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Optimalworks

The Optimalworks site immediately impressed us with its crisp visual image and sense of purpose. The visuals were big, bold and clear with a large readable font size and good use of supporting images/icons — all of which contributed to a strong design that was both bright and cheerful. Then we switched images off and, to our surprise and delight, the site still looked good! We also noted the extensive meta text — another demonstration of good attention to detail on this site from the ground up. With the odd exception, keyboard navigation was an absolute breeze, thanks to the very clear onfocus link highlighting. The site doesn’t mess about with subtle changes here or attempt to introduce unintuitive tab ordering either. The link highlighting hit us right in the eye (even on graphical links) and the tab order was exactly as expected given the visual display. All of which made navigating this site by keyboard a real no-brainer. All in all, the kind of keyboard friendly site that should be the norm — not the exception.

The site’s cross-browser performance was particularly impressive with pages rendering almost faultlessly in every browser we tried. Testing at a number of different screen sizes also hinted at a design that was elastic enough to deal with most situations.

However, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t find a number of areas where we thought the site could be improved. Ironically, it was this site’s greatest strength that we also felt was its greatest weakness — colour. The visual design, whilst very attractive, was highly dependent on colour for a lot of information: form requirements, link states, etc. For example, we weren’t happy that the blog comment form didn’t specify which fields were mandatory. Three of the 4 fields in the comment were demarcated by colour but there was no supporting information (either visually or within the markup) to explain that input fields labeled with red text were required. So, unless you were already aware that red is commonly used to highlight required fields, knew which fields WordPress required by default or happened to be psychic, this amounted to no indication at all.

Some of the colour choices and contrasts across the site were also a little too marginal in our opinion and could create problems for colour blind users. With regard to keyboard navigation, whilst it was generally good, we’d like to have seen a “skip to content” link and more “back to top” links. Overall, though, this was the best site we’ve had the opportunity to review for a long time and we believe that the award level we decided upon expresses that.

Optimalworks.net was crafted by Craig Buckler and, following review, was deemed eligible for an Award Level of: “Quality Universal Design.” Well done, Craig!

Filed under The Showcase, Quality Awards —

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