Sometimes, in our quest to build the perfect website, with a sleek design and optimized search engine functionality, we can lose sight of the most important question of all:

Is the site accessible to as many customers as possible?

BNET recently explored this question in some detail and raised some interesting (and surprising) points in the process. (For example: “Increasingly, laws are being passed requiring a minimum level of accessibility on a Web site.”)

In an editorial entitled “Making Your Web Site Accessible to All“, BNET lays out some of the “best practices” of accessibility. These include:

Keep It Simple: Good accessibility design is also good Web site design. Trying to be too clever or trying to use too many groundbreaking features is simply not effective when you’re trying to communicate on the Web. Make your site simple, clear, and consistent; the result will be a Web destination that is more accessible for everyone.

… Clear and consistent layout of content is important for accessibility. While it may not seem exotic or eye-catching, black text on a white background actually improves readability for everyone. While it is not that hard to find faint red text on a stark yellow background on some “artistic” Web sites, you should avoid the use of colored or graphical backgrounds, particularly where substantial quantities of text are presented, especially if you are trying to increase accessibility to your Web site. It is also important that font sizes should be reasonable and that visitors should be able to change the font size if they wish.
Provide Clear Navigation

Implementing consistent and clear navigation allows everyone to move through the Web site easily and in a logical manner. If you go to a sub-page on your Web site, users should be able to get back to where they started and to be able to easily go to any other related Web page that is also part of your site. Navigation design should embrace clarity and simplicity.

The article goes on to explore ALT text and the dangers of incorporating moving images, tables, frames, scriplets, and much more. It also warns against utilizing non-universal technology (”If content has to be delivered that requires a plug-in or other special feature … make it easy for the visitor to obtain that plug-in”) and touches on many other points.

It’s a recommended read, and offers many useful ideas to keep in mind when making your website as customer-friendly as possible. Check out the original article, linked to above, and let us know what you think.

HostReview recently offered up an extremely useful run-down of tips to maximize your website’s sales conversions. (A conversion happens when a visitor to your site actually buys something, which is basically the whole point of having an online store.)

As you probably know, lists of this type are usually overly obvious space-fillers straight out of Business 101. This list, however, we found to be a fairly exhaustive survey that actually has some solid research behind it.

So, if you have an online store, and are interested in learning about ways to earn customers and keep them coming back, it might be in your best interest to check out the following excerpt:

Converting visitors to buyers is part science, part art. No one formula fits all sites but here are 25 tips that will boost conversion rates on most

1. Keep it simple. The simpler it is for visitors to complete a purchase the more purchases (and fewer shopping cart abandonments) you’ll see. Make it simple to find the product and go through the checkout process.

2. Provide complete contact information including a telephone number. Buyers want to know you’re real and they want to know how to reach you in case of a problem.

3. Provide encouragement throughout the checkout process. The best way to do this is to let buyers know what stage of checkout they’ve reached, and to provide them with highlighted signage to let them know what to do next.

4. Use product pictures in shopping carts. This reminds visitors what’s in their carts. It also reinforces, in the visitor’s mind, the reason(s) for the purchase.

5. Link back to the product page. After an item has been placed in the shopping cart, the visitor should be able to click on the item and be directed back to the product page in a new window for example. This makes buying comparisons easier and ensures the visitor has the right item for his/her needs without leaving the shopping cart.

6. Don’t keep shipping costs a secret. Nothing kills a conversion faster than a $19.95 shipping and handling charge on a $10 item. Provide shipping cost information on the first page of the checkout.

7. Is it backordered? The visitor finally reaches the end of the checkout only to discover that the item isn’t in stock. Do you think they’ll come back when the item comes in? They won’t.

8. Provide complete product information including sizes, colors, styles and other product descriptors. This will cut down on product returns because buyers will know what they’re actually purchasing. Avoid hyping products for the same reason.

9. Keep terms of service (TOS) simple and unambiguous. What’s your guarantee? What’s your return policy? Eliminate the boilerplate and give them the facts.

10. Provide a menu of payment gateways. Not all buyers want to pay by credit card. Some don’t even have a credit card. Buyers should be given the option to pay by debit card, personal check (snail mail), PayPal and other similar services, bank transfer and, if the want to stop by to pick it up, you’ll even take cash.

We urge you to take the time to read the complete list of 25 tips at the original article, here. And as always, feel free to share your comments with the Aplus.Net community.

Today’s New York Times addressed an issue that’s been getting talked about more and more in recent months: The problems with accurately monitoring site hits.

How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million?

The answer — which may be any, or none, of the above — is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.

Other big media companies — including Time Warner, The Financial Times and The New York Times — are equally frustrated that their counts of Web visitors keep coming in vastly higher than those of the tracking companies. There are many reasons for the differences (such as how people who use the Web at home and at the office are counted), but the upshot is the same: the growth of online advertising is being stunted, industry executives say, because nobody can get the basic visitor counts straight.

