The latest event from Carsonified is The Future of Web Design, which was held in London this week. These are the notes from some of the speakers presentations.

The theme for the event focused on creative approaches for design:
The main ways for the speakers we by ‘changing your perspectives’ and ‘asking and collaborating with other people for ideas’.

Inspiration vs duplication - Often leads to designs being directly copied as its easier, but leads to abuse. How do we go about doing the right thing? By looking for elements that solve problems in intersting ways.

Inspiration. Takes practice and is never ending process. Lead to wealth of ideas that you can apply to web design

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For those that want to find out about the presentations, and for indeed the people that made it, but couldn’t missed panels that ‘rawked’. Check out the links below to relive some of the panels back in March from SxSw 2008:

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/mov/ Movie - Quicktime

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/swf/ Flash - swf

http://video.sxsw.com/2008/mp4hi/ Audio - MP4

We often use the content in the following post, when explaining designs and layouts to clients who. We make it easy to understand why homepages and doorway pages are so important for new visitors to your site.

Probably the most important one being “You have less than 5 seconds to catch your customers attention.” If the design or interface of the web site or application confuses you will repeatedly lose valuable customers.

A company’s homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website’s business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment..
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Presentation by Daniel Appelquist of Vodafone

Vodafone: 191 million customer worldwide, and member of w3c mobile working group

Do users want the web on their mobile?

The answer is yes, due to:

1. The largest uptake of mobile web content in africa and developing countries
2. Creation of worldwide mobile web initiative

Leading to the mobile web best practices - which focus on the following:

1. designing for one web
2. rely on web standards
3. stay away from known hazards
4. be cautious of device implications
5. optimise navigation

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Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more useable and accessible include keeping Web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter - especially extraneous content - and ensuring that the primary purpose of the Web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.

There are many organizations and online resources that offer Website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for Website owners and authors. Broad adherence to these guidelines is one way of ensuring that sites are universally accessible.

Enter Google labs Accessible Search

http://labs.google.com/accessible/

Called the Google Accessible Search, the search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search and finds the most relevant results as measured by Google’s search algorithms, but also sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. So when users search from the site, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully - pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

We look forward to this developing and making the web more accessible. And the Co-op developing into making algorithms more favourable toward accessible web sites, like the ones we make at Callender Creates.