Our Site Design

The new Volunteering ACT Logo
Volunteering ACT is proud to show our new logo, which highlights the diversity of peoples and cultures that make up the volunteering community.

New Logo - New Site

Late in 2003 , Gina Fallace of Green Words and Images designed our new logo, which now features in our promotional material, presentations and business cards.

Subsequently we decided to revamp our web site, and we commissioned Green Words and Images to produce the web page banner that is at the top of this page.

 

Standards Based Development

Our new site was built in 2004 - and maintained with regular updates until the end of November 2005 - on a largely voluntary basis - by Studio Also- with a concern to meet the emerging standards for web site development.

Below, for those interested, we provide some links to more information about these standards.

One of the most important outcomes of building web sites to standards is the resulting accessibility of such sites. Accessibility here means that the broadest range of people using the broadest range of equipment and software can view these sites as closely as possible as they were intended to look. In particular, people who have need of assisted technology such as screen-readers should be able to access standards-based sites with an ease that non-conforming sites do not always allow.

One of our intentions in taking as much care as possible to standardise our site is to make it accessible to people with a range of disabilities.

“Coding with standards (particularly CSS for positioning, and strict HTML) makes accessibility an easier goal to achieve, as standards have been created with accessibility in mind.” The Business Benefits of Web Standards

Some Technical Information

The newer parts of our site have been built utilising XHTML, and CSS for layout as well as for presentation. Much of our legacy site was built using tables for layout and those pages have been merged into the new site as seamlessly as possible. Many of those older pages still retain a non-standardised underlying structure. Over time we hope to convert the more frequently used legacy pages to standards-based pages. As new pages come on line they will be built utilising our new CSS templates. Thus our present site is in a sense, transitional.

XHTML Links

Better Living Through XHTML - Jeffery Zeldman

XHTML: A Bridge To The Future - Information Week Online

HTML Versus XHTML - Web Standards Project

CSS Links
Why Use CSS? - John Allsopp

So, why bother? - Owen Briggs

Accessible Web Structure: CSS Advantages - University of Florida


The basic structure of the template used for the site has been adapted from the Flexible Layout created by Tonico.

This page has been tested and found to be valid XHTML Valid XHTML 1.0! and valid CSS Valid CSS!

"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call 'web standards', are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market." The Web Standards Group

To find out how Studio Also can build or revamp your web site contact John Saward of Studio Also