumptions. These are assumptions of what their users need, of what choices people will make, and how those users will view their website. The best way to get over assumptions is to get the opinion of someone else, especially someone you can’t fire when they disagree with you but whose opinion carries some weight. For me,