The article further explains that from the research, they have found that “a third of online users who have seen an ad are able to recall it when asked” . It is funny that only a third of people are able to recall online ads, because here at webqem, we believe that our online ads are so amazing, 100% of users are able to recall the online ad! You can check out webqem’s coolest online ads here.

As part of that commitment, Rob and Chris attended the WIPA (Web Industry Professionals Association) Accessibility 2.0 Seminar in Sydney on 12 November, to discover the latest news about accessibility.

The seminar covered three main areas:

1. Moving from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0
2. Preparing accessible Flash
3. Preparing accessible PDFs

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which a recommendations from W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. This covers physical, cognitive and technical disabilities.

The WCAG 1.0 Recommendations, have been in effect since May 1999 and needed revision to address changes in technology and future flexibility. WCAG 2.0 is in “Proposed Recommendation” status, and considered highly likely to be approved as a “Recommendation” by the end of the year.

The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (1992) says it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their disability. The Australian Human Rights Commission notes that provision of information and online services through the Web is covered by the DDA. The Australian Government Information Management Office has a guide to minimum websites standards for accessibility.

The old WCAG 1.0 Priority Levels of 1,2,3 are to be replaced with WCAG 2.0 Levels of Conformance (A, AA and AAA). These levels are not directly equivalent. Conformance is determined by fully meeting a level, for full pages, complete processes, accessibility supported, not interfering with the ability to access the rest of the page.

WCAG 1.0 was more concerned with specific technologies, such as HTML and CSS. To cater for future technologies, WCAG 2.0 requirements are technology neutral, phrased in terms of content being supported by assistive technology (such as screen readers) and having available accessible user agents, such as browsers or plugins.

Whereas previously PDF documents, Flash and Javascript were considered inaccessible, WCAG 2.0 no longer automatically precludes used of these. Not all Javascript, Flash and PDF documents are accessible, but components can be made accessible, or deemed accessibility supported.

Improved use of labels, tags, titles, summaries and captions can assist in making forms, tables and buttons more accessible. Skip links are encouraged, for navigation. Guidelines for making audio and video accessible are included.

Accessible PDF documents
This was a presentation by Andrew Downie, who is totally blind and uses screen readers to access computers. He amazed everyone with the speed with which he listens to screen readers. His primary recommendations for people creating PDF documents were:

• Focus on document structure
• Use structured headings rather than font sizes (in both Word Documents and PDFs)
• Provide alternative text for images
• Provide document and table summaries
• Provide table of contents
• Use bookmarks
• Use tagging
• Not to use text boxes
• The importance of reading order, and how to correct it

Accessible Flash
Simon Reid from Adobe gave a presentation on creating accessible Flash. Since CS3, accessibility features have been a feature, and it has improved in the new CS4 release.
He emphasised features such as:

• Using accessible components
• Enabling control over reading order, tabbing order
• Giving each item a unique instance name

Flash accessibility features unfortunately are not turned on by default, when installing Flash. Editing the config.xml file can turn them on.

For more details we were referred to the Adobe Flash accessibility design guidelines
Simon said he was happy to come to our workplaces to demonstrate the use of Flash accessible components.
Adobe also has a page on PDF accessibility guidelines.

Required equipment:
SoundStation 2W conference phone
USB Cable – A male to mini 5-pin male (same as most digital cameras)
2.5mm to 3.5 mm stereo cable
Windows based computer

Install the Polycom firmware updater software onto PC/laptop. Do not upgrade the firmware of the soundstation. Visit Polycom download page.

Connect cable from the 2.5mm stereo jack on the Polycom to the 3.5mm Microphone jack on your PC/laptop (there is a picture of a mobile phone next to it).

Once the Polycom software has been installed, connect a USB cable from the Polycom (on the underside of the unit at the opposite end to the keypad) to your PC/laptop.

Press the button marked “IP Mode” on the Polycom.

