G Plan Upholstery
The G Plan Upholstery site immediately impressed us with its modern and seemingly effective design. It’s professional, clearly communicates, offers great visuals (even some tasteful Flash), and still manages to retain good accessibility. It’s a full site with lots of pages so we can appreciate the effort that went into making it. We were so impressed that we had difficulty in deciding on the award level — it is on the cusp of being eligible for our coveted “Classic Universal Design” award.
We did find some things we felt could have been done better without impacting the design’s beauty and effectiveness. The primary thing, the one that held the site back, was the use of the :focus pseudo element on anchors. It’s there, it’s in-use, but the styling changes aren’t significant enough for our liking. We’d prefer more pronounced style changes on a greater number of link types as this would be of great benefit to visual keyboard users — it’s an accessibility feature that we are particularly keen to promote. Had focus been attended to with more depth, this site would be a “Classic” winner. Don’t get us wrong, though, this site is a class act. The owner should be delighted, and the maker should be proud.
The G Plan Upholstery site was crafted by Craig Francis and has been granted an Award level of: “Quality Universal Design.” Congratulations Craig!
Deborah responds:
Posted: March 27th, 2007 at 12:45 pm →
Beautiful design! I really enjoyed this site.
Wonderful use of color, easy to navigate, overall a pleasure to visit. Only one small item I found, it could be my “older eyes”. I would adjust the color of the hover on navigation. The difference in color between non-hover and hover state is slight.
Mel Pedley responds:
Posted: March 27th, 2007 at 5:06 pm →
I agree completely. I found it be a very tasteful and wonderfully under-stated design that let the product take centre stage. I do hope that G Plan appreciate that they have a little gem here.
The issue you mentioned about the onhover colour mirrors the comments about onfocus changes. If anything, sighted keyboard navigators need a far more pronounced change if they are to clearly identify where they are within a page or group of links. I can appreciate that the designer wants to use changes that are relatively subtle in keeping with the under-stated nature of the whole design. However, I do think that the changes could be made a little more pronounced without impacting too severely on the overall feel of the design.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: March 27th, 2007 at 5:37 pm →
Hehe, exactly what Mel said. She beat me to it. Congratz Craig. It’s an awesome site.
Craig Francis responds:
Posted: March 28th, 2007 at 2:55 am →
Thank you very much for the kind words… and I really appreciate the work that went into grading this website.
But I should point out, the visual design came from Ruth Suddes… she is a fantastic designer who completely understands the restrictions in websites (e.g. no vertical dependence when it comes to font zooming).
As to the Flash files, that was done by Nick Livingstone… who has been my mentor for the past 2-3 years when it comes to building standards compliant and accessible websites. Without him, none of this would have been possible.