Christopher Scally is a Hove artist producing some fine fresh paintings. He has a new site to showcase his work called Rock Shake Ape. Please check out his wonderful illustrations on his new blog/online gallery.

Another friend with a new website is Tim Stannard. He now lives in Madrid and is an expert in La Primera, the top Spanish football league. He has been a football pundit for Spanish television and now writes on his own website La Liga Loca.

17 days to go till the launch of the Nintendo Wii. Here’s a BBC article on the new console. Why not smash it up in front of all the other people queing for their new console, as can be seen at The Register. They did the same last week with thier new PS3.

Martina Topley-Bird - Soulfood (Charles Webster mix) mp3. A haunting house track I found on the web.

Presenting the new owner of West Ham United FC, Eggert Magnusson. There’s a great article about the takeover at the Telegraph.

Funny David Blaine parody on YouTube, contains swearing.

During the redesign of this site I had to take into consideration the current hot topic of web standards, accessibilty. This is where you design your site with respect to people with disabilities, such as blindness, so that it can be viewed in as many different kind of browers and screen readers as possible. There are laws, such as the Disability Discrimination Act UK and US Section 508, demanding that public bodies make their websites fit certain criteria. This makes web accessibility a valuable skill to add to your arsenal. It was also the topic of the recent Brighton & Hove web awards keynote speech by Kevin Carey, the head of HumanITy, a digital inclusion charity. The good news is that accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) share the common traits of demanding well-writen code in line with web standards so there are also financial reasons to adopt them.

During this sites redesign one of my main goals was to fix the poor CSS layout in an attempt to help its SEO. The old fluid layout technique had demoted the middle content to the bottom of my HTML file leaving the busy left and right bars sitting in the middle of the code. Search Engine robots often give up reading a sites content after a certain amount of code and stopped before they got to the actual post. This has now been fixed and the code is semantically sound with the correct use of headers and other CSS tags (with no hacks) allowing me to post my CSS validation badge at the bottom of the sidebar. To get a better understanding of this you should view the source of this web page and you’ll be able to almost read the site yourself (in Internet Explorer go to view/source and in Firefox press CTRL-U.) If most of it makes sense to a human then it should work better on all devices.

After last Wednesday’s post on the live implementation I thought there might be nothing left to change on this site. The PHP templates were fixed, the CSS was fixed, the design had improved by a factor of 10, what else was there to do? After adjusting the rightbar adverts and the comments form I thought I had finished. It was only after I decided to check my site out with some online validation tools I realised there was a lot more to do. The goal was to get one of these:
and to do that I needed to get a pass from a range of different sources. I did well and made around 10 changes that have increased the accessibility by quite a margin. I now present a list of different validation sites, along with comments on why this site failed to pass.

Cynthia Says. My site passed the Section 508 test and only came up with a few warnings, not fails, on the WCAG tests. One problem was with the alternative text of images (the description of the image). You are meant to use an ‘alt’ tag so that people whose browsers have images disabled can still know what the image was. Blind people should also be able to read the image description, not guess what it is from the filename. I enter these descriptions when I create each post and I can often get lazy and ignore them. The recommendations are that the descriptions should be between 7 and 81 characters long and I will endeavour to include these from now on.

TAW. This validation service checks your site against WCAG 1.0 standards up to level AAA (priority three) and is the best looking of the lot. Instead of a list it actually visibly highlights problems across your web page making identification of problems much easier. KingOfMyCastle.com passes Priority 1 & 2 but falls over with only one instance of failure to comply with Priority 3. The mistake is with the search box on the right. I am advised to put some text into this box as some screen readers have difficulty when they are empty. Aesthetically, I felt this was wrong so I have left it blank.

ATRC. This checker validates your site to WCAG 2.0 Level 2 on it’s default setting. Unfortunately my site fails on only one factor, a dodgy link created by WordPress. This link has no text to actually click, which is what the validator complains about. Solving this would involve making changes to the WordPress engine itself, something I’m not about to do. Oh well, at least this isn’t my fault.

EvalAccess 2.0. Ouch! This one threw up over 250 problems and 600 warnings although Priority 1 was clean and Priority 2 had only one issue. The issue was that it didn’t ‘associate labels explicitly with their controls’ in the search area on the right. To fix this would mean putting some text next to the search button saying ‘Press this to search’ which I feel is unnecessary on a submit button. Most of the issues thrown up on Priority 3 are with Access Keys which allow the reader to move to specific links using shortcuts, rather than the mouse. A good article about access keys can be found at A List Apart and it’s well worth the read if you’d like to know more about this underused and badly supported feature.

So that’s the automated experts view on my source code but what do I think? Well, I’m upset that I can’t display the badge proudly at the bottom of this site but I’m not a government organisation which lets me off. This is just some place on the web I dump a number of links, images and articles I think people may find interesting. However, the improvments from the last design are numerous. Just try increasing the font size (CTRL scroll wheel) and you’ll see that the site doesn’t break as before. The markup is much more cleaner and I’m sure that anybody using a device other than a standard web browser will be having a much better experience than they were last week. I’ll just chalk this one up to a big experience gain on my part.