Go into the Sound Applet in control panel and ensure that the microphone jack is enabled. You should now be in business.

Google XML sitemaps have been around since June 2005. Yahoo soon followed, allowing submission of sitemaps in various formats. Now the three search engines have come together to agree on a standard XML format for sitemaps. Google will accept sitemaps in a variety of formats, such as txt, xml and rss feeds.

In a December WebProNews interview with Vanessa Fox, Product Manager Google Webmaster Central , Vanessa spoke about Google sitemaps. Sitemaps don’t guarantee your site will be accepted and included onto the search engines. They don’t boost your ranking at a search engine. What they do is make it easier for the search engine robots to crawl pages of your site that may have otherwise been hard to find. A sitemap is of most use to new pages that have not yet been crawled or indexed. Compulsory fields are the URL and location. Optional fields include the relative priority, date of last modification, and frequency of changes to pages. The priority of a page is meant to indicate the importance of a page as compared to others on your site; not the importance as compared to external sites.

Vanessa also spoke about duplicate pages. If a site contains pages that are basically duplicates of others within your site, indexing all of those duplicate pages and returning them on a search results page would not provide a good search experience. Preferably only one of those pages should be indexed. Sitemaps are one way of indicating the page you prefer to be indexed.

webqem can generate sitemaps for new and existing sites, and for newly designed sites, can optionally update the sitemap and notify Google whenever the site changes.

Blogging is the tool of the moment because it allows non-technical people to communicate quickly and effectively. It allows interested readers to easily subscribe without clogging up an overloaded email inbox, and bypasses email spam filters that block desired emails and let in yet another ad for member enlargement.

Blogging has SEO benefits because of frequent updates. Search engines like fresh content, so if you blog regularly you can

Yahoo! And eBay announced an exclusive advertising partnership, where Yahoo will be the exclusive provider of graphical and sponsored search ads for eBay – customers famously in the mood for shopping. The eBay-owned PayPal payment service will be the third-party provider for Yahoo Wallet and be heavily promoted on Yahoo.

<>The next day Google and Dell announced that new Dell systems will be preloaded with Google’s desktop search software.Amazon moved from Google to Microsoft early in May, with their A9 search now using results from MSN search and Windows Live search.

Google Maps arrived (unofficially) in Australia. See how webqem has used it on our contact page. Or try a search for “Sydney Australia”, choose the Hybrid map, and zoom in using the controls on the left of the screen.

Google Trends allows you to analyse searches over time, by region, city and language. Great for detecting seasonal behaviour, and comparing results for two search phrases.

Google Coop allows you to share your favourite searches, and could be a new way of establishing yourself as an authority in your niche, with corresponding SEO benefits, allowing people to subscribe to your links.

Search is no longer solely a competition to see who can produce the best search engine results (index the most sites, with the fastest, freshest and most relevant results). It is increasing about branding, breadth of services, information, innovation and participation to gain user allegiance.

Allianz Australia’s intranet site was selected because of its functionality, easy to understand content and user-focussed approach. Rather than making employee information needs fit the technology, the Allianz site is maintained by its own employees to meet their information needs and those of Allianz Australia’s customers.

Through employee focus groups, Allianz found that staff wanted their intranet to be a practical, everyday work tool encompassing a consistent look and feel, simple navigation tools, short cuts and company news. Over several days, design options emerged in workshops and paper prototyping that captured all of the major goals. As with all good design, “less is more” and the home page features a great method for presenting a lot of context sensitive links and tools; a ‘Quickstart’ menu that each employee can personalise to provide direct access to the web pages that are most important to them. The menu slides away when not in use.

The bottom-up approach to intranet design enabled Allianz to produce a cost effective business solution with an emphasis on internal communication.

The design principles underpinning the Allianz intranet have also been successfully transferred to the company’s external web channels including its business-to-business Partner Portals for business partner insurance transactions and Sunrise Exchange Allianz products (electronic quote-and-bind facilities for insurance brokers).

