Mixing Business with Personal?

[MKJ]

Ok am developing my site along 'business lines'. Tis developing slowly but I sure miss the personal touch. Can you mix both? I don't really want to start a new site. Are people put off when they can see personal links when infact they are looking for business info? Or vice versa come to that. I want to put my music back on along with chat etc. Just not sure it will work alongside the business stuff though. Any thoughts?

 

[Shovel]

Depends entire upon the content of the business site. You can't tack a completely unrelated blog onto a business site, if you want a personal site then you need to make a new one separately. But if you are going to write personal content related to your business site, then a partnership could work.

Consider Flickr and the associated Flickr Blog. It's the single greatest social-web application out there right now. The former is very focused on the Flickr service, and whilst Flickr happens to have a lot of personality to it, it doesn't feature and staff opinions. The blog on the other hand is _about_ Flickr, written by the developers. They write personal entries about cool photos they've seen on Flickr or things which are coming soon to the service.

Now, if you were to keep a blog containing software reviews, comments on neat tools and utilities you've found, plus upcoming site features and so forth then it might well work. However, if you actually want to write about which films you've been to see, CDs you've bought and suchlike, you should definitely do it as something completely separate as people who visit your site for software links won't be interested and it would impact on the perceived professionalism of your business.

 

[MKJ]

Yeah. You spot on there. Am tempted to put personal stuff on but it just doesn't feel right. I just going to keep putting content on my site a little bit at a time each day. Just joined the Shareware association so need to look into that a great deal yet. Could mean I will have a great deal of software on my site soon - far more than I already have.

What you think of my site now? It has some innovative additions to it now like the use of menus in the UK Shopping and Software (menus of my own creation) - along with a sliding side menu for 'popular links'. Infact the 'UK Shopping' and 'Software' is a link program I was using embedded in the Joomla theme. Just take a look at the source to see when on those pages. I took a snapshot of Joomla with the wrapper displayed then removed the code for it and replaced it with my links script. Very easy to do if you have done it a number of times before. Means the link script appears to be a part of Joomla but isn't at all. Posted this stuff on Joomla's forum but I don't think anyone can follow my instructions . Tis pretty radical for sure. Being radical is rubbish though. Just need to know if I on the right road. Had to make these alterations as the auto-adjustable wrapper that Joomla uses wouldn't work with Opera whereas my solution does perfectly and is search engine crawlable. Anyways your opinion would be welcome .

Me site if you don't know by now

 

[Shovel]

I find the sliding side menu really rather offputting. You'd be better off using CSS fixed positioning for that, then at least it wouldn't bob around so much. You can then alter the script to only run on Internet Explorer 6 or less (IE7 will support position:fixed).

It also suffers from the same accessibility problems we discussed regarding dropdown/flyout menu systems. Because you've implemented it with pure script, it's impossible to activate the menu using the keyboard thus anyone with a motor deficiency (or anyone who doesn't like using the mouse on any particular day) wont ever be able to access that menu.

When you make the menu appear and hover over a menu item, even though the background colour of the item changes, you only activate the link when you click on the text. This is confusing for users. Either the whole bar highlights and clicking the whole bar activates the link, or you make it clear that you have to click on the text by not highlighting it on hover.

To finish off on keyboard navigation, you're tabindex="" is completely screwed. For some reason when tabbing through links I get taken through the horizontal navigation from right-to-left, where left-to-right would be expected and I then have to to tab through the entire left hand navigation before being able to access the content.

Ideally you should have your HTML in a logical order, so that the content comes before the long navigation in the source. However, since you're misusing data-tables for layout you can't do much about that until you change your template over to pure CSS. The only stop-gap solution is that you need to set the tabindex="" attribute properly on your major page regions.

Oh, and viewing the page without stylesheets switched on reveals your huge spamorama of keyword text below the footer. You need to be aware that trying to cheat Google like that is in breach of their terms of service and will get you blacklisted.
Furthermore, it's also completely against the ettiquette of web development and having discovered it, I'm not all that happy about helping you with that site if that's the practice you're really intending to partake in. Googlerank is not a game.

Whatever, I'll leave the above advice in all the same since others may also find it useful. I'm disappointed though.

 

[MKJ]

Taken out the stuff on the bottom of the site. Thought it was a good idea .

How many people ever use the keyboard to navigate? I know I have to make the site useable for various operating systems but for keyboard only users as well? Might be asking a bit too much of me I reckon. I mean if someone is disabled then they still use point and click with various different gadgets to suit them which replaces the mouse. The number of people that attempt to navigate using the keyboard only must be something like one in a million . Never really heard anyone wanting to do so before.

Good comments though as usual and I have taken all onboard. Tis all a learning process after all.

Cheers.

 

[Shovel]

Taken out the stuff on the bottom of the site. Thought it was a good idea

Hopefully it's clear how much of a bad idea that is.

I mean if someone is disabled then they still use point and click with various different gadgets to suit them which replaces the mouse.

That's disturbingly incorrect, and still discrimanatory. There are features in Windows for controlling the mouse with the keyboard, but that doesn't magically fix everything for all disabilities. I'd suggest you do some actual research into the alternative ways of browsing the web: voice browsers, text only browsers, alternatively devices etc.

Ultimately, sensible content ordering and tab-index is best-practice in web design. You do it partly because it's the right thing to do out of principal (no-one should be excluded from using the net, I don't care outnumbered they are by those of us fortunatel enough not to be disabled). You also do it because new technology for browsing the web is going to happen. Think of 'tabbing' through links and form fields just in terms of navigation, it doesn't matter why the person is doing it. The order which you tab through the content of your website reflects how much sense your website makes on lots of other systems.

For example, consider rendering on a mobile phone: If you have to tab through the entire left navigation before reaching the page content, you're going to have to scroll through all of that on a small screen device, or you're going to have to have the whole bloody thing read out to you by a screen-reader utility before you get the part of the page you're interested in.

In that situation what you're tabbing through is actually just reflecting the content order of your site. If you alter the tabindex of elements then you'll find that change doesn't change the content order (content order is a separate issue, really)

The number of people that attempt to navigate using the keyboard only must be something like one in a million

Don't use imaginary statistics to justify mistakes It'll only come back to bite you should you ever have real client work to do.