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Sanford c01.tex V3 - 08/13/2008 2:49pm Page 3

Chapter 1: Why Design?

more likely you will simply lose them as future visitors and never have a clue how much your

organization is suffering from these aesthetic choices.) While not as important as usability,

aesthetics should never be undervalued.

❑ Accessibility This is one of those terms that people have trouble deﬁning. Some people might

refer to it as 508 design (after Section 508 of the Disabilities Act). Some might associate it with

text readers and other tools to assist the visually impaired. But that isn’t really what accessibil-

ity means (although this is certainly part of it). Accessibility means, in its simplest form, making

sites that everyone gets equal value from. This takes a lot of different forms. Take, for example,

a site that broadcasts its daily specials using Flash software. A text reader will read the rendered

code of a Web site to the user accessing the site. When it gets to the site’s daily advertised spe-

cials in Flash, the reader will likely announce something like ‘‘embedded object found’’ and

then move on (if they acknowledge it at all). So these patrons will have no idea that ear muffs

are buy-one-get-one-free today and may decide to brave the frozen tundra without them. And

you just lost a sale. In a similar situation, imagine an e-training site that offers online training on

various business topics. But what if those classes were all done in streaming media where some

narrator or even instructor is recorded going over subjects like sexual harassment or civil rights

issues. How effective would that be to a person who cannot hear? If there is no consideration

for such people (and there are plenty of them), the site will suffer for it. These ideas should be

fundamental to any designer in today’s Internet.

Before you dismiss vision- and hearing-based accessibility issues, consider this: According

to the U.S. Bureau of the Census statistics for 1999, there are more than 1.5 million visu-

ally impaired computer users. Also, according to a 2005 report by Ross E. Mitchell in the

Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education from Oxford University, nearly 10 million

people in the U.S. are hard of hearing and nearly 1 million are functionally deaf. And those

numbers only reﬂect potential U.S. visitors to your site; they don’t account for all of the other

visitors from Canada, Britain, Germany, and the rest of the world.

❑ Branding This can mean different things to different people, especially on the Web. Many cor-

porations today have speciﬁc branding requirements. This often means that Web media can

only use a designated logo at speciﬁc dimensions and must be separated from all other elements

by a speciﬁc number of pixels. It could mean that the entire color scheme is mandated by the

branding requirements of the company or public entity. It could even mean font sizes and colors.

When getting into site design, it is imperative that designers understand the branding require-

ments of the people paying you to make the design and then adhere to them.

With MOSS 2007 (and portals in general), there is at least one other consideration: Don’t look like every

other instance of this portal. If visitors come to your site and think, ‘‘I’ve seen this look somewhere

before — make that lots of places before,’’ that is not a good thing. Unfortunately, many user groups fall

into this exact trap. If you go to one user group site, it will often look like every other user group site,

with the exception of the content, colors, and logo. They all take the same portal and just choose one of

the out-of-the-box templates and slap their logo at the top and call it a day.

Here is an interesting case study: Look at Figures 1-1 and 1-2.