“Business partner and insurance broker feedback tells us that our systems are intuitive, easy to learn and equipped with good quick-find tools,” said Nicholas Scofield, Allianz Australia’s General Manager for Corporate Affairs.

“Ensuring more than 3000 employees dispersed throughout Australia and New Zealand receive a consistent corporate message could be tough,” said usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group.

“Designers at Allianz Australia Insurance, however, tackled the problem by making their intranet the vehicle of choice for corporate communications and strategy, and employing clear design and writing.”

About Allianz Australia

Allianz Australia is one of the largest general insurers in Australia and a leading private workers’ compensation and third party motor accident insurer. Allianz Australia has approximately 3200 staff and operates in Australia and New Zealand. The company delivers a wide range of personal, commercial and corporate insurance products and services and are proud to be of service to over 2 million policyholders. Allianz Australia is a wholly owned subsidiary of the worldwide Allianz Group, which operates in over 70 countries and services around 60 million customers globally.

About Nielsen Norman Group

Nielsen Norman Group is a user-experience research firm that advises companies on how to succeed through the human-centered design of products and services. Nielsen Norman Group principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini are each world-renowned experts in usability and human use of technology. Besides authoring books and evangelizing about user experience, they and the other user-experience specialists at Nielsen Norman Group offer high-level strategic consultation on usability of websites, consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be easy-to-use.

Some background

For the last couple of years, most web developers of note have been producing sites using ‘web standards’. We won’t go into detail here – you can find out all about web standards in our very first issue of ‘brief’ (If you don’t know much about what building for web standards means we strongly encourage you to look at that article and, if you’re really keen, head on over to Web Standards Project as well.)

In a perfect world we would be able to use pure, standard mark-up to create sites and all modern browsers would display the site as intended. Whilst we’re edging in that direction we’re not there yet. The increasingly popular Firefox browser is much closer to the agreed standards and IE6 was a big improvement on its predecessors but there are some common workarounds that are used to get sites to display well in IE6. Developers call these workarounds ‘hacks’ and though they’ve been the cause of some angst they have provided a solution for building standards compliant sites that display well in IE6.

The issue

It looks as though Microsoft have seen the light and taken greater strides towards standards compliance in IE7. Fundamentally this is a good thing of course. It means that we can look forward to more standards and less hacking – which means less development time and costs. But, in doing so, many of the hacks we have all been using may now cause the pages to display incorrectly in IE7.

Basically, browsers are supposed to ignore rules that they don’t recognise. It’s this behaviour that has been exploited to workaround some issues within IE6. When IE7 is released it looks as though it might start displaying some of these previously hidden elements and a degree of visual chaos may ensue. It may be that some remedial work will be required. We will continue to keep an eye on the IE7 news and assess the impact for our clients nearer the release date. If you’re a webqem client and your site will be affected we’ll let you know.

Without getting too deep, that’s it in a nutshell. For those of a more technical nature, you can find more information on the problem in this Community MX article.

Further information can also be found on this Microsoft Developers Blog.

Few organisations are untouched by the imperative to do business across geographies. The faster and more effectively you can communicate across distances, the more successful your organisation will be – whether your goal is to reach more prospects, sell online, brief your team, deliver courses, or ensure compliance. Macromedia Breeze is elevating online training and web conferencing to a whole new level by delivering high-impact communications that everyone can access instantly through any web browser. Breeze provides real-time and on-demand communications that let you reach your audience anytime, anywhere, with rich multimedia content that delivers your message effectively and affordably.

MEET.

Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime

Meet instantly with anyone to share presentations, applications, and engaging multimedia content, such as video and simulations. Breeze meeting rooms can be customised to support the kind of meeting you’re holding – whether it’s a collaborative session with colleagues or an elearning lecture. What’s more, Breeze meeting room configurations and all content are automatically
saved and always available for reuse, dramatically reducing preparation time for recurring seminars, sales demonstrations, or online classes. Meetings can be easily recorded for later reference.

