Showreels
- Flexible visual design
- Coding standards
- Independent forms
- Screen-reader benefits
Forms showreel
Designing good, solid HTML forms is a really important task. They often perform a central function to any website and getting them right takes effort. Here's a summary of how we make best-practice platform independent forms.
This presentation was designed to use Adobe Flash version 8. You may not use Flash or perhaps have an old version which may need updating.
View transcript.
Platform independent HTML forms
Spoken by English male demonstrating the anatomy of a well-constructed form.
This is Stuart Johnston from Standard Ease. I'm on the Standard Ease questionnaire page.
This is the page that we have on our website that allows people to fill in a form to get in touch with us for the first time. And I really like making forms.
Forms are one of the overlooked aspects of design and a lot of people can't design forms very well.
The way we make forms at Standard Ease is to use Web Standards and we make forms that have that have good logical structure; that are marked up appropriately; and that will work when there is no visual styling.
So this is a regular web browser for example and we apply our cascading style sheet to style the form in an attractive way.
But one of the considerations that we have to make is that what happens when the CSS goes away, what happens when the styling goes away? What happens when this form - this important place on your website - what happens when it doesn't have the benefit of looking the way it does with CSS on a normal web browser?
Well the answer to that is to really have a look at the structure of the form when the CSS is taken away.
I am hoping you'll see that this form still makes a lot of sense even when it has no visual styling because it has been structured properly.
You can still understand what's going on in this form you could fill it in, you could use a mobile device to fill this in for example if it didn't support CSS. You could use a low bandwidth situation.
Just to illustrate how portable this form is . . . this is a well known text browser called Lynx. Lynx isn't very sophisticated - it's a good test for platform independence.
And when we look at this questionnaire page with Lynx you'll see that as I go down, you begin to see the form and you can fill that out.
So that's a good illustration of how platform independent the forms that we build can be and how they should be.
This is why what we do is of real benefit to any platform, whether it be a screen-reader or a copy of Lynx or a mobile phone or indeed a copy of IE6!
It doesn't really matter we make forms platform independent.
Hire us?
Completing our questionnaire will give us enough information to begin to understand your requirements. It costs nothing and we'll provide a written proposal, normally within a week.
What do you get?
Digital agencies work with us because we love what we do. But you'll especially enjoy:
- Personal service
of a small specialist company - Fixed costs
allowing projects to be completed on budget - Knowledge
of robust & scalable industry standard media
