About Barbara Handley

Barbara Handley

I don’t use bizspeak and I don’t talk about myself in the third person (I think it’s really weird).

The most important thing to know about me is that I’m a poet. Poet literally means “maker.” That’s what I do–I make things. Lots and lots of different things.

I’m an artist and a geek which is a really great combination in a web designer. I have a very strong intuitive sense of layout and design and I understand all the code.

I’m a spacial thinker. That means I think in terms of the relationships between things, so it’s easy for me to arrange and organize lots of complex information into coherent systems.

I have a degree in English Literature and people used to ask me “so, what are you going to do with with a degree in English?” Well, in the late 80′s, “design websites” wouldn’t have made any sense, but it turns out that many things I studied along the way are incredibly useful in web design.

I’ve been designing websites since 1997 and programming computers (developing software) since 1980. I have journalism and editorial experience. I’ve done graphic design. I’m an artist. I’m a writer. I’m good at many things, which is really handy since designing websites requires quite a few different skills.

I laugh a lot. I write poetry. I play the piano and autoharp. I sometimes dance in public for no reason because life is a joyful celebration.

Oh yeah, I also run this little web design company.

A few tidbits about this blog

The site validates to the XHTML Strict standard. Except for the Subscriptions page because TinyMCE (the backside wysiwyg text editor) insists on wrapping everything in paragraph tags. I protected the Feedburner subscription form from that fate with the Raw HTML plugin, but the raw tags themselves are wrapped in paragraph tags and that causes the validator to throw errors.

The site stylesheets validate to the CSS level 2.1 standard

The RSS and ATOM feeds are valid, too. I can’t take credit for that, because they’re generated by WordPress, but it’s still cool.

The site passes all the colorblind filter tests.

508 and WCAG Accessibility Guidelines

This site meets 508 and WCAG Priority 1 accessibility standards. It meets WCAG Priority 2 standards on almost all pages, and meets most of the WCAG Priority 3 standards as well. I’ve been frustrated in my attempt to make the entire site meet WCAG Priority 3 accessibility standards by some quirks of WordPress that make it very difficult. We’re discussing writing a couple of plugins for WordPress to help solve that problem. I’m considering offering an mp3 version of all posts and possibly using a third-party tool to caption YouTube videos.