Joomla! Community Magazine™

Web accessibility is important for all websites and applications that we design and build to allow users with visual impairments or visual difficulties to easily view and consume content. Colour contrast happens to be one of the key elements of a design that can be tweaked and implemented correctly to help improve the visibility of text on a page, whether it is in the body of the page, or in the navigational elements of the website. Keep in mind, it isn't just users with visual impairments, but can also be users in situations where the screen that they're viewing is in an environment where it is harder to see such as sun glare on a screen. It also happens to be a very easy success criterion to test for and implement a fix to help meet WCAG 2.0 requirements.

Some of the readers out there may know that I have been audio podcasting about Joomla for almost two years now.January 2015 will actually be the two year birthday of the Joomla Beat Podcast, one of the many passions in the Joomla Community that I have been carrying on almost every week. I was proud to hear also that I had inspired someone in the Spanish speaking community to start their own Joomla podcast in Spanish! Something I’m very excited to hear more about and see grow over the next few months.

As a follow up post to David Hurley’s round up of working less, I mean, Work LESS in Joomla, I’ve put together a list of tools and programs that you can use to make working and coding your websites up with LESS far easier, especially if you come from a traditional world of basic CSS and now trying to get your head around how LESS works.

This article goes through a bunch of useless, I mean useful, LESS tools that our interns here at PB Web Development have found in their time working and learning LESS and Joomla. 

Over the past few weeks I've noticed a few more websites appearing online using parallax methods in their designs with some very impressive results.

As the year comes to a close we have a chance to stop and look back at the awesome designs that some of the Joomla template providers have put together throughout 2011.

As more web enabled devices are released on the market, people are viewing the internet with different tools. Smart phones, tablets, portable gaming devices, car entertainment units and even household appliances, like fridges, have empowered users to stay connected to the internet all day long. 

Many years ago, when I first started designing Joomla! websites, I found that I ran into a few stumbling blocks when working with clients. Being young and eager, I'd always jump straight into a design with very little thought, preparation, or even communication with a client! I would spend hours and hours at my desk coming up with what I thought was the "perfect design" for the client only to get it completely rejected with comments such as, "I was thinking of something a little different", or "That's not quite what I had in mind", or even worse "Are you really a designer?"

The High Court is the highest court in the Australian judicial system, and was established in 1901 by Section 71 of the Constitution. The functions of the High Court are to interpret and apply the law of Australia; to decide cases of special federal significance including challenges to the constitutional validity of laws and to hear appeals, by special leave, from Federal, State and Territory courts. The new High Court website acts as a central point of information relating to cases and the High Court. PB Web Development crafted a creative interface that is not only visually appealing, but is also built to meet web accessibility standards.