Today I checked out the Nintendo Wii Roadshow happening down at Churchill Square shopping centre. The installation looked great consisting of four demonstration sections each running different games. I’ve laid down a deposit for one of these the moment the release date was announced, being a new Nintendo convert, but this was my first look at the console in action.

My first impressions? Not good. I was told about the demo but the knowledgeable staff at GameStation on Western Road. They knew all the titles that would be available on the launch date and mentioned the possibility of a midnight opening - that would be my first ever. Ha! What a nerd. But spending 15 minutes with the Wii team took the wind out of my sails a little.

It wasn’t due to the hardware. This looked great and the remote control looked responsive, if a little difficult to master. The games on display looked fine, if not as detailed as it’s Xbox 360 rival, and all the passer-by players seemed to be having fun. Unfortunately a group of kids seemed to be hogging the controls so there was no go for me. I may try again tomorrow morning.

What was really disappointing was the staff running the setup. The first member I talked didn’t know the name of the game they were demonstrating, a kid standing next to me had to tell me. Another member of staff couldn’t tell me if the game they were demonstrating, Wii Sports, came bundled with the console, cue another kid telling me it does. One of the team was asleep! Ha! It did look like they were all out on the lash the night before. The other demonstrator seemed to be enjoying his Nintendo DS so much he just sat on the sofa playing it for the 10 minutes I was there. Now I know why sales teams have commission incentives.

All this means that passers by who could have been tempted to buy one for Christmas have probably decided not to. Without having a go with the controllers the Wii looked as standard as one of those 50-games-on-a-joystick you plug into your TV. And the staff, well the ones who were awake anyway, wouldn’t have been able to answer their questions anyway. But still I can’t wait till December the 8th. Just like Cartman in this clip from South Park.

will be happening to this website over the next couple of days. There may be times it’s down and other times you might get some gibberish on the screen. Thats because I’m doing a live implementation of my new web design.

Now you should test your sites on your PC before you implement them but that would mean creating a whole new WordPress database on my computer. Unlike many websites this content is dynamically generated by the WordPress blogging engine. You never get to see WordPress as it’s just the back end I use to write posts, manage comments and upload images. All you see are the HTML pages it generates using my PHP templates and my CSS stylesheets.

I’ve had to radically change both PHP templates and all the CSS for my design so over the next couple of days I’ll be putting them through this blog’s WordPress engine (think mangle or mincer) looking at the output and then fixing all the bugs. Luckily you can swap themes quickly in WordPress so once I’ve outputted a web page I can switch back to the old style while I work on fixing the code.

Hopefully they’ll be a fully functioning website by tomorrow morning.

It’s now 22:50, Wednesday 15th. Let’s see how long it takes. Hope you enjoy the new design!

Yes, I’ve been hard at work this weekend thinking about this site’s redesign and I’ve come up with a few ideas. I think the new motif will be the King from a playing card. Something similar to this:

I’m going for three columns, fixed at 810 pixels. It may not fit on everybodys screen but the important stuff (i.e. my posts) will be on the left. The amount of users still stuck on a 800×600 display is minimal and I’ll make a seperate style-sheet for handheld device users. The content area will have a white background, whereas the body background will be very pale blue. I’ve yet to decide whether to do a flashy fade from background to content. It’s easy to do with the fixed width but may end up looking out of place. Simplicity is the key. There will be much more white space, the text will be much smaller, the headers bigger and the links will be a different colour.

One issue is the other pages I current have linked on the left. It took me ages to get that folder effect (neglecting graphic design in the process) but I don’t get that many visitors to those pages:
‘Current eBay Auctions’ is still popular and bring many hits from eBay itself, I’ll be keeping something similar in the redesign.
‘House Records For Sale’ has 60 users landing on it every month but I haven’t sold a record from it or updated it in over a year so it’s time for that to go.
The ‘ID These Tunes’ section used to be very big but all but two of the tracks were identified so it’s time for that go too.
The ‘Photo Album’ page is great, being all my photos of course, but due to the invention of services such as Flickr, allowing me to embed photos in the rightbar, this may have to go. I have to think of my bandwidth too!
The less said about ‘Links’ the better. Half of them are dead and today was the first time even I’ve looked at it for months. What with the services such as Digg (which embarrasingly I’ve yet to look into) this page is redundant.

A major design flaw with this current design is that the links I’ve described above have so much prominence on the main page. When I crowbarred the blog into this design it felt right but as the blog has now come to overtake the rest of the site in importance and hits they now look like useless relics from my previous design. So out they go (apart from the auction page).

More soon!

Oh well. I didn’t win the award yesterday for Brighton & Hove’s best personal website or blog. Instead it went to Adactio. Which is a well coded and regularly updated website. Well done!

One thing I did notice was the number of extremely good looking websites being made in Brighton & Hove. There really is some first class design out there, so I’m glad my fledgling web design business has some really good graphic designers I can call upon if needed.

I also have tons of ideas for this site’s redesign. If I can just get the header image I’m after right I could get started on this puppy within a week or two. Keep you eyes peeled!

Just in case anybody didn’t quite get my last post here’s:

Had this in my mind for the last few days what with all the mid-term elections in The States. 15 minutes in Photoshop later: