Is it worth it?

• At least 10% of population in most countries has disabilities; visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities can all affect access to Web.
• Average age of population in many countries is increasing; aging sometimes results in combinations of accessibility issues; vision & hearing changes, changes in dexterity & memory.
• Many elderly and disabled people rely increasingly on internet to obtain their goods and services.

• Allow access to users of mobile phones, small display scress, Web-TV and web-kiosks and other new web=enabled devices.
• Increases usability in low bandwidth or slow connection situations.
• Provide access across a wider range of computer hardware and software.

• Many governments now require certain websites to conform to accessibility guidellines.
• Accessible websites are easier to index by search engines and therefore help drive traffic to your site.

To help some amateur web designers out there, I have here a list of established rules of thumb in web designing. This may help you in creating functional and arty wed sites.

1.A picture is worth a thousand words thus, you need not stuff your page with a truckload of images. Pictures and images are used to enhance page and not to mess it up. Bear in mind that less is beautiful.

The average time to load a page should not take longer than 5 seconds. If it’s longer than that, surfers might click away elsewhere. Therefore, you must keep page size less than 30k.

Each file on page should have a separate HTTP request to server. Lots of small images will slow down loading. Other factors that contribute to slowing down of loading are height and width attributes. Without these, browser should wait for image to download since it has no idea of how much space to leave for them.

2.Navigability and functionality come before artistic excellence. It is no use making your site a masterpiece of art if users cannot navigate around it.

3.Keep web site simple.

4.Whenever your whole page is within a table whole page cannot render until whole table is downloaded. To remedy this, split table into two and let top one be a short table that displays only page header and a small number of navigation links.