About a month or so ago the TopSpot crew got commissioned to participate in the AIR Houston competition. The competition consisted of creating a fully accessible website for a non-profit organization in 8 hours. Our NPO was Kids Meals Houston. Essentially they are like Meals on Wheels but focus on local Harris County children that live in poverty and are hungry. These kids know what it means to be hungry and Kids Meals provides them with lunches on a daily bases. Our NPO representative Ruth, was just amazing. She provided us with everything we needed to build the site as well as moral support day of the competition. She came with Pom-Poms… yes Pom-Poms and it was really great to see her so excited about the website.

The Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) is an award-winning, Web site building competition held annually around the country by Knowbility, a place where you can learn how and why to make technology accessible to everyone – including people with disabilities. . In the competition teams compete against one another and showcase their talents with the most accessible website they can create in 8 hours, valid XHTML Strict 1.0 and CSS of course.

It all started today at 9 am at UH. We had are design sliced out and started to code away. After some FTP problems with Godaddy we decided to host it ourselves and then we had really taken off. Each of us started to code away at our sections and once the Belafonte had put it all together, we started to populate the pages with content and get rid of bugs and quirks of all the major browsers.

Quite an interesting day. It was a great learning experience for all of us and Kids Meals got a website they can be proud of. I will link to it, soon as it is migrated off the development server and on to theirs. Check out the Kids Meals Houston website now live and running. Speaking of learning I decided to give the input check boxes a width and height in ems and now they resize when the text size is increased. A simple thing yet overlooked when creating a standard website.

Our NPO rep, Ruth was just awesome. Twice and energetic as us and three times as excited, the next picture speaks for itself

Looking forward to AIR Houston 2008!

Everything on this list is obvious yet I see it happen all the time. Most of what’s on this list, everyone already knows, however people STILL feel it absolutely necessary to do. This is simply a list of things you should not do on a website. Period.

Splash pages. If I have to choose high or low bandwidth before entering your website you’ve failed. This is 2007. There is no need for splash pages anymore… personally I don’t think there ever was. From an SEO standpoint having a splash page can be very hurtful towards your rankings. Search engine spiders will index your splash page instead of your home page and usually a splash page consist of flash or some other form of media such as a picture. The only actual text content on a traditional splash page is the “skip intro” link. Users with dial up or even slow broadband will become frustrated after waiting for your page to load up only to find its a splash page and no actual content is on there. You want to make it easy as possible for users to navigate your website, and you want them to do as little work as possible. Having them wait for a splash page and then click “continue” goes against this principle.

On going music. Unless you have a couple of hit albums there is no reason you should be playing music on your website. I’m usually listening to my own music when I’m on the computer, the last thing I need is for your website to add its own soundtrack. Music on a site is usually done wrong in the first place. Why is your song restarting each time I go to a new page or refresh the current one? If you’re going to do something unpleasing at least learn how to do it right so its not that much more unpleasant. Again users on a low bandwidth connection and search engine spiders will come across your site and leave. This is an age of instant gratification especially on the Internet. If you really really want music because it just happens to be your favorite song of the week, please allow the user to stop the song, and don’t do it on page load.

Multiple video formats on the web are irrelevant in 2007. How many of you ACTUALLY have real player installed? C’mon don’t be shy now… ok 3 of you. Good. How many of you have flash player installed? Oh everyone who’s ever watched a video on YouTube. Hmmm does that tell you something? Flash has become the default player for delivering video on the web, stop using Real Player, or window media player. Stick with what works best.

JavaScript Links. C’mon people enough I cant stress enough what year it is… If I can’t right click and open in a new tab/window you’ve failed. This is a huge usability flaw. Like most web savvy users, I user Firefox, and if I can’t use its built in tab feature then that’s almost as bad as…

You resizing the user’s browser how DARE YOU! I am browsing your website with the settings I want. Resizing the users browser is a huge flaw. First of all you don’t need to be doing any more. Who uses 640×480 even 800×600 is out the door. 1024×768 should give you PLENTY of room to design your website without having to launch external content in a new resized browser window. At least put up some sort of notice that says, “This link will resize your browser” I wonder how many would actually click then… that alone should tell you something.

This will be an on going list. Stay tuned for more!