August 25, 2009, Durham, NC – Recently the fourth annual BarCampRDU conference was held at the Red Hat World Headquarters in Raleigh. DesignHammer’s Managing Partner, David Minton, participated in Saturday’s events by leading a session on “The Intersection of Usability, Accessibility, and SEO.” Sponsoring the event for the second year in a row, DesignHammer was also a Gold Level sponsor of this year’s conference.
A BarCamp, as the organization describes itself, is an “ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event.” The conference is free, open to the public, and driven entirely by content created by those attending the event. The informal nature of a BarCamp allows for sessions, on current trending topics, contributing to each highly educational event.
On his lecture, David Minton stated, “Most tend to think of Usability, Accessibility, and SEO as three separate aspects of website content creation, and development, with the three areas often handled by different people or even teams. DesignHammer is a small agency, and since I often provide counseling to our clients for all three subjects, it seemed to make more sense to take a holistic approach.“
Usability, Accessibility, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are terms describing disciplines, when applied to Website development, that contribute to making websites easier for users to interact with, whether it is a live person or search engine robot. Usability is an often overlooked, though important concept used to describe the ease or difficulty with which an individual navigates a webpage. High usability indicates the target user can navigate relatively easily through the website, and locate pertinent information for their use. To ensure sight impaired users, as well as those with other disabilities also have access to the Internet, website developers make special considerations for the needs of this group, with this work referred to terms of Accessibility.
Designing a website in such a way will allow these users to gain all the information a non-Impaired user would by using various sorts of assistive technology (AT). SEO is the discipline of studying the way the different aspects of search engines interact with the content of websites, and preparing and editing content in an attempt to improve a website’s rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
What the web design practices of usability, accessibility and SEO have in common is their effect on the end user and making it a more effective experience whether the user is a sighted person, sight-impaired person or a search engine robot. During his lecture, David offered solutions for these three practices on how to ensure a website is meeting the needs of all users, and best reaching the ultimate goal in website effectiveness. Such solutions surrounded successful practices of hyperlinks, tagging of images to help sight impaired users, and illustrating the impact of flash on SEO performance.
Local Web Designer and Developer, Kosta Harlan attended David’s session and commented that, “The session provided a clear and concise overview of the intersections between usability, accessibility, and SEO. Most people usually discuss those terms separately, but David did an excellent job explaining these concepts as three interrelated aspects of the same process of development. My design and web development work will benefit from the knowledge I gained from the presentation.”
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