Since Google was finding the test site and putting it high up on the rankings when we weren't looking we decided to put the site up properly a little earlier than anticipated. We knew that there would still be a few tweaks to make once the site was "live" so we've been busy troubleshooting.

Most of you won't notice what we're doing, though if you were looking yesterday evening you may have noticed that some of the links were going funny colours...

So what are we up to? Well, to most people the site should look quite pretty and realtively easy to use but there are lots of ways that people "see" websites that the rest of us never really need to experience. Paul and I do a lot of testing to see how the site works for various people - for instance...

• The site needs to work if you take all the images away
• Information pressented in a table it still needs to make sense if the table formatting is stripped out
• There needs to be adequate contrast between text and background
• Images need labels that make sense if the user can't see them
• Text needs to be spelled correctly in order to be read by text-to-speech software

There's a whole pile of this stuff but you get the idea! We've been very busy for the past few days testing all this stuff out and fixing various things, I think we're getting there but I have yet to get the site tested to see how it performs for the blind - I have a friend who kindly does this for me from time to time. We've put an enormous amount of research into all this but all the knowledge and electronic checking is no substitute for human testing. It would be great if we could get the site tested by more people with accessibility issues but at the moment I wouldn't know who to ask.

Our next project involves providing information to other church webmasters on how to build and accessible website and why it is so important. It's something we've felt we needed to do for some time now but never quite managed - I suspect that originally our timing was a bit off but God appears to have his backside kicking boots on now :-) It's going to be quite difficult since doing things for churches usually involves doing a lot of hard work for no money and I'm trying to make a business out of webdesign, nevertheless I feel it's what we're supposed to be doing so I guess I will just have to trust that the bills will get paid and there will be enough to eat.