Archive for the ‘Accessibilty’ Tag

Company Net Website on Top SharePoint

Posted September 16, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, Company News, SharePoint, sharepoint internet | Tags: , , , , ,
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We are very pleased that our new website was accepted onto the Top SharePoint list today.

Top SharePoint for Company Net Website

Top SharePoint for Company Net Website

We have extended our approach to ensure AA accessibility and ensure a high degree of xHTML compliance whilst making sure that site performance is maximised. We are practicing what we preach and showcasing what is very achievable for SharePoint Internet sites. We have received great design input from our partners Red Dress Creative and Shaw Marketing and Design and combined their initiatives into our own final design for the site.

We are actively looking for many more SharePoint Website projects and believe that if you currently use SharePoint for your internal portal that there are significant benefits to be achieved by also puting your website on this platform.

These benefits include:

  • Simplified content management requiring no coding experience
  • Business users own and manage their content from end to end
  • Single interface for managing intranet and extranet, reducing training requirement for staff
  • Familiar Microsoft Office interface
  • No reliance on third party suppliers to maintain company website
  • Improved customer interaction through SharePoint discussion forum and blog capabilities

If you are a Microsoft Gold Partner then we are offering knowledge and skills transfer whilst building or migrating your own site to SharePoint. You can see more details here on the Partner Channel Builder Portal  

SharePoint – Affordable AA Compliance for your Internet Site

Posted August 26, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, SharePoint 2007 | Tags: , , , ,
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Here are a few insights from Steven Gardner our Senior Technical Architect on the solution for achieving AA Compliance when using SharePoint for your website.

To start with a little bit about compliance:

Standards compliance is the adherence of a websites HTML and CSS markup to W3C standards.  Over the past couple of years making websites standards compliant has become a major driver in the development of public facing websites, why? In the not too distant past, few websites were developed to any form of standard but instead targeted a particular browser as their preferred display medium.  Targeting a particular browser had the effect that when a user viewed a website with a different browser, then at best the user suffered a less than optimal browsing experience but in the worst cases were completely unable to view the website.  As browser market share has become more distributed, from a business perspective, denying potential customer’s access to your website just because of the browser they use is simply throwing sales away!

The Problem

For web standards compliance, there are a number of fundamental issues which have to be addressed:

  •  Lack of DOCTYPE
  • Invalid HTML markup
  • Table based layouts
  • HTML containing custom attributes
  • Over reliance on JavaScript for basic functions
  • Use of inline CSS styles

The Solution

In partnership with Microsoft, HiSoftware developed the Accessibility Toolkit for SharePoint 2.0 (AKS).  The toolkit offers a number of new features to help meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints (WCAG 1.0 AA) and the newest WCAG 2.0 AA Candidate Recommendation while significantly reducing the time, knowledge and effort required to implement such a website.

Along with developing the AKS, HiSoftware have also developed a direct replacement for the default text editor within SharePoint called Accessible Rich Text Editor(aRTE).  aRTE allows a user to edit content in a Word like editor but crucially ensuring that the output is XHTML compliant and accessible.

Steven’s White Paper on the full topic is available for download below:

Compliance White Paper 

Project Scotland was the Top SharePoint Internet Site in the UK (for a while)

Posted August 16, 2009
Filed under: Company Net, SharePoint, SharePoint 2007 | Tags: , , , , , , ,
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We were happy that our site built for Project Scotland rose up to top spot for a couple of weeks.

In the meantime we have been finalising our own site on MOSS 2007

Here is a quick preview:

Company Net Website

Company Net Website

Other than good design our focus has also been on AA  accessibility and xHTML compliance using HiSoftware tools and achieving excellent optimisation resulting in a nice reduction in overall footprint.

Answering the question that SharePoint has a large footprint

Answering the question that SharePoint has a large footprint

We will shortly be issuing a White paper to share the approach to Accessibility and Optimisation which we believe are fundamental to seeing SharePoint websites continue to flourish.