I've written about site design a few times in the past.  The focus of those posts was designing a site that 1) works well with search engines and 2) helps convert browsers into customers.  There's another area of site design that I have yet to touch on, but feel is equally important:  accessibility.

Joe Dolson runs an entire blog on accessible web design.  In his post "What's the key to Accessibility?", Dolson talks about making the actual design of your website customizable by users with special needs or special priorities.

A few days ago I talked about a post at the Google Blog about using the Google Transcoder to make webpages easier for blind users to have read to them.  While I'm not suggesting every website owner needs to create a transcoder, we can all take a lesson and make a few small revisions to make our websites accessible to more users.

A good example of customizable site design is Ars Technica.  Notice the set of six buttons in the upper right corner?  Those buttons let you increase/decrease font size, font face, and contrast.  By using those tools, users with poor vision can customize the size and color of the website to make it easier to read.

Make sure you take a look at the comments in Dolson's accessibility post.  As Dolson notes at the top of the post, Jared Smith of WebAIM stopped by and left another take on the issue.  He suggests that users with special needs will most likely already have their browsers set up to minimize whatever issue they may have.  Website owners, Smith says, aren't entirely responsible for making their websites customizable.  However, website design, at the very least, should not prohibit those adjustments from being made.

With a little conscious effort, we can all make our websites a little more usable and little more accessible.  Don't wait for next year's World Usability Day.  Start looking at ways to improve you site today.