Codeistry

Posts Tagged ‘codeistry_website’

Bunch of updates to the Codeistry site

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

I’ve made a number of small updates to the Codeistry site today, which I’ve been queuing up on my local version for a while. I’ve made updates and corrections to my Accessibility made simple article, as well as minor updates to the 9 Steps to Improve your Small Business website and SEO for Fun and Profit ones.

Screenshot of MODx metadata field in page editor.I’ve also souped up the metadata that gets output in the page’s code, so that I’m now outputting a meta description tag – this outputs whatever I’ve typed into the page’s Description field in MODx.

Screenshot of the MODx Meta Keywords systemI’ve also started using MODx built in meta keywords system, so some pages now have some keywords set.

A little while age I also added a Creative Commons license to the page footer but forget to mention it on the blog. This means that the site’s content is now actually marked as copright of Codeistry now – which it wasn’t before. As I’ve chosen a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, this also means that anyone can re-use, re-mix, translate or re-purpose any of the stuff on here for whatever they want, provided it’s non-commercial and they credit the original source.

Anyway, here’s the old footer:

Screenshot of the old Codeistry page footer, before the new license

and here’s the new one:

Screenshot of the Codeistry page footer, with the new Creative Commons license

Accessibility article updated

Monday, February 9th, 2009

Screenshot of the About Codeistry page displayed in Lynx, a text-only web browser.Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve updated the Accessibility article on the main Codeistry website. I’ve polished the text a little more and added a section about testing your site’s accessibility using the Lynx text-only web browser. Check it out!

Colour contrast & accessibility

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Zoomed in composite screenshot showing the Codeistry website before and after the contrast tweak.I’ve been playing around with the Codeistry website’s colours, to improve the contrast and accessibility, whilst retaining the same feel.

The changes are subtle but move the site from mostly failing to almost completely passing the contrast and luminosity tests from JucyStudio.

It might seem obvious but going through this process brought home to me how much the perceived contrast of text depends on the background colour behind it. Text that looks fine on the normal page background might have insufficient contrast when used in a footer, link or menu – where the background colours are different.

The changes included changing the body text to use the old heading colour, using a slightly darker colour for headings and links, and a slightly lighter shade for the page footers, to increase the contrast with the footer text.

I actually think that this has helped the design too – not only for accessibility but it also feels stronger, with more impact and weight. I may even revisit this in the future and punch it up a bit more.

Colour contrast testing tools

http://juicystudio.com/article/colour-contrast-analyser-firefox-extension.php

Codeistry look & feel – website font choices

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

logotype-green-website-fonts-coloursMy choice of logotype font paid off here, allowing me to use Tahoma as a heading font. This works well, as Tahoma is installed on almost everyone’s computers and is a very readable font for on-screen work. It’s also excellent at heading with a strong bold weight.

I wanted a contrasting font to go with Tahoma for use with body text – what you’re reading now. I wanted a font which would continue the theme of contrast between the technical and the artistic set-up by the logotype, but couldn’t use Candara, as almost no-one has it installed, so they wouldn’t see it when viewing the website. Candara also inevitably looses some of its subtle curves and arty feel when you get down as small as 11 or 12 point.

I also wanted to give an organic feel overall – I wanted the ‘artistic side’ to win out in the overall feel of the design.

I ended up using the font that you’re reading now, Georgia. This is another very nice font, very readable at body text sizes, with a large x-height and open letter forms. It’s also a serif font – which are generally felt to be more readable for longer passages of text. It contrasts nicely with the Tahoma headings and gives the page a very organic feel overall.

Codeistry blog is proudly powered by WordPress Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).