One of the things to keep in mind when developing a website is the level of accessibility your target audience will have when using your site. While it’s often easy to make nice-looking designs that appeal to your average teenager, it’s rarely easy to make a site that can appeal to those both young and old. Some things to keep in mind include the font size, color usage, HTML labels, and cross-browser compatibility.

Font Size

The size of font on your website is critical if your target audience is 40+. While small fonts may be easy to read and often times look better overall, your website is of no use if the user cannot read what you’re writing. Font size is also important in making titles and headers stand out. Having the same font size for all parts of your page may make the text hard to navigate.

Color Usage

Color usage is important for the obvious reasons of appearance and the mood the site conveys to the reader. But remember that some of your users may be color blind. Certain colors that blend well may not be ideal for text/background colors.

HTML Labels

Few people know of the <label> tag for HTML. Specifics can be found here, but the general idea is that these tags can aid in helping sight-impaired users navigate specific content on your site should they be using speech-enabled browsers. Labels also have other benefits of distinguishing specific form content and their respective identifiers.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Depending on your audience, it may be beneficial to test your website on a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. While later versions of these browsers have begun to comply with internet standards, you may be surprised at how these browsers render your website differently. Adding onto the idea of font size and colors, also keep in mind the zooming capabilities of these browsers. For example, Firefox 3 has a zoom functionality that lets you zoom the entire page, including images. Thus if text on images is small, zooming the page can make the content easier to read. However, most browsers do not support this, so small text in images may be impossible to read when projected on a larger screen or viewed on a small, mobile device. Also keep in mind that if your font is small, using the browser to increase the font size may distort your page. Again, each brower will handle this differently, so be sure to test to make sure the primary browsers all scale your site appropriately.