Wide Compatibility

The easierthan design template has been tested to work on a wide range of platforms. Unlike many website designs, it displays equally well and can be navigated easily on PCs, Apple Macs, Mobile Phones, Touch Screens and even the likes of a Nintendo Wii games console!

It has also been tested using a variety of different browsers, both modern and old, including: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Konquerer, Lynx and NCSA Mosaic

Small Footprint

Our website templates are designed to use a minimal amount of images and unnecessary content. This helps to ensure they load faster on antiquated machines and anyone still suffering with dial-up internet. This is more common than you'd expect with broadband still not available in many rural areas.

Additionally, the new trend for access via mobile phones or laptops using a mobile dongle means that speed of loading is still an issue.

Flexible Layout

Unlike many company's fixed-width designs, the easierthan design template features a flexible layout which expands and contracts to fill whatever size screen the user has, meaning that it still looks good at as low a resolution as 800 x 600 and as high as any screen goes.

After all, what's the point of your customer shelling out for a big expensive high resolution monitor if your website ends up as a tiny column running down the middle of it?

Customer Friendly Printing

All easierthan websites feature customer friendly printing. Unlike many websites you'll have visited, we use a print style sheet which removes the banner, menus, footer and any unnecessary colour from print-outs, thus saving your customers money on printing and making your information clearer.

Try it now by selecting "Print Preview" from your browser's menu to see the results.

Accessibility

In line with the Disability Discrimination Act, we aim to ensure all our websites conform to at least "AA" standard of the Web Accessibility Initiative. This initiative provides a whole host of guidelines, which attempt to ensure websites are accessible and usable by people with disabilities. There are too many to mention here, but a few examples of disabilities and the steps we take include:

• Blindness - Blind people rely on Screen Readers to navigate a website by reading out the titles of links on the screen. Link titles therefore need to indicate what to expect when the links are followed. We never use meaningless link titles such as "Click Here" or "More...".
• Upper Mobility Impairments - There are a number of conditions where people find using a mouse difficult and instead use a keyboard to navigate through the links on websites. This creates a problem when they need to reach links within the content of a page as it often requires a press of the "Tab" key for every navigational banner and menu link first. All of our websites carry a "Skip Navigation" link which takes keyboard users straight to the content.
• Photosensitive Epilepsy - Just as with television programs, screen flickering or flashing from animation on websites can trigger seizures at a particular refresh rate. We never use unnecessary menu animation or flashing banners and adverts.

If you don't know anyone with a disability many people's first reaction is does all this really matter that much? Well, if not from a caring or legal perspective, consider it from a business angle. There are approximately 8 to 10 million (available figures vary) registered disabled people in the UK and an estimated 2 million people have significant sight loss. Many of these people will require websites with Accessibility features and that's a lot of potential revenue to ignore!

Read more about how easierthan make our websites accessible on our Accessibility pages.

Resizable Text

As we suggested above, poor eyesight is a very common problem such that everyone will know someone who suffers. easierthan tackle this in four ways:

• By using a good size font such as this one or the slightly smaller one used on www.bozzsoftware.co.uk.
• By always using a high contrast background of black on white to make sure the text stands out.
• By using a clean basic font such as Arial or Verdana.
• By making that font resizable by the browser. Linked to Accessibility above, most browsers have the facility to resize text on the screen provided it has been set up correctly.

Try it now. In Internet Explorer or Mozilla, choose "View" and then "Text Size" from the menu. If the menu isn't visible, use the "Alt" key on your keyboard to make it appear.

Clear Signposting

Where a website has more than a couple of pages and / or has multiple levels of pages that branch off like the chapters in a book, clear signposting to tell the customer where they are is very important. As can be seen on this site, the easierthan design template includes:

• Title Bar - On a PC or Apple Mac, this is the bar that runs along the top of your browser's window. Note that this site's title bar shows the company name and your location within the site. A good title bar is also important for Search Engines such as Google and MSN as that is what appears as the title in the search results.
• Home Page Link - A link to the site's Home page on every page of the site so that a customer can always find their way back to the start.
• Breadcrumb Trail - Below the top menu you'll see a series of links starting with the words "You are here". Again, these links show your location on the site and allow you to move back to a previous level in the site's structure. The term originates from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.
• Page Title - As well as appearing in a bar directly above the content, the page title is also highlighted in the left menu to further reinforce the customer's location.
• Up a Level - Where the site warrants it, an "Up a Level" link is used at the bottom of the left menu to help the customer travel back up the hierarchy of the site's structure.
• Contact Us - If the ultimate aim of the site is for a potential customer to get in touch (as with this one) via a Contact Us page, easierthan think it makes sense for this link to be available from every page on the website. We also recommend having contact details such as address, telephone, fax and email on the footer of every page (including the printed version) so that they are always readily available to the customer.

For a bigger example of all of this in action, visit www.sarahmyerscough.co.uk which has over 100 pages and up to three levels in some places.

Internet Filter Friendly

All easierthan websites are labelled up appropriately to ensure that they are not blocked out unnecessarily by internet filters. Many of your potential customers may be using computers they share with their children and may therefore have parental control filters on such as Net Nanny, which can sometimes exclude innocuous websites it believes to be harmful. Alternatively, your potential customers may be visiting your website via a computer at a college, library, church or other public area - all of which are often subject to internet site filtering.

We use hidden tags in accordance with the Internet Content Rating Association to let such filtering software know that your site does or more likely doesn't contain nudity, sexual material, violence, potentially offensive language, potentially harmful activities or user-generated content, thereby helping to ensure it only gets filtered if it's meant to be.

No Additional Software

The best example of additional software is Flash, an aptly named tool used by website developers that allows them to easily create flashy looking animated introduction screens, banners, menus and adverts.

easierthan does not believe in building websites that may require your potential customers to download additional software in order for them to work. Doing this runs the risk of alienating and losing your customer at the outset. The only place we would advise the use of Flash or Java plug-ins is for specific features such as videos and games.

Although they can look great, if you are considering getting a website done wholly in Flash, please note the following, all of which relate back to previous points:

• There can be accessibility issues with Flash, particularly surrounding screen readers as used by the blind and partially sighted.
• Your website will not have the widest possible compatibility as there will be some platforms on which your site cannot be accessed.
• Flash menus are generally slower to load and will cause frustration for potential customers with slow internet connections.
• Some users are simply put off if they have to download any new software to view a site.
• Potential customers visiting your website via a computer at a college, library, church or other public area may not be allowed to download software.

Note that even You Tube which provides thousands of videos via Flash doesn't use it for its menus and other content.

Custom Error Pages

Error pages appear if something goes wrong when a customer is accessing your site. The most common error and one which most people are familiar with is "Page Not Found (Error 404)". This is generally encountered when a customer types in a specific website address incorrectly or when Google (or any other search engine) indexes your site and then a page that they are linking to is moved or deleted.

A custom error page is one that is branded to look like your site and contains a user friendly message which directs the user back to your site. To view this website's custom 404 error visit: www.easierthan.co.uk/madeupname.htm.

Note, when a site is hosted with us, we will include these at no extra cost. Where you would like us to host the site on your existing web-space, there may be a charge to liaise with your service provider.

Search Metatags

Every website design company should include these, but surprisingly many still don't. These are hidden labels attached to your web pages that briefly describe your organisation and provide a list of keywords that are relevant to the organisation and its purpose.

They're used by Search Engines such as Google and MSN which often use the description in their search results. The keywords and description combined can also contribute towards getting your site noticed.