Orion House Bed and Breakfast
Compared to many other bed and breakfast (B&B) websites that we’ve seen, the Orion House Bed and Breakfast site is outstanding. We’re convinced that the online search for holiday accommodation would be a much pleasanter experience if other B&B sites attained this site’s standard and demonstrated its commitment to help and support visitors.
The information in the site’s privacy policy, for example, is extensive. How many other sites would go as far to tell you how to remove their cookies! The site’s accessibility page also offered solid visitor support without overwhelming its intended audience with technical details. Under the hood, the overall page structure and markup is good which means that the site performs well with CSS disabled, images turned off or both.
There are, however, some flaws. The heading structure isn’t always quite logical and some potentially important information is almost hidden. A page outlining things to do in Port Isaac page is right down in the footer alongside the B&B’s phone number. The latter, especially, deserves a far higher profile whilst a site map might make some pages far easier to find. The site also lacks a print stylesheet yet offers a lo-graphic alternative stylesheet that could easily serve that purpose.
We also like links within a page to look like links. To us, that means underlining links that are outside the site’s navigation menus and removing the underline in the hover/focus/active states. Navigating the site by keyboard isn’t as easy as it could be, either. The link focus change is far too low-key to benefit sighted keyboard navigators who will need to consciously scan the screen looking for the underline change. Meanwhile, the site’s (admirably visible) skip links don’t function effectively in Internet Explorer 7.
Our biggest peeve, though, is that tabindex is being used to counteract the design’s reversal of the horizontal navigation links. We freely admit that we’re not great fans of tabindex under normal circumstances — preferring a logical and natural tab order via a page’s markup — but, in this particular instance, we feel that the attribute is being used to support a design approach that, ideally, needs re-thinking rather than patching.
Visually, the site’s design makes the most of clear, simple lines and strong colors yet still retains its own distinct personality.
The Orion House Bed and Breakfast site was designed by Steven Wallbank and, following review, was deemed eligible for an Award Level of: “Notable Design.” Congratulations, Steven!
Steven Wallbank responds:
Posted: May 23rd, 2009 at 7:17 pm →
Thanks for your kind words Mel - I am over the moon to have been given this award by Accessites. I have taken on board some of the things you pointed out and made amendments - the two h4’s on the “Directions” page have been corrected as has the jump from h1 to h3 on the “Static Map” page. I have also implemented your suggestion of underlining non-navigational links and removing the underline when the links are focused upon.
I must take issue with you on one point, however. The skip links seem to work fine with IE7 - at least on the two pc’s that I tested them on anyway. Now if you mean IE6…
May I just take this opportunity to thank my dad, Claire (my sister) and my friend Mel for providing valuable feedback on the mobile version of this site. Oh, and of course I’d like to thank you Mel for your kind words and encouragement prior to the release of this review.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: May 23rd, 2009 at 8:50 pm →
Nice looking site… congratz, Steven.
Keith Bell responds:
Posted: May 24th, 2009 at 12:29 pm →
Congratulations to Steven; I agree it’s rare to see such effort being spent on a B & B web site. I couldn’t add anything of value to what Mel has already said. Nice work.
Mel Pedley responds:
Posted: May 24th, 2009 at 1:40 pm →
I did re-test the site in IE7 as I was writing the final review and still couldn’t get the skip links to work when using TAB to move around the site. The day after I wrote the review, I upgraded this machine to IE8, so I’m not able to carry out a 3rd re-test using a full version of IE7 very easily. If there’s any more evidence of the skip links working in IE7 on other machines, I’ll happily amend the comment to “skip links don’t appear function effectively in some installations of Internet Explorer 7″.
Frédéric Hewitt responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2009 at 8:57 am →
About the skip links under IE7 and tab navigation : the page scroll well, but the tab navigation is reset. That break the concept of the skip link.
But I don’t know if it’s a IE7 specific bug or a problem in the page.
Steven Wallbank responds:
Posted: May 25th, 2009 at 7:48 pm →
Thanks Frederic, I’ve taken a look and I see what you mean. It may be an IE7 specific issue. If, for example, you use the skip link for “help” on the Accessites home page, and then press tab, it resets to the menu in IE7 rather than tabbing down the help list as it does in FF. I also looked at Phil Smears’ site, and the skip to content link there also resets to the left-hand menu when you next hit the tab key. This also does not happen in FF.
Delving deeper, I found that Karl Dawson’s skip to content link appears not to work in either FF or IE7, while Joe Dolson’s skip to navigation link is broken in IE7, skipping to content instead.
Press Mel Pedley’s “jump to footer” link in IE7, then hit tab and rather than tabbing through the links in the footer, up pops the “skip navigation” link.
Sorry to single you out, Phil, Karl, Joe and Mel, but it appears that I’m not the only one with a skip-link / IE7 problem… :-*
Incidentally, Mike Cherim’s skip links to content, navigation and footer all behaved properly in both IE7 and FF, so the thing to do I suppose is examine what he’s doing differently and copy that.
In the meantime, how’s about removing the
“the site’s (admirably visible) skip links don’t function effectively in Internet Explorer 7″
comment seeing as Mike Cherim is the only person on god’s earth whose skip links do function effectively in IE7…?
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: May 29th, 2009 at 2:16 pm →
Mel is on vacation this week which is why she hasn’t replied. Just wanted to make you aware of that. As far as skip links not working properly in IE7 I’m guessing it’s probably due to a lack of “haslayout.” Say, for instance, you’re jumping to a link with no CSS properties capable of giving it “haslayout” — things such as dimensions, width, height, or zoom, and others can provide this. So, if jumping to a link in IE that has no “haslayout,” the user will reset to the top of the page when they click tab again. If this is a new term, this page from the MS Developer’s Network should help. These experimental test pages I made a long time ago might offer info as well. Maybe.
Mel Pedley responds:
Posted: June 2nd, 2009 at 4:55 am →
Steven was right, I’d managed to remove the footer’s hasLayout fix in one of my conditional style sheets on my site during a recent site tweaking session. So I’m grateful for the heads-up but that still doesn’t explain why the Orion site’s jump links didn’t/don’t function effectively in some IE7 installations.
On a slight tangent, I noticed that IE8 still seems to have the same hasLayout issues as its predecessors — which is a great pity. I was really hoping that this would have been fixed by now.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: June 2nd, 2009 at 6:01 pm →
I haven’t tried IE 8, Mel, but do you know about some of the other weaknesses, like
abbrelement support and focus styling control for the various form elements? I suppose those are like hasLayout, but one can hope.Mel Pedley responds:
Posted: June 3rd, 2009 at 5:01 am →
abbrsupport appears to be the same as IE7 (which didn’t have any problems here that I’m aware of).legendandfieldsetrendering is still dodgy (which is one of my bugbears). However, I’ve just run some quick tests and we have form control focus!I’ve only been running IE8 for a few weeks and haven’t had a chance to put it through the full “new design/much swearing” routine yet but initial impressions are that it’s a distinct improvement. I’ve noticed a far closer correlation between Firefox 3 and IE8 on random sites. I’m hoping to test all of my own WordPress themes shortly, so if I spot anything else significant during that process, I’ll try to write it up.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: June 6th, 2009 at 8:16 am →
Thanks.