We’d say yes (well we would, wouldn’t we), but there are solid reasons why online and particularly social media deserve more of your consideration.

In any downturn, marketing has to work with much reduced budgets and the CEO will still be breathing down your neck asking about ROI and increasing sales. There’s nowhere better for spending a little to achieve a lot than the web.

For starters, online is cost-effective. For a limited budget you can reach huge numbers of people. Videos, podcasts, email newsletters and blogging cost little. They can be your most effective and lowest cost form of advertising, and unlike traditional marketing and advertising efforts they come with solid metrics.

People like to feel that they’re involved with organisations that they like and this is where social media really comes into its own. A medium that allows your users to really hear the authentic voice of your organisation; to reply back; to feel included. Best of all you leverage your existing users into being your most effective spokespeople. This is likely to require a substantial change in your organisation’s mindset. Blogging only works as a communications tool when it is perceived to be open and honest. There’s no use simply spouting the official line and not listening. Blog openly and honestly and people will respect that.

Similarly, it’s no use quashing customer or user dissent by censoring your social network. This will enrage people and incentivise previously quiet critics to start talking. It’s amazingly helpful to show that you can take criticism and deal with it, and if you sort out customers’ queries and complaints, you’ll be able to add to your army of online advocates. You may find that great ideas are started by people you’ve never met and handed to you for free.

Social media is also becoming the place people turn to for advice about what and where to buy, after all you don’t want to make a mistake when money’s tight, and if the worst comes to the worst using it to help them find a new job. If you want to attract the best staff when we climb out of recession then having a great reputation can’t hurt.

Even if you choose not to take part in the social media whirl then keeping an eye on it is always a good idea too. It could help you work out why you’re failing to connect with supporters, failing to retain great staff or losing customers to a competitor.

All valuable business intelligence and all for pennies.

Photo credit: qwirksilver on Flickr

Whether design versus accessibility or design versus usability, a lively and sometimes heated debate accompanies developments in web design. It seems that with accessibility in one corner and design in the other, the relationship is generally perceived as two opposites that can only be traded against one another.

In numerous articles on ‘accessibility versus design’ one is given the impression that a designer’s concern is entirely focused on aesthetics, rather than on solid design thinking which includes aspects of usability and accessibility alike. As per definition, accessibility is a general term to describe the degree to which a product such as a website is accessible by as many people as possible. It is the ability to access and its focus is on people with disabilities and their right to access. Whereas usability is used in context of the efficiency and effectiveness of web design or in fact any other design discipline, such as product design or environmental design for example. So how come there is such a wide-scaling debate fought between designers and web standardistas, the latter predominantly concerned with applying web development to WCAG 2.0 criteria?

In this argumentation it seems worthwhile mentioning that good design education teaches about a methodical process of which defining goals and setting out the parameters for what design has to achieve are key to the successful delivery in any given project. Whether this addresses the ergonomics of a coffee machine or the communicative tasks of a charity website, solid design methodology integrates usability and, where required, accessibility right from the outset to ensure that shape and form, three or two dimensional, respond to the effectiveness of any given product or service.

The debate on visual aesthetics versus functionality is not exclusive to web design and I am convinced it has been fought a million times. I would not be surprised if it goes as far back as to when Romans chiselled our modern alphabet into marble. However, if there is anything to learn from design history then we do not even have to look back this far. An historic showcase that demonstrates design performs at its best when functional aspects are taken into account is London Underground. Not only has the capital’s transport system provided us with one of the most iconic symbols in the world but also created a visual navigation system that is widely acknowledged as an example for functional Creative. Aesthetically and logically sound, it guides millions of people everyday, through narrow tunnels that twist and turn and in which anyone’s intuitive sense of direction gets confused. In many ways a great example that shows that if form takes into account functional aspects, some of the best designs solutions are achieved. It seems worthwhile remembering that functional design, sometimes interchangeably coined as Modernism, came into existence no later than in the late 19th and early 20th century. The integration of aesthetics and engineering was further illustrated by the inherent conflict between functional design and the demands of the marketplace happened in 1935, after the introduction of the streamlined Chrysler Airflow. Too far ahead of its time it could not meet customer expectations. And Raymond Loewy, who gave the Coke bottle its iconic shape, stated that design is bounded by functional constraints of math, materials and logic, but that its acceptance is constrained by social expectations.

