Bernard Herenmode
The Bernard Herenmode site has paid a lot of attention to accessibility, which is a rare thing amongst commercial sites. Pages are well structured with sensible use of headings and lists where appropriate. Links within content have been made clearly visible, although slightly overused. Text resizes without breaking layout for the most part — logo goes wandering a little. Page titles and meta data are specific to each page and a favicon helps for all those tabbed browser users. With 13 tabs open, yes, favicons help!
It is a strange layout which actually gets better as you scroll down if you are on 1024 x 768 monitor. This is a shame as the initial impact is lost and without a logo appearing above the fold it appears a little headless and possibly disorienting.
Overall the markup behind the site is very good with the “MERKENOVERZICHT” section standing out as a having paid a lot of attention to both mouse and non-mouse users. However list markup for navigation menu on left is not quite right, as sub-section pages should be nested which would assist screen reader users in understanding the site structure. “View sourcers” might be disappointed by some usage of non-breaking spaces instead of Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) to space out elements. It’s not, however, something users will ever notice, but it can be a minor headache when it comes to re-styling.
There is good visitor support with a custom error page offering a link to a site map, however there’s no style sheet for handhelds and Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 5 does suffer with large blank spaces. The tab order wasn’t too intuitive. It would be better if the the use of tabindex in the markup was dropped and the “skip to content” link was replaced by a “jump to navigation” link as the left hand menu actually comes last in the source order.
The Bernard Herenmode website was crafted by Maurice Engels and following review was deemed eligible for an Award Level of: “Notable Universal Design.” Congratulations Maurice!
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: January 17th, 2008 at 7:09 pm →
Congratz Maurice.
Maurice Engels responds:
Posted: January 17th, 2008 at 8:08 pm →
Team Access,
Thanks for the award! Me and my client are very prood of it! In the weeks to come I’ll take all your comments in consideration and try to improve were possible.
Thanks again and keep up the good work. Accessibility is a must, even for commercial sites.
Jermayn Parker responds:
Posted: January 17th, 2008 at 9:38 pm →
I actually quite like this design, something different and effective!
Well done!
David Zemens - 1955 Design responds:
Posted: January 18th, 2008 at 4:42 pm →
Very nice work, Maurice. The design is simple, clean yet unusual at the same time. Not easy to achieve!
Craig Francis responds:
Posted: January 20th, 2008 at 6:43 am →
Well done Maurice, it is a very nice site, and the focus styles for the links are impressive.
Just one quick point, that might help you with re-styling in the future… try to keep to using the correct case with headings/navigation, and then use the CSS “text-transform” property to change it to upper-case… that way, if the design changes in the future, without upper-case, you won’t have as much text editing to do.
Oh, and well done with getting the source so clean - I am under the impression this is quite difficult with some ASP sites.
Shane Holland responds:
Posted: January 28th, 2008 at 11:44 am →
Nice work Maurice. I’m not too sure I like the font style on the website, but I do like the design. The pictures are taking a little while for them to load for some reason on this machine. Not like 10 seconds or anything, but slower than the average page (and your pages really aren’t image heavy!).
Good attention to underlying detail…overall, nice work!
Maurice Engels responds:
Posted: February 6th, 2008 at 7:49 pm →
Thanks everybody for commenting. About the design I can only say that finding something attractive or appealing is always a personal interpretation. This design was chosen from a series of design proposals by my client and was the best fit to the actual store and existing company identity / brand name. Thanks again and hopefully there will be some more work up for judging by accessites.org in the future.