On Tuesday evening Emily and I attended the launch event of the Bristol City Council Pledge to Children in Care, which is supported by their new RVoice website – designed and developed by Focus.

We had lots of positive feedback from people at the event including Annie Hudson, Strategic Director for Children, Young People and Skills, who gave us a special thank you in her ceremonial cake cutting speech – which was much appreciated.

The site and The Pledge document have all been created with the same graphics and style – created by Simon Mosse our designer.

Now that the site is up and running we’ll continue to work closely with the Children in Care Council, Bristol City Council and Reconstruct to ensure that the content is kept up to date and interesting, as well as reviewing the usage, stats and goals for the site to keep it moving forward.

Connexions West of England will now be known as Learning Partnership West. New name but same great service - committed to the participation, progression and achievement of all young people and adults in the West of England.

We have been working with Connexions since 1999 on various web development projects including five versions of their existing website, an intranet and campaign microsites and we are very happy to be involved in this latest venture.

Two new websites will be created - one for the Learning Partnership West, which will include the new corporate identity with information to support their key services – Education Business Partnership, Adult Careers and the additional Shared Commissioning Services. The second is a new interactive site for delivering the Connexions service direct to people aged between 13 – 19 years old (up to 25 for those with a learning difficulty or disability) to help with decisions and choices in life, education and work.

The Learning Partnership West site will be live at the beginning of June – you can have a sneaky peak at the new brand here http://www.lpw.org.uk/ and the new Connexions West site will follow in the summer.

I've just come back from a very interesting lunchtime lecture entitled: WCAG 2.0 for usability specialists by Michael Cooper (from W3C WAI).  It is the second of two events I've attended this year advertised on the 'Bristol Usability Group' network, and it was extremely informative.  Having attended the RNIB WCAG 2.0 one day course last year, I was interested in polishing up some knowledge on building accessible websites, but also in posing a few questions from the perspective of the buzz term 'User Experience'. The talk was really well organised and informative so thank you to Stuart Church from CX Partners for adding it to the Bristol Usability forum.

In his talk, Michael Cooper went through some of the beginnings of accessibility, as well as confronting a few common perceptions as to notions of what is usable, and what is not. 

For example he illustrated that whilst an image online might seem visible and helpful to the average user, without the magic [alt=""] attribute not visible to the average browser user,  it suddenly becomes unhelpful and positively annoying for the screen-reading user, as the random image url is read out loud in an effort to inform the user of it's presence. Whilst information like this is available at the W3C WCAG 2.0 Guidelines site, even Michael Cooper admits that the guidelines are 'carefully crafted to be precise, rather than to be easily read'.  Slightly ironic bearing in mind that one of the 4 key principles of accessibility is for content to be 'Understandable!'

One area of particular interest for me was the notion of a 'A', 'AA' or 'AAA' site. As with everything now, whilst definable in a court of law, what is black and white on paper is often grey in the light of day. 

As I had an official W3C WAI representative right there in front of me, I asked Michael if it was really possible to have a 'AAA' site, as some of the strictest 'AAA' guidelines seem to contradict each other. His response was interesting, and seemed to sum up the best-practise attitudes that are helpfully gaining some momentum in the web world today.

He said (paraphrased):  Yes, there can be 'AAA' standard websites, 'as long as you chose appropriate content for the specific user group, and don't use a conflicting combination of content'. 

User groups and users are ultimately who we're working for, even though we love our clients.  Whilst a bit simplistic, if we can help a user to use a site, then we are doing our job, and Michael Cooper's position on aiming to broaden the possible types and numbers of those users is a cause worth fighting for...even if that means trawling daily through the 'book-length' documentation that accompanies the WCAG 2.0 guidelines!

We look forward to this years release of PDF and Flash specific additional guidelines.

You can view the Talk notes here.

Today sees the launch of our mobile site – a pared down version of the main website with all the essentials on there, including contact details, how to find us and our latest blog articles.

Of course, you’ll still be able to view the full site through your handset if you need to, but will have the option of mobile optimised browsing for when you’re out and about.

We’ve noticed the number of people accessing our site through their mobile has been steadily increasing over the last 6 months or so, and with many of our clients using iPhones, Blackberrys and other PDAs, we thought it was about time we tailored the site to their needs.

Morgan Stanley have predicted that mobile browsing will overtake browsing from a desktop as soon as 2013, with mobiles already overtaking desktops for gaining access to social networking sites. 91% of mobile internet users socialise online(!) compared with only 79% desktop users, according to the ecommerce journal.

Gone are the days when it was reasonable to assume that people would be viewing your site in 1024 x 768 resolution. With an estimated 16 million users in the UK alone using their mobiles to gain access to the internet, we wanted to ensure people could view the site in a format that’s most suitable for them.

We don’t think it’ll be long before everybody else is doing the same...

So, please take a look, and as always, let us know what you think!