Everyone knows by now how important it is to have an accessible website both from a legal and a usability point of view, however this article looks at website accessibility from another angle. This article examines the commercial aspects of This Site's Services and accessibility and states why it is also financially beneficial to have an accessible website.

Generate Leads

First of all let's stop and think about what goal you are trying to achieve with your website and then we will take a look at an example. Whether you are trying to generate leads from your website of sell directly over the web using an online shopping website, the more accessible you can make your content, the more users will succeed in finding the appropriate pages and doing whatever you want them to do when they get there. So it stands to reason that you should do whatever you can to make your site more accessible and easy to navigate for all users.

Accessible Web Pages

Let's take a step back for a moment and think how users actually get to your site in the first place. They come from search engine results pages of course! Now there are many guidelines for creating accessible web pages, far too many in fact to list in this article. Instead let's take a look at just a few notable examples of how website accessibility guidelines can also help your website rank well in search engines and therefore create more orders, enquiries and more profit!

Usability Guideline

One common website usability guideline is that you should use descriptive text to form links on your website. This is so that users have a better understanding of the type of web page that the link leads to.

This in itself is a good idea. When you also consider that search engines essentially do the same thing - look at the words used to form the links to web pages, you can see that using keyword rich, descriptive link text is a very beneficial thing to to. Not only will it make your site much more user friendly but it will boost your rankings in search engines which will ultimately lead to more users and more profits.