Just an idea

[webdesignguy]

Ok, so I am looking to break free from the ties of 9-5 and go free lance in the wonderful (and already saturated) world of web design and as such I am looking to build up my portfolio. The theory being the more quality sites that I add to my portfolio, the more work that will come my way (with a bit of luck).

As such I am looking to take on a couple of projects where the fee will be £200 less than we normally charge. So a £600 project becomes £400 and a £400 project obviously becomes £200.

Naturally all packages are built using CSS, no tables except when used to display tabular data.

Anyway if you are interested drop me a PM and we will take it from there.

[William Wilson]

Do you have a portfolio of work?

[Dread]

Are you just a designer or can you develop aswell? Care to show an example of your work?

[webdesignguy]

I haven't finished the homepage yet, but for anyone interested I can send a link to the site with the portfolio on. This also includes testimonials.

[Dread]

PM it across. :)

[Dread]

Ok, i had a little look and it looks like your going in the right direction. I do have a few suggestions though...

Your html source code for your own site looks good, no tables, as you mensioned in your pm to me, you've just picked this up, i can see in your portfolio that you used tables in your clients sites, if your clients allow you, i'd consider going back and taking out all the tables in those sites, free of course, its for your benefit not theirs. This allows your work to be consistant.

Also your html doesnt validate, i'd like to see your html validate (http://validator.w3.org) or better still to be valid xhtml transitional (or strict if you wanna be "l33t") once you have this you have it cracked. xhtml is easy to learn try www.w3schools.com, it should be easy to get your own site to validate, try get your clients sites to validate too.

One other observation i made was that your site and your clients sites all have the same basic design structure, try and not follow the same starting blocks when designing.

Your definately doing well, keep it up.

[SmallBizSoftware]

So can I get a £200 project please .... with the discount

[William Wilson]

Can some explain what this validation thing is about?

[Dread]

Basically when your site validates it conforms to the standards of the world wide web consortium (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/).

[William Wilson]

Yes, but what's the purpose does a failed validation site not work or is it for security or what?

[webdesignguy]

the validation is a set of guidelines set out by the W3C, they are just a guide to building good sites, they aren't the law. A lot of people misunderstand this and think that because a site doesn't validate that is no good.

Dread I am working on getting the last few errors out... that's why the site isn't fully live yet. Thanks for the advice.

[William Wilson]

When you say good is it behaviour with browsers, SEO or the user experience?

[design@ews]

they mainly set out how to build accessable cross-platform sites. This has the obvious benifit of improving pagerank ect. but I agree with webdesignguy that they aren't the law, just a guide.

[JoyDivision]

I have found that all my XHTML validate sites work perfectly on what ever I throw it at, including my cheap £20 phone! Coding to standards solves a lot of messing about with getting it work in Firefox, Opera and IE. A lot of tags people use are not actually valid are there are alternatives which work on all browsers.

CSS is still a problem with different browsers but learning those tricks is just about experience and practise.

XHTML valid sites also help SEO and accessibility. I have no patience with sites which have lots of errors .

Regarding the law although its not law to code to W3C standards if disabled people cannot access a site you could be sued, and the courts will want to know what steps you have taken to make your site accessible. Coding to W3C standards is one of these steps.

[Dread]

Like a lot of people have said w3 standards are only guidelines, but echoing what JoyDivision points out, if your site is not accessable to people with disabilities etc, then you can get in big trouble.

Personally i wouldnt hire a web designer/developer that couldnt follow w3 standards.

Also if you code your site to these standards then just about any browser should be able to view it (including browsers on PDA's, phones and screen readers). If a browser cannot render sites that validate then thats the browser's flaw, not the sites.

[mrbusiness999]

Just to add my 2p, yahoo has 262 validation errors.

[JoyDivision]

Just to add my 2p, yahoo has 262 validation errors.

It probably does, its a crap site, I am sure Google won't validate 100% but would be very surprised if there was many errors.

A certain large cinema company had to take their site offline and make an out of court settlement becuase their website was so bad, disabeled people could not accesss it, it was done in flash so blind people could not use it, and it wouldn't work with a keyboard so unless you had muscle movements in your fingers its tough.

I like to make sites which look good and also as much as possible can be used with people with a only a voice for muscles or blind. In many situations this can be achieved without impairing usability for people who use a standard web browser, a monitor and a mouse.

One of the major problems with ASP.NET is it didn't comply with any of this, so Microsoft had to quickly to fix this in ASP.NET 2.0.

To be honest I could not give a stuff what Yahoo does, I've not used it since 1997.

[epiphany]

If any of you fancy some more detail read here

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml

[William Wilson]

If any of you fancy some more detail read here

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml

I read over the info and even tried the validation, it passed.

My next point is how can the information on this site/page be accessed by a blind person since it obviously meets the requirements?

[Dread]

My next point is how can the information on this site/page be accessed by a blind person since it obviously meets the requirements?

Most (or i expect all?) blind computer users have access to a screen reader. Although never having seen one in action i can take an educated guess at what it does. It reads the plain text from a webpage from top to bottom and "talks" it to the blind person using the computer. Bearing in mind that top to bottom means the source code and not the visual top to bottom. The cleaner source code and less html in the source the better the screen reader can read the page. This is why css should be used to make source code neater as screen readers pay no attention to css files.

[William Wilson]

Got you, it's a lot clearer now.

[Dread]

Im guessing since nobody corrected me im either right or nobody knows any more on the subject? :P

[webdesignguy]

yeah, think you nailed that one dread :)

[JoyDivision]

And as an added bonus what a text reader can read, so can a WPRS phone and a search engine :)