Each of you has chosen a different theme so some of what is said here may operate slightly different for you than it does for your friends.

So much of what we have looked at so far as related to content and what your site has to say.  We’ve looked into the look and feel of your site but now it is time to get into the functionality.

By functionality we mean things that your site does rather than things that your site says.  An example of functionality is the search facility that every website should offer.  When I mark your major site I expect to see a search bar front and centre is one of the functional options available to your visitors.

The ability to search is built into WordPress in the form of a widget.  Widgets are accessible in your appearance tab on the administrative dashboard.  A basic set of widgets come with the basic themes you installed when you installed WordPress.

In the twentyseventeen theme that I use the sidebar only appears when you are looking at posts.  They appear on the right-hand side of the page. Widgets can also be placed in the footer area (my theme has a left and right foot area-essentially giving me to areas in which to place widgets in the footer) but most of the use occurs when the widgets are placed next to the text of an article.

If you wish to do something more specialised you have the option of searching WordPress for a Plug-In.  Some excellent plug-ins are listed in this article. Plug-ins will almost always add widgets to the collection you have available in your administrative dashboard.  Sometimes they will also include pages that you can simply add to your menus.  This is the case with online shopping carts such as Woo commerce.

It’s quite important that you read the documentation that comes with plug-ins and widgets.  Sometimes you will need to include square brackets around particular words to insert the content of your plug-in into a page or post.  This is particularly common with gallery type plug-ins.

You will always find lots of functional goodies in your plug-ins tab in the dashboard after installing plug-ins.  Please look at WordPress.org to search for plug-ins that interest you.  It is quite important that you read the reviews on the plug-ins and see how many have been installed to try to choose effective plug-ins.

Also be aware that many free plug-ins are somewhat crippled and encourage you to pay extra to get the full-blown “professional” version to unlock particular features.  You will not need to do that for this course.  Simple functionality will do, but you absolutely need to show that you have considered the needs of your users in your design and tried to cater to those needs through both your content and your functionality (plug-ins).

There are also some good plugins listed at https://www.wpexplorer.com/best-wordpress-widget-plugins/

So by now you should have realised but the core of plug-ins and widgets involves functionality.  These are things that your site does rather than what your site is.  You have a widget to sort your latest posts in reverse chronological order available to you.  There is the search bar widget that was mentioned earlier.  There are widgets to insert galleries into postal pages.  There are widgets to allow feedback on your posts and pages in the form of comments.  There are contact form widgets which will allow a website to email the site owner.

This is just the tip of the iceberg where the amount of functionality that has been preprogrammed for you is concerned.  Please don’t jump in the deep end and install first widget that catches your eye though.  Be sure to read the documentation and look at examples of that widget in action through preview pages (like what you would do with the theme) before investing your time and effort that widget on your own site.

Things to do now.

1. Search WordPress.org for plug-ins that may suit your needs with your site goals.  When you see one that interests you be sure to look at previews of it and read the documentation before downloading a zip file of that plug-in.

2. Download two plug-ins that you feel will meet your needs that you researched in the previous step.

3. Install those plug-ins by using the plug-in tab in your administrative dashboard and clicking the upload button.  You need to upload the zip file of your plug-in and then activate it.

4. Search your administrative dashboard for new options that may have been installed by the plug-in.  Also check your widgets area on the appearance tab on the dashboard for any new widgets that may have been installed by your plug-in.

5. Configure your plug-ins to operate as you wish and to appear in the spots of your site that you wish.

 

The web environment is not an equal playing field for all of the individuals using it.  We all know of somebody whose eyesight is not as good as ours, or who may be a little hard of hearing like Mr Wallace!

 

What about people who have difficulty with movement or coordination?  All of these people have as much of a right to use your website as anybody else and we need to take them into consideration in our design work.

This is particularly important if you are working for a government organisation or perhaps a charity.  There may well be legal requirements for government organisations to adhere to where accessibility to web services is concerned.

So let’s look at the kinds of things that may hamper somebody’s experience using a website.

The fundamentals of accessibility have been laid out by the world wide web consortium. (w3.org). I’d like you to watch THIS VIDEO CLIP (less than 5 minutes) before continuing.

Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. More specifically, people can:

• perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web
• contribute to the Web

Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including:

• auditory
• cognitive
• neurological
• physical
• speech
• visual

Web accessibility also benefits people without disabilities, for example:

• people using mobile phones, smart watches, smart TVs, and other devices with small screens, different input modes, etc.
• older people with changing abilities due to ageing
• people with “temporary disabilities” such as a broken arm or lost glasses
• people with “situational limitations” such as in bright sunlight or in an environment where they cannot listen to audio
• people using a slow Internet connection, or who have limited or expensive bandwidth

It is essential that several different components of web development and

interaction work together in order for the web to be accessible to people with disabilities. These components include:

• content – the information in a web page or web application, including:
  • natural information such as text, images, and sounds
  • code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc.
• web browsers, media players, and other “user agents”
• assistive technology, in some cases – screen readers, alternative keyboards, switches, scanning software, etc.
• users’ knowledge, experiences, and in some cases, adaptive strategies using the web
• developers – designers, coders, authors, etc., including developers with disabilities and users who contribute content
• authoring tools – software that creates websites
• evaluation tools – web accessibility evaluation tools, HTML validators, CSS validators, etc.

Think about users who have visual and auditory impairments.  (People have trouble seeing, including colour-blind people, and those who have trouble hearing.)

These people can use assistive technologies such as text to speech facilities (for visually impaired) and speech to text for those with hearing difficulties.  In addition alternative text and captions can be used on photographs of other diagrams to help those who cannot see so well.

You’re probably saying to yourself that Wallace has rocks in his head.  How can somebody who is unable to see a photograph possibly read a caption?  I’m glad you brought that up.  This is where text-to-speech facilities come in handy.  There are a number of facilities around that can convert the written word to a voice.  Steven Hawking is one of the most famous users of such technology.

Right now I am using a similar technology that is turning my voice into text to go on to this website.  Artificial intelligence and voice recognition technologies are improving every year.

It is up to you to ensure that your web design is accessible to all people who may wish to utilise your resources.  Predominantly that means visual, hearing or motor impairment.  Assistive technologies also exist for people who have trouble using a mouse or moving their arms and fingers.  Again Steven Hawking is a prime example of this.

Don’t forget that in order to access your website people have to find it.  This might sound a bit silly but part of your design process should involve taking into consideration how to ensure that websites such as Bing and Google end up indexing your work and returning it to customers who search for the kind of thing but you are providing.

This is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.  It is a massive topic and there are plug-ins available to help with optimising your site for indexing by search engines.  At school I go to great lengths to ensure that your sites are not accidentally indexed by Google as I do not want your schoolwork archived on the Internet forever.  That is why you clicked the box at the bottom of the page when you installed WordPress that said “discourage search engines”.  There is a search engine optimisation plug-in built into your WordPress installation.  We can look at this but please do not activate it.

Categories and tags play a small role in the searchability of your own site (using its own search bar) and used to play a fairly large role in major search engine indexing as well.

What you need to do now!

1. Research the web accessibility standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium at w3.org.Write a report (minimum of 500 words) that summarises the main six disabilities that impede people’s access to websites.  You will find these at W3.org.

2. Ensure that your report indicates ways that you can design your site to take these users needs into consideration.  Also try to find any legal requirements of the been published where a government organisation or charity is obliged to include certain facilities on their website for members of the community who suffer disabilities of one kind or another.

3. Bear in mind that disabilities can be temporary and may not even be physical.  This includes when people choose to use devices with small screens such as watches or telephones to view web content, temporary disabilities such as broken arms or lost glasses, situational limitations such as bright sunlight or an environment where audio could not be heard properly or those who have a slow Internet connection or limited/expensive bandwidth such as some 4G plans.

4. Make alterations to your wesbite (start with your media library) to ensure that you (at the least) include ALT-TEXT which will appear and can be machine read when a user hovers over that media in one of your posts or pages.

It’s also important that you validate your code when you write HTML and CSS. https://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/htmlvalidation.shtml has more information on this.

You will have this post right out of the box…….

“Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!”

WELL (Let’s add to it.) Continue reading “Hello world! (and TW10 class)”

It’s almost midnight and I wanted to share something with you that I have discovered over the years (relating to web pages and music) that really bugs me.

It’s pretty simple really. I never seem to finish the things! There always seems to be something more that can be done. Something can be made prettier, or something can be expanded upon to better get the message across. Continue reading “Something that bugs me…”