Looking over my site statistics the today I noticed a few referrals from a site called Search and Go. Having never heard of the site, I figured I’d check it out and see what was up. Well, turns out it’s a project which is still in beta development which intends to provide a comprehensive information portal including articles, news, a directory, and various other tools.
One of the key aspects for Search and Go (as one might conclude from the title) is that it’s intended to be fully accessible by mobile internet devices, and also has a featured directory section of sites tailored for mobile devices.
Looking at their code, I’m pretty happy – they are using very clean, semantically appropriate design. Since it’s still in beta, and the front page is clearly labeled as a work in progress, I’m not going to go out of my way to criticize the site’s layout, although I’d suggest making their navigational skip links a little more transparent. That is, possible to be made visible. There’s a very interesting article on the subject of skip links by Gez Lemon and Mike Cherim available at Accessites.org which is worth looking at on this subject.
As for my own site, I was thrilled to see it organized under the category Internet > Web Accessibility > Accessible Designers. The sheer novelty of the existence of this category is worth noting, since many directory sites take so little effort to consider accessibility as to lack a category for it entirely.
Good luck, Search and Go!
Joe Dolson
; May 3, 2007 at 8:16 amThanks for your comments, Vincent! I peripherally know some of the developers who have worked on the project, and certainly it’s pretty solid from what I’ve seen of it so far. Look forward to the prototype release!
Vincent
; May 3, 2007 at 8:09 amThanks, we certainly appreciate the comments, a lot of time and work is going into the build of this portal. The first real prototype release is scheduled for approx 5 weeks time when we release the home page and various other services. Thanks for pointing out about the various issues, they of course will be dealt with as they come in order and are quite pleased that this was picked up on by you.
A lot of work has gone into the directory and the unique architecture of the directory has been built by some really good exerts in the field of SEO and development and is in the process of going through a rebuild phase. So far so good, the directory has had some very good and unique submissions from good websites. It’s strict each and every person who submits is manually scrutinized to ensure the best possible resource for our audience. Were not a directory there for a backlink its there for visitors looking for quality services – to this end we have gained a lot of trust not only from search engines but webmasters and site owners.
The accessible category was a must and its our only free category, we wanted to give good accessible designers an area in our site for free to show there is a reward (albeit small) for pushing what can only be considered a very integral area of web development – accessibility.
When we started there was going to be a separate mobile section, this may now be incorporated into the main directory, following the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) guidelines that call for an existing site to eb fixed to be mobile friendly rather than build a separate mobile ready site. This makes perfect sense and takes back to the old accessibility arguments against building separate bolt-on accessible websites. The only time we would deviate from this if the main information was too much to put on a mobile phone, then we will eitehr condense it, or have a simple style sheet swap for new content.
Thanks again for the write up and much appreciated.