Leaving creativity and its successes and failures of customer and social expectations aside, functional aspects had long been an integral part of the design process, so why the design versus accessibility or design versus usability debate? Is it partly because it is still a relatively new medium in historic terms? It shouldn’t be the reason as the fundamental principles of good design methodology are universal. Functional aspects such as accessibility and usability on one side and form-giving on the other are interlinked if not two sides of the same coin. Therefore, designers should always take functional aspects into account, whereas web standardistas should be remembered that questioning common practises, challenging standards and the way we do things is an imperative to improvement, not only in digital but in general.

In that sense, designer or web standardista, if you happen to work in a practice that is about the giving of help to those in need, most likely to be a charity, you may also consider providing high standards of accessibility to those with disabilities almost by default. It is a uniquely positioned opportunity for those who happen to be lucky enough to work for charitable organisations to drive good design standards and best practise forward. After all, which sector other than Ethical would require equally high accessibility standards and as a result of that, provide this kind of platform from which to lead the debate?

http://webaim.org/blog/access_vs_design/
An illustration of a rather amusing conversation between a web designer and web standardista.

http://webstandardsgroup.org/features/joe-clark.cfm
Journalist, author, and accessibility consultant Joe Clark is refreshingly direct on the subject and speaks his mind. Here are ten questions for him.

http://www.sensible.com/
Usability and Accessibility are totally different things, however, in the context of this article, we might mention Usability Guru Steve Krug. Unfortunately, Krug often portraits the designer as a mere decorator or a make-beautiful sort of person, other than that, generally a good read and resource.

http://blog.chrisfearon.com/archives/92
More in-depth thoughts on design versus accessibility

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuna2AWvqk  A little song on the subject that my dear colleague Paul Collins made me aware of

"We can now recycle our batteries. This includes rechargeable and non-rechargeable batteries as well as mobile phone batteries.

There is a nice battery tube in reception for us to put our batteries in. Bring them in from home as well !!

Why should we recycle our batteries? Well here’s why :

• All waste batteries are classified as hazardous waste and recycling is always the best option.

• Ordinary batteries do contain some hazardous chemicals so ideally should not be thrown out with the day to day rubbish.

• Rechargeable batteries contain harmful metals, so should never be thrown away with daily rubbish.

• Ordinary batteries require a lot of energy to make, so in order to save energy, use rechargeable batteries and electricity mains instead of ordinary batteries.

• Rechargeable batteries are the most environmentally friendly option as they can last for up to several hundred charging cycles resulting in less waste being produced. "

Other sessions on at the same time (e.g. those about e-commerce and email marketing) didn’t appear to have a queue at all! Maybe that’s not because people don’t want to use those mediums, but just because they already know how to do it, and there’s still a lot of questions to be answered about social media marketing. Whatever the reason, I think this video really shows the level of interest in the social media sector, which is a great sign.

In addition, this was a free event, so would be likely to be oversubscribed. For those in the queue who missed the sessions at Internet World 2009, you might want to come to Digital Leap next month - a social networking conference for charity people and we’ll try to answer some of those questions…

That’s because, in the non-digital world, we’re obsessed with getting in front of people, rather than making them come to us. Retailers compete for the sites with the most footfall. Direct marketers take the argument to people’s newspapers, telephones, doormats and inboxes. Face-to-face fundraisers literally won’t let you walk down the street.

And that’s the direction that digital is finally heading in, with proper investment in being where people are ­ on YouTube, on email, on search engines, on social networking sites. It’s all measurable too (just like hits to your website).

I love a good website. But I like to know what it’s for first. Please remember to share this with a friend.

Let’s change the perspective. Another school of thought may suggest a more editorial feel and could argue that certain sites should look less utilitarian in order to entice their readership into an article, because after all, who enjoys reading phone directory style sites with lots of one-size-fits-all letters and layouts with little contrast or no white space to guide the eye? Bearing in mind that the way we have learnt to read the web is linked to how we have learnt to read newspapers and other printed content, it is probably a valid point to say that large type and variation in size helps us to identify the important from the less meaningful parts.

Furthermore, visual style gives us clues as to the type of content and by that, guides us and helps us in making decisions on whether content is of interest to us or not. In that sense bigger headers set in a unique typeface and contrasting sizes as a visual reference to its content adds functionality too. I also suspect that, had web fonts such as Verdana been working typographically in bigger sizes, web designers would have used bigger type long before sIFR technology enabled us to use better and more aesthetically pleasing type faces.

