Although there are a number of factors that make a successful website, we believe that the most important factor is that users can access a website that they can use. While design considerations can obviously have a strong effect on a visitors impression of a website (and by extension, of their impression of a brand or company as a whole), we believe that the worst impression that can be given is by a website that simply doesn’t work.

If a website assumes that the user has particular technologies (such as Flash or Javascript) installed or enabled, it can easily appear to be broken if those technologies aren’t present. If a website assumes that the user has a mouse, it can be either frustrating or impossible to use the site with other methods of navigation (such as a keyboard, or the directional pad on a web-enabled mobile phone.) Although screenreaders and other technologies exist to read out the text of a website, if a website assumes that the user can see and uses images in place of text (ie. using pictures of text for navigation menus), then it can become very difficult, if not impossible to use for a blind or partially sighted visitor.

An example of a particularly valuable visitor to a website that should always be catered for is a search engine "bot" or "crawler"; these are programs which read and index websites for search engines like Google, so that they can send users searching for relevant information to your website. Much like a visitor using a screen reader, a search bot cannot see images or videos, or hear sound effects. If a search bot is unable to understand a website (for example if it relies on particular programs to access the information, or if it relies on images or sounds without having a suitable fallback in place), then it will become much less likely that visitors will be sent to that website by search engine traffic.

Our websites are all designed with accessibility in mind from the very beginning. We believe in the principles of graceful degradation, meaning that if we add features that use technologies such as Javascript, we start off by ensuring that the website functions without it. Javascript functions are then included as an additional layer, with the goal that the website visitor is unaware that they are missing anything.

As people viewing websites have seen their bandwidth and effective data costs decrease, this has led to more freedom for website designers and developers as speed and cost issues become less important to those end users. As a result, the need for websites to be well structured and efficiently coded would appear to be becoming less of an important issue.

However, this doesn't reflect the whole of the picture. For example, there are geographical areas where broadband internet access is not yet available. If a web designer has made the assumption that their site is only being viewed by people with a high speed connection, they may become reliant on large image or video files, and as a result will no longer be of any practical use to someone using a slower connection.

Another example would be mobile internet users, such as those using mobile phones, PDAs or laptops, where as well as the issue of limited bandwidth and longer loading times, there are also cost factors as users are usually charged by the amount of information they download. While this may not prevent users from viewing a site, they may find that waiting to download a flashy animated page of branding and advertisements at their own expense is more annoying than not seeing the page at all.

Of course, keeping bandwidth low doesn't just benefit the audience- it also keeps the cost of running a website down. While access to the web is often unmetered, the costs of providing the websites remain. For a large website with lots of regular users, even removing a few unnecessary lines of code can add up into a considerable saving in bandwidth, and therefore a significant amount of money.

These are just a few examples of where the efficient design of a website is still a very important issue for the site's audience, and how the form of a site can interfere with it's function. We hope this helps you to understand our goal.