Well that optimism might have worked out nicely for Kevin Costner in his 1989 film “Field of Dreams” but if your website is hoping to attract other baby-boomers then you’d better make sure you pay a little more attention to detail.
Long gone are the days when the ’silver surfers’ were a minority demographic, in fact recent research shows that more than 60 percent are avid social media consumers, (up 40 percent in the last year) sifting through blogs, forums, podcasts and online videos. This statistic comes as a surprise to some, who previously categorised ageing citizens as technologically illiterate!
So what does your site need to do? Well, it’s the simple things that matter, the things often overlooked by young trendy designers who want to be hip, (instead of needing replacement ones).
First off, make sure your website is built using compliant code up to W3C standards. This ensures the the vast majority of browsers will be able to render it as you expect. Once you have compliant code, then it becomes easy to add in extras like Adaptive Font Resizing – allowing your readers to increase the type size, without breaking the page layout. Also you want to make sure that any image you use has a good “Alt-tag” (alternative tag). This gives a brief description of what the image is, so that if the visitor is partially-sighted and using a screen reader, then they can understand what the picture is of if they can’t see it.
The extra benefit is that the search engines love compliant code, Google in particular gives you a far better ranking if it deems your site worthy! And there’s an easy way to tell, just look out for the W3C compliant logos (normally in the footer of most good sites) – that tells you the designer has done more than just build a site, then sat back hoping people will come…