Breeze provides full support for conducting large online seminars, enabling you to easily get your message out to a wide audience without the costs and logistical problems of in-person events.

PRESENT.

Personalise, Analyse, and Update

Make your presentations stand out. With Breeze, you can personalise Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with voice-over narration and add video, animations, and simulations. Breeze converts your presentations to the Macromedia Flash format and publishes them online for your audience to view at their convenience. Breeze reports let you analyse the success of your presentations by providing viewer statistics for each slide, so you can easily tell what’s working and what’s not, and update your presentations as needed. Breeze presentations are automatically stored in the fully searchable Breeze content library, allowing you to improve productivity by enabling all content creators to find, retrieve, and repurpose content across the organisation.

TRAIN.

Rapid and Effective elearning

Training has never been easier or faster. Breeze lets subject-matter experts use PowerPoint to create narrated multimedia training modules. With Breeze, it’s easy to add a variety of quizzes, from multiple-choice to fill-in-the-blank, and results can be tracked using a convenient reports dashboard. Because Breeze enables content creation at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional elearning methods, the load on scarce training resources is reduced. Breeze also provides complete curriculum management, including the ability to require live seminars, as well as self-paced courses, within a single curriculum. Finally, Breeze content complies with AICC and SCORM standards, enabling straightforward integration with existing learning management systems.

CUSTOMISE.

Flexible Branding and Integration

Breeze is designed to easily adapt and expand to suit the needs of your organisation. Extensive branding functionality allows your organisation to incorporate your brand, including colour scheme and logo, throughout the Breeze experience. The Breeze architecture supports flexible integration with enterprise systems. For example, Breeze Directory Services enables out-of-the-box integration with existing user management systems. Breeze provides APIs and SDKs to support integration with existing applications through web services. Breeze also supports third-party audio conferencing integration, so you can use audio conferencing provided by an existing Breeze partner or by a provider of your choice.

Communicate with ease

Macromedia Breeze is a rich web communication system that lets you instantly reach your audience. Breeze online meetings, self-paced training courses, and on-demand presentations are delivered using Macromedia Flash Player, which is already installed on more than 98 percent of browsers worldwide, so your audience can access Breeze meetings and presentations instantly, without downloading special plug-ins.

Achieve measurable results

Achieve immediate time and cost savings through reduced travel to and from meetings, faster training, increased productivity, and more efficient and effective communications with customers, prospects, employees, students, and partners worldwide.

Here are a few examples of how your teams can start realising the benefits of Breeze today:

Elearning

• Rapidly develop training content using Microsoft PowerPoint
• Use a common curriculum to manage self-paced and live training courses
• Easily track and analyse results with Breeze dashboards
• Integrate with existing learning management systems

Sales and Channel Training

• Accelerate training for new reps and partners
• Provide updates on new products and pricing
• Train more frequently through online seminars

Marketing

• Reach large, distributed audiences instantly
• Increase direct marketing responses with high-impact multimedia presentations
• Efficiently manage and track large online events

Sales

• Quickly qualify prospects through online demos
• Shorten sales cycles by using frequent live online meetings
• Deliver customised capability presentations and proposals, complete with voice-overs

Human Resources

• Conduct employee orientation sessions
• Share policies instantly with worldwide staff
• Distribute employee compliance programs

Education

• Develop course content and academic programs online
• Host online meetings, classes, or virtual office hours
• Rapidly deliver professional development training to educators and staff

Government

• Rapidly train your workforce or your emergency first aid teams
• Collaborate instantly across programs and agencies
• Deliver web-based briefings in a secure, ultra-lightweight footprint

Cross-team Collaboration

• Share plans and schedules with team members worldwide through on demand presentations
• Meet online to review and edit specifications, marketing materials, or budget proposals

For more information about Breeze 5, or to arrange
a free 15 day trial, contact Larry Adler .

Why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Matters

Guy Wayland