Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

Having recently bought 3 books from the Amazon website, two of which were from other suppliers and delivered 10 or so days late, I logged in to check why they were late. Using my usual username and what I thought was the correct password, discovered that I couldn’t see the latest books that I had ordered, only my last batch of books bought before Christmas. What was going on? I tried again and again without success until I entered another password that I also use sometimes. This time I could see my latest three books but not my pre-Christmas orders!

Somehow I now have two Amazon accounts that share the same username but which have two different passwords. How can this be? Surely usernames should be unique!

It seemed as if the only ones managing to get a bite to eat on Sunday in China Town were the Chinese dragons; swaying, crouching and then devouring the cabbages hung from the shop entrances.

Sometimes, especially in quick turn-around campaign sites, images are used to such an extent that there is actually very little textual content on the web page. A quick and dirty solution for getting a magazine advert or flier onto the web.

“If all of the content is repeated as alt text for each image, then all is ok, isn’t it?”

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Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner have written this excellent article Improving Ajax applications for JAWS users, a follow up to their previous article Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers.

Here they explain how Jaws 7.1 has improved in such a way that the “virtual buffer” can now be updated via a scripting method, which allows for Ajax interactivity to actually be of some use to a screen reader user.

It seems a little ridiculous that 467 local authority web departments are all struggling to resolve many of the same issues. And unfortunately so many of these sites are hard to use and have substantial usability problems. Couldn’t resources be better spent by resolving the issues at a Governmental level instead of repeating the difficult process of developing accessible easy to use web sites over and over again?

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A strange observation I made when carrying out user testing was how some users viewed certain navigation links as unnecessary and even confusing, if they also appeared in the page content. “Which one should I click” they would say. This really surprised me and more recently even a member of a “Web Department” made a similar observation when reviewing a wire-frame for some Intranet pages; “why is that link in two places? Shouldn’t we take out the link from the navigation if it’s already in the main body of content?”.
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I have just stumbled across this very interesting interview with Venessa Fox, who works for Google.
Having recently started to include an xml sitemap in a couple of my sites, I never quite understood their significance. They are not sitemaps in the traditional sense; a page similar to a table of contents. Instead, the new standard for sitemaps are only for the benefit of those crawling webbots, so that they can find all of your web pages. I actually thought that the job of webbots was to follow links from the homepage, but perhaps they need better directions and a little help once in a while, especially with complicated sites.

Venessa also discusses a little about Duplicate content and the filtering process undertaken by Google.

One of my clients has two sites that run off the same database, sharing 60% of the content between them. The problem is this is a duplication of content and it looks as if Google has interpreted this as an offence of some kind. Why else wouldn’t the webots have re-indexed these certain pages in 6 months.
The best article on the subject is: “Deftly dealing with duplicate content“. But the advice doesn’t exactly cover this situation.

My first attempt at resolving the issue is to remove the site that wasn’t supposed to be indexed anyway, using a robots.txt file. Perhaps this will work and regain some favour with the webots. Otherwise we have to think again.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is such an interesting subject that attracts a huge amount of debate. Sifting through the various opinions of so many people can be confusing, but the task of keeping abreast of current SEO ideas remains crucial for any web manager or developer. One great resource on this subject and a place for many useful SEO tools is SEO Chat.

For links to flash movies and pdf documents it’s a really nice effect to add icons in front of the link using style sheet declarations, by setting padding-left and background image the same way as for making list more attractive. Unfortunately, in Internet Explorer it seems a little more difficult than this.
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I am a strong believer in using pdf’s for publishing certain on-line material. However, there are many such documents hastily uploaded to websites which are so difficult to navigate that they are only any use when printed and used off-line. The key to their on-screen usefulness is to use internal links as much as possible as well as the built in functionality of bookmarks which is actually the default export option from MS Word if you also own a copy of Acrobat.

Yet another really simple method, rarely used, is to link to particular page of a pdf document from outside of the document on a website. And this is surprisingly easy to achieve and doesn’t require any further customisation of the pdf. Therefore you can link to pages in anyone’s pdf.
Simply create a web page link that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/yourdocument.pdf#page=34">link text</a>.

The user will be taken unsurprisingly to page 34 of the document.

The following are links to different sections of my dissertation:

• Introduction
• The Sound and Touch of the Internet
• The Rich Internet Experience
• Easier Ajax Implementation
• How Screen Readers Interpret RIA User Interfaces
• Conclusion