In the short term this super large type trend could level out, as seen many times before when new tricks and technical novelties had to be used excessively only to be ‘so last month’ a day later. What remains are the universal questions that a designer has to find the right answers for; what message do we want to bring across, how are we going to do it and what technology is at hand to enable the best possible result? Form Follows Function springs to mind but this over-used phrase doesn’t encourage personality nor flair so much as cool rationale and solid ground reasoning. In addition to Form Follows Function I promote the emotive aspects of the design process and believe that a wider variety of fonts and more liberalism in form of contrasting sizes should give web designers the option to style pages more reflective of their content – in that sense, how about Form Follows Meaning?

Check out these sites

i love typography - 15 excellent examples of web typography

Ar-bent-ing - Large typography

Smashing Magazine - The Showcase of BIG Typography - Second Edition

Font Shop

One of the hardest things to deliver now is exclusivity — the web has opened up everything to everyone. Except, exclusive, personal time-contingent experiences. So CD, cinema and DVD sales are falling (this content has no intrinsic value now) - while everyone’s going to concerts, plays and musicals (and flashmobs) instead. While a whole generation is embracing the handmade, the intimate and the infinitely customised.

But I think there’s still room for us to deliver these experiences online. Expect a new era of closed, not shared, and very personal experiences.

Photo credit: Igor San

The fact that mobile phones are now everywhere across the globe is also driving their use for all sorts of interesting things from checking where your friends are using services like Google Latitude, to playing games using the streets as your board like tourality, to monitoring the fairness of elections using text messages and online tools like Twitter or even organising street activism.

In particular location based services (LBS) have been touted for years and in typical web 2.0 style have gone from much-hyped but little used, to "Oh that again" to actually coming into their own and starting to be useful and used. In the web world we’re getting used to localization - changing languages and in some cases content for users preferences. With the use of stylesheets we have an easy way of tuning the look and feel of websites for the users’ abilty to view it, whether because of accessibility issues or because of the platform they’re using. Soon we’ll have a world where as you walk down the street your phone will buzz with offers from shops you’re passing by and to let you know that if you turn right at the next junction you’ll bump into your friend who’s off shopping for a new washing machine and that since you’re going to the same place you could share a taxi. And "compare the market" will have a whole new meaning when a website can compare the actual market you’re standing in. Imagine knowing the availability and sustainability of all the fish for sale in Borough Market and being able to choose which stall to buy from on that basis, or being in Africa and knowing where to get the best price for your crops.

The use of mobile in amateur activism is also interesting from bystanders videoing abuse by authority figures and uploading it instantly to sites like Youtube and the Hub to the use of text messaging in poorer countries to find the location of the nearest health clinic.

The challenges are many and varied and when you are connected not just 24×7x365, but also located too, privacy is going to be a huge issue.

At least with mobile you can always say your battery died if you aren’t feeling that sociable.

[photo credit: Mike Kline on Flickr]

• For all the debates in the accessibility world, a lot of the respondents do find access keys useful.
• 75% of respondents update their screen reader software within the first year of a new release.
• 12% of respondents are using screen readers on their mobile phones.
• Even though the respondents are rather tech savvy, 33% of them are still using IE6 with their screen reader.

There were some beliefs that were reinforced by this survey too, which was nice to know. In particular:

• A large portion of respondents use headings, links, and search to navigate through a website.
• A large number of people use the "skip" link at the top of a website.
• Only a small portion of respondents use site maps to navigate through a website. 
• If the  image you are providing ALT text for is a photo, then add "Photo" before the ALT text.

It is worth noting that the respondents to this survey are visitors to the WebAIM site and offered to fill in the survey, so this can’t be taken as a complete view of the population of screen reader users. The ones who participated here are more likely to be tech savvy, which is probably why a large proportion of them use Firefox. 

Still, an interesting read.

Further information

WebAIM Screen Reader survey
WebAIM Screen Reader survey results discussion
Introduction to Screen Readers

We started a forum post on the fantastic Campaign Monitor site to see what the email marketing community thought, and the discussion was vast and insightful. Most users were not convinced, and many of them ran tests on their email clients. The outcome from our small survey was that video rarely played in any email client bar Apple Mail, and it would be unlikely to.

Much to our satisfaction, Campaign Monitor kept an eye on the forum post, and decided to run extensive testing for video rendering within an email, with some fascinating results about what email clients would support playing video. As you can see from this chart, it’s not many:

It’s definitely worth having a read of their report, and keeping an eye on future developments. Campaign Monitor have already followed up with a discussion about various vendors claiming to be able to perform the video in email technology, with again, disappointing results. Watch this space.