My portfolio site and accessibility

As I've been working on my portfolio website, I've realized through todays readings that I'll need to update a few things in order to make my sites more accessible. Putting my website through the WebXACT accessibility checker, I knew that my biggest shortfall was twofold: I lack proper meta tags and I haven't included ALT attributes in any of my IMG tags. So I'll just put two more things on my "to do" list. Oh, and I forgot some width and height measurements for some of my gifs: this isn't a problem in my instructional site yet because I don't have any gifs or pictures yet. I'm still debating if I will use some.

I also learned something new about coding in the readings. It's important to include the "/" at the end of the url if the href is going to an index.html file. Apparently, the browser has to make two requests from the server to follow a link if the last "/" is missing.

In general, the design principles in the readings today really didn't deviate too much from what Garrett had talked about, but they each had their own pet peeves that they aired out. I honestly don't think much of that one gentleman who advocated for programming a site so that it could be viewed by Lynx. However, I do agree that it does make a site more indexable and thus should at least be attempted. Also as a result of this man's design principles, I might also consider using a script to display different (aka smaller) navigation images depending on the resolution of the client. My portfolio site looks ok at 800x600 (it looks great in 1024x768), but it might not look as cluttered with smaller navigation images at 800X600.

Oh, can I also get an Amen! to all of the writers who mocked colorful and busy backgrounds!

But my favorite assigned website was the graphic design website! It wasn't too deep, but gave a great outline on basic design principles. It reminded me why I like working with Photoshop so much and how flash can be a mixed bag of nuts. It was, for a flash site, simple and well done: but it took me a while to figure out where the contextual hot spots were. I learned from the site that I picked warm hues for my color palette: I was actually going for that. The interactive color wheel was terrific and I'll definitely use that as I finalize the color of my instructional site (I currently have primary colors, and I knew from the beginning that this wasn't exactly what I wanted). I also found the bit on typography to be fascinating (as I took some websites to task...cough...Drudge...cough...for poor typographic choices). And now I know what a serif is: it's those little nubby things that make letters fancy, like the things at the bottom of the t at the beginning of the next sentence! This font that I'm writing in is a serif font (although the serifs are small). Speaking of fonts, I also want to share a great website: Font Freak. It has tons of free fonts!