Everyone wants to make a great website, and as mentioned in my previous article, a good start is to ensure aesthetic design and user research are intimately related.

When you choose an apple from a pile, what do you look for? You’ll find a lot of reasons are aesthetic – whether it’s shiny, it’s colour, it’s shape… How we choose what to buy is a key question that should be asked when designing an ecommerce website. While we all like to think we all make rational decisions, considering the functional nature of products, aesthetics clearly influences people and their choices.

More and more mobile phones users are browsing and searching the Internet on their handsets. The UK, for example, has neared saturation for mobile phones and many handset browsers can now handle sites designed for viewing on computers. Indeed 20% of UK mobile phone users now use the Internet on their mobile devices (source: 3G.co.uk1).

Web developers attempting to build accessible websites often make the same mistakes time and time again. Although they’re trying their hardest sometimes their overzealousness gets in the way and actually hinders the accessibility of their websites.