Website Organization and Accessibility

While growing up, your Mother or Father might have told you a few dozen times to clean your room. Of course at your young and tender ages, you saw this as being just about as important as cleaning behind your ears. It did not serve you any purpose at all. The times have changed though, and especially in web hosting organization can be your best friend. Organization also goes hand in hand with accessibility as well. So put on the rubber gloves, grab an old rag and lets get to work.

Make sure you keep everything in it's own place. Nothing is more stressful than looking for an image in a FTP folder filled with web pages. There are no rules, find the folder structure that fits you best. Your images go in the "images" folder. Your archived entries go in the "archive" folder. It's just that simple.

Now your folders are organized and you know where to find what. The next step would be to start looking at your web page HTML code next. In the spirit of accessibility, you have to remember that some blind or impaired users use screen readers or other tools to help them figure out what is on the screen. You should label each of your images with an "ALT" tag, so that even if the image isn't shown, the person knows what is there. Also, you should use the "height" and "width" tags so the browser can go ahead and draw the space the image takes.

Keep your code consistent and organized. It's important to be able to understand your code, so that you can make quick changes when you need to. After a few minutes or searching, lines after lines of code all slowly begins to look the same. Spacing things out and putting them in their own groups can save you a lot of time.

Make sure that you keep the same style or look to each of the pages on your site. As an example, if your entire site is black and white, throwing in a neon blue page with green text might look a little out of place. Also use headers and titles on each page. This will quickly help identify what the page is about.

Your navigation also plays a key roll in your page organization. Make sure that your navigation is easy to read, easy to read, and easy to understand. Hiding your navigational links make it hard for people to figure out where to go next.

There's no reason to try to keep up with the latest and greatest tricks in web design, because in doing so you're cutting out a lot of your visitors. Be careful while using tables, and use them because you need to, not because of style. Un-logical locations can make things harder to figure out if somebody is using a text browser or have a disability.

If you feel like you have to use frames with your site, be sure to provide a "NOFRAMES" tag that will give your visitors who ca not use frames an alternative way of navigating your site. These are only a few ways to keep your site organized and accessible, but should be a good start. So what are you waiting for? It's time to get to work!

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