Alt Tags

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Five Steps To A Better Website In The New Year

The New Year is the perfect time to bring a fresh perspective to your website. Whether you’re planning a major site redesign in the coming year, or you’ve just finished one in the old year, there are a number of things you can do to improve the quality of your site.

Give Your Content Some Attention

If you’re using a content management system (CMS) there’s always the temptation to assume that your content is fine. It’s being “managed” right? So what could possibly go wrong?

Plenty.

Use the New Year as an opportunity to review the quality of your content. While most CMS systems include some form of workflow, you might be surprised by some of the things that slip onto your website. Be on the lookout for content that is outdated, inaccurate, irrelevant, or just plain incoherent.
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Accessible Folksonomies

I’ve been working with web technology for over a decade now and I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an idea gain mindshare as rapidly as the Folksonomy has. It seems like everywhere I turn someone is discussing this new categorization system.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a folksonomy is basically a taxonomy created by the people and for the people. A community of users collaborates by “tagging” various types of content with user created keywords. This concept is flourishing on a handful of community driven sites that all seem to have a certain addictive quality. I think the best way to fully grasp how folksonomies work is to dive into one of the sites that makes use of the concept. Flickr, 43things, and del.icio.us are good places to start. Given the success of these early experiments in group tagging I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing folksonomies implemented on all sorts of sites in the very near future.

Lately I’ve been thinking about one particular artifact of the folksonomy phenomenon — the folksonomy menu that serves as a sort of buzz index providing users with a quick visualization of the most popular tags (technically I think it’s called a weighted list). Popular tags are displayed in a larger font and it’s relatively easy to identify hot topics at a glance. This visual representation of the popularity of any given tag is undeniably cool. However, once the coolness factor wears off it becomes fairly obvious that these menus are also not very accessible.

I realize these sites are currently trail-blazers and they deserve to be recognized as such. I have no intention of detracting from the innovative work that’s being done. My concern is that once folksonomies enter the mainstream, the next wave of sites implementing them will likely begin a wholesale copying of the work that’s being done by these innovators — markup and all.
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The Crazy Alphabet on Your Website

Having thoroughly beat up the abbr element, it’s time to turn our attention to its close sibling (but definitely not twin) acronym. First, a quick note about the differences between abbreviations and acronyms. Yes, I know. We learned this in elementary school. But even the most brilliant of us sometimes forget — it’s a busy world out there, and we can’t always remember every little detail of every little thing. So:

Abbreviation: Making a word shorter by removing lots of letters. Some examples: etc, req’d, cont’d, or ms.

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Spelling It Out

Usually, the abbr and acronym elements are discussed in the same section, but I’ve never liked doing things the same old way. So, let’s start with abbr, and we’ll discuss acronym separately. abbr is the abbreviation element. This inline item allow you to spell out the meanings of abbreviations.

But why? Everyone knows what I mean when I say req’d. It means required. No, it means requested. No…I’m absolutely, positively certain it means requisitioned. Or maybe not.

You could argue that the meaning of the abbreviation will be made clear from context. And your tax return forms are a breeze to complete, right? For example, in the following sentence, my meaning is perfectly clear:

What was req’d?

Silly example, and I’m sure nobody writes that way, right? But can you be so sure that your meaning is perfectly clear to every person reading your website (and every person listening to your website)?

Why not make it easy on everyone and expand your abbreviation. The markup is ridiculously simple (even more so if you have an HTML editor that reduces most of the work to a mouseclick or two. To expand an abbreviation, simply do the following:

<abbr title="requested">req'd</abbr>

Yes, I know. Too simple. So simple you don’t know why you haven’t always done it (probably that’s because it hasn’t always been an option). Now when your abbreviation is encountered, screen readers will spell out what you mean and a tooltip will appear when other users mouse over the item. Yes, I’m perfectly aware that this wonderful feature isn’t fully supported by browsers everywhere (but, frankly, isn’t it time we forced Microsoft and others to comply with the standards?), but abbr is a wonderful invention. Use it!