WordPress & Empty Searches

Posted January 9th, 2009 by Mel Pedley

WordPress’ handling of empty site search inputs is far from satisfactory. Because the search form references the overall site address, submission of an empty search causes the site’s home page to be displayed. No error report. Nothing to indicate what has happened. Nada. Zilch. Nothing!

The solution, however, is blindingly simple and merely involves a few, fairly simple, changes to three WordPress theme files.

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Raspberry Frog

Posted December 8th, 2008 by Marco Battilana

Visit the Raspberry Frog site The Raspberry Frog site has a very contemporary, well structured design that compliments both the branding direction as well as the favorable user experience. The brand of the site focuses on the “raspberry” theme quite effectively with the consistent use of the color in it’s imagery, graphics, and text throughout. As well, the overall visual structure of the site makes it simple for the user to absorb the content effectively. This is done by the choice of the graphics used to create the content’s containers, mainly with the secondary content on the left side. As an added bonus, not many sites have their secondary content to the left of the main content. With the visual structure, it works quite well.

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WordPress and Accessibility

Posted November 17th, 2008 by Mike Cherim

Many sites are built using WordPress (WP) as the content management system (CMS). Not just blogs but full-blown ecommerce sites and others. The power and flexibility of WP is evident by these implementations. And speaking of implementations, it was used as the CMS for a site recently built as a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 implementation, to the level of AAA (one of two in the world with the other being Vision Australia). To learn more about that, here’s a short summary of the experience. This article is about WordPress’s end of things.

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Wrangling Widgets

Posted August 8th, 2008 by Mel Pedley

Sooner or later, you’re bound to come across an article, or blog entry, that talks about text size widgets. What exactly are these widgets and are they of any real use? A text-size widget is a link, input or user control that allows users to view the site via an alternative style sheet with a larger, or smaller, relative font. The widget itself may be a short piece of text such as “Large Text” or it could be a small icon. Some sites offer a whole range of small, medium and large ‘A’ icons that change the text size. But, at the end of the day, it has to be said that this kind of accessibility option does replicate functionality that is probably best accomplished through the user’s own browser. So do these widgets offer any practical user support?

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