Depending on what side of the aisle you’re on — seller, or consumer (or both) — you may have differing opinions as to just how tragic this situation is. After all, with more flashing, popping, and noisy banner ads than ever, it sure doesn’t seem like online advertising has stalled in any way.

But in an era where more historically dependable economic factors such as consumer confidence, automobile sales, and interest rates are erratic and unpredictable, the business world has come to depend a great deal on online commerce. Which means that any sudden fluctuation or uncertainty regarding eCommerce could indeed have grim repercussions.

Online advertising is expected to generate more than $20 billion in revenue this year, more than double the $9.6 billion it represented as recently as 2004. Nobody doubts that the figure will grow — particularly as advertisers hone their techniques for aiming messages to particular consumers — but the question remains how much the clashing traffic figures will hold the market back.

… Many advertisers pay Web publishers each time their ad gets an impression, meaning that it is viewed by a reader, but each company uses its own methodology to count impressions.

To make matters worst, two agencies that buy huge amounts of ads — Starcom MediaVest Group and the MindShare unit of Group M, part of WPP — threatened major Web sites last spring that they would slow the money flow if the Web publishers did not get working on the discrepancies. Advertisers are concerned not only about how many people visit sites, but also how often their ads appear.

The article goes on to explore just how this situation is different from that of traditional media, where numbers can also contradict each other, and then outlines some of the possible causes for the discrepancies (from customers who regularly delete their cookies, to tracking systems that don’t count a site hit if a consumer visits it from a work location, and so on).

Read How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting at the New York Times here, and let us know what you think in the comments section.

Continuing the controversy over just what is and isn’t legally allowed to appear on YouTube, the BBC carried a story today describing Google’s new attempt to make sure that copyrighted materials are kept off.

If this solution finally works, it’ll be much to the relief of Google, which has been struggling recently with the inherent problem YouTube offers: It’s incredibly difficult to keep track of what’s on there. Of course, if a video is posted that violates a copyright, it’s promptly removed. However, that same video might just be posted again tomorrow, in a slightly different format, or under a different name, or by a different person — or by five other people, or by 50. It’s hard to police a site like that.

But, of course, Google has no choice but to continue to police this site. Not to do so is to leave itself open to many potentially disastrous lawsuits. The company’s famously deep pockets help make it an even bigger target for such lawsuits. (In fact, the company is currently in the middle of a “billion-dollar legal battle” with Viacom over the spread of copyrighted material.)

So in Google’s eyes, it’s a problem that desperately needs to be solved. In an attempt to do just that, Google has launched a new tool called “Video Identification”, which will “require the cooperation of copyright holders who must provide YouTube with copies of material in order for the firm to compare the files with videos on the site.”

The tool will also “give copyright owners the chance to leave their video on the service and to sell advertising around the content.”

The question is: Will it work? Either way, it’s obvious that Google is taking this matter seriously. As time goes on, we’ll continue to cover this story right here.

In the meantime, you can read the original article (”YouTube rolls out filtering tools”) here.

At this point, it’s definitely safe to say that nobody likes “spam”. It’s pretty universally considered to be the most significant negative aspect of the Internet. But it’s usually also seen as an inevitable result of the Internet’s incredible positives — namely, freedom of information and ease of access.

And as bad as spam is, X-rated spam is many times worse.

It’s hard to imagine that even people who like pornography enjoy getting bombarded with unwanted X-rated emails. Whether you do business online or are just a casual email user, this kind of spam is, at best, an annoyance. At its worst, it’s an embarrassment and an outrage.

With that in mind, we’re happy to share some news that just may bring a smile to your face: Finally, the U.S. Government has succeeded in shutting down some of the most notorious porn spammers, and is actually putting them behind bars. From yesterday’s Guardian:

One of the world’s first successful prosecutions against internet ’spammers’ has seen two men sentenced to five years in jail in Arizona.

The two, who sent millions of unsolicited pornographic emails and netted millions of dollars, were the subjects of the first US prosecution under new federal anti-spam laws, US Department of Justice officials said.

Jeffrey A Kilbride, of Venice, California, and James R Schaffer, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, bought lists of email addresses and sent the owners links to pornographic websites, prosecutors said. They were convicted of charges including conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene materials after a three-week trial and were sentenced by a federal judge in Phoenix.

Over nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages, according to court documents. They were paid commissions based on the number of people who accessed the websites via the spam.

Kilbride and Schaffer tried to make it seem as if they were sending messages from abroad by logging in to servers in Amsterdam. But those messages originated from Phoenix, prosecutors said. They were also ordered to forfeit $1.3m.

Read the entire article here, and feel free to share some comments with other readers.