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Contrast, Accessibility and Web Design

Contrast

Have you ever looked at a web page and gotten a headache trying to read it? In the early days of web design, there were some truly hideous color combinations out there that were almost impossible to read — the good old green lettering on a red screen combo, every colorblind individual’s nightmare. People were trying to be creative. They didn’t want to have black words on a white page. That’s boring, and there weren’t as many color choices available because our monitors and browsers couldn’t handle many colors.

Black and white may be “boring” to some people, but there is a good reason that books have been printed this way for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and that reason is contrast.

The human eye needs to have contrast between colors to comfortably be able to read. The higher the contrast, the easier it is to read. For colors that have a low contrast, the text will need to be larger for the human eye to be able to read the text. The word accessibility is important for web designers, but I often hear it mostly in use for screen readers for the visually impaired. We should be including Alt Text on our images so that screen readers will read them on images so that visually impaired individuals will know what is on a web page that is loaded with images or graphics. However, there are plenty of people who have perfectly good eyes that do not want to have to strain to look at a website.

Sometimes, you will want to have some color variation in your text design. We feel that links are a good example of this. They are not huge swaths of text, so if the contrast is not as strong here, it isn’t so serious, but designing all of your content with low contrast colors is not something that should be done. This Contrast Ratio site is a great tool to help determine if your text and background colors are going to be comfortable for your users. This site will even give you suggestions for when the font size will pass accessibility testing. For web designers, this is a good tool for when you have a client that is suggesting a color combination that you know is not going to be a good idea for users.

As web designers, we need to always think about our end users. Their comfort is important, so keep that contrast ratio in mind when you are designing your sites.

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What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?

What Is SEO and Why Is It Important?

If you have a website, you have probably heard the term SEO, but do you know what it means, and why it is important? SEO stands for search engine optimization. Basically, that means that there are things you can do to help you show up higher when someone searches you. The reason that is important is obvious. The higher up you are, the more likely people are to visit your website and ultimately do business with you. Everyone wants to show up first when someone uses Google to search his or her business type. That is not always going to be possible, but there are things you or your web developer can do to help.

There are many ways you can improve your SEO. You or your developer can add meta descriptions, page titles, descriptive URLs and easy navigation. One of the best ways you can improve your SEO is through quality content. You need actual relevant content that uses words that people are searching for when they search for your type of business. This should not be contrived. For example, we create websites for small businesses, and it says that on our home page. We are not adding in extra words, pages, or unnecessary links that say this in order to trick the search engines, but we do say what we do, and this helps search engines locate us. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised at just how many websites don’t actually say what they do anywhere on them!

Another way to improve your SEO is to improve your local SEO by registering with the search engines as a business. This helps people that are actually in your area find you.

Finally, I must give you a word of caution. There are many great SEO specialists and copywriters out there, but there are some that are not. Be very cautious of anyone that promises to move your page higher on a search engine. While there are many ways to do this, none of them can be guaranteed. Much of your ranking depends on what your competitors are doing, and you can’t control what they do.  Additionally, search engines change their algorithms frequently. What is good SEO one day, will not necessarily be good SEO the next. You should also be cautious of anyone who seems to want to trick the search engines. The search engines almost always eventually catch on and will lower your ranking.

 

 

 

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Client Relations – When Something Doesn’t Seem Right, It Probably Isn’t

Trust Your Gut

Last week was a strange week for us. We finally got it together and got our Google Business presence verified. If you are a small business, I urge you to do this. You simply go to Google.com/business and will be directed to fill out some preliminary information. You will need to verify that you are actually the owner of your business. To do this, you may need to wait a few days for a postcard to be mailed to you that will have a code on it. Then you will need to enter a code into a certain spot on the Google.com/business site, and then your business will be listed on Google. Supposedly, some businesses do not have to go through the postcard route and can get texted the code to their phone, but we didn’t have that option and had to wait for the postcard. In any case, we are now listed on Google as a business. This helps us on our local SEO, which should hopefully help local clients find us a little easier. If you are a home based business, like we currently are, there is a place that you can check that you will come to visit your clients and a certain mile radius that you will travel. If you do not want clients coming to your home or your address to be listed on Google, pay close attention to this section of the form so that you do not inadvertently list your residence.

We listed our business on Google on Monday, and immediately on Tuesday, we had a major contact through our site that seemed very promising. Yay! This sounded great! Or did it? Was it too good to be true?

Well, we should have known something was up when the first thing the guy wanted to know was if we took credit cards.

The next big flag was that he didn’t answer a couple of key questions that we asked in our first contact with him. We wanted to know how he had heard about us. That seemed like a fair question. We are new, and we figured someone had referred him to us. If he had indeed found us through Google, that would have been fine, but we would have liked to have known that too. We also wanted to know if he was in the Atlanta area, because we like to sit down and do a face to face and get to know our potential clients.

He did not answer those questions, and he did not fill out our client questionnaire. He just had a list of things that he wanted done.

OK, so he was a little different, and he didn’t follow directions very well. He had a nice budget, so that was promising.

Again, we asked where he was located. He still did not answer. He again insisted upon a quote and a four week timeline for a rather giant project.

Michelle began drawing up the proposal and let him know it would be Friday before he would have the proposal. On Wednesday he started demanding the quote. As an aside, I was on a short trip to the beach, so Michelle was dealing with this stuff, but I was keeping in touch via email and phone while it was going on. When he sent a second pushy email demanding a quote on Wednesday, I sent him an email telling him basically to chill out, he’d get his quote on Friday like we said, and that he needed to do things on our timeline like we told him.

Well, Friday rolled around. I returned from my trip. I realized the guy hadn’t given us an address, a phone number, nothing. So I sent him another email and told him we would not give him a quote until we had those details. We also would need to have a phone conversation with him before we would give him a proposal because we were worried about the scope of the project. Michelle meanwhile did an IP address search on him and found out that he is in California.

He emailed us back with an address in San Jose, a business name, and a phone number. Michelle, Teddy and I called the guy while we were in her car and we got a Google voice number. He finally answered the phone and the call was unintelligible. We ended up hanging up and trying again. He answered, and we still couldn’t understand him. We decided then and there that this is not going to work. Michelle sent him an email basically saying that communication is not working between us, and we are not going to give him a quote. He then called Michelle back and had a decent conversation and agreed to an eight week timeline. We agreed that we could send him a proposal with that change.

After emailing him the quote, he immediately signs it and emails it back with a bunch of craziness that is basically a scam in which he wants to pay us a bunch of money so that *we* will pay his graphic artist because his graphic artist doesn’t have credit card capability. He will give us a “tip” for doing this. Uh, no. I can see how this plays out. We end up losing thousands of dollars in a completely stupid con.

We are not happy. The con was annoying enough, but drawing up proposals are a lot of work. Losing valuable work time, not to mention getting our hopes up about having some decent cash….UGH. What a jerk.

I knew Wednesday night that something was off with this guy. Within 24 hours of contact with him, something was not right. At least we didn’t do any actual web design for him, but I am sorry that Michelle went through the effort of a proposal. We put a lot of time and thought into these proposals. This was an elaborate con job. At least we did not get conned. We did report it to the FBI, but nothing will become of it. If you are reading this Mr. Con Man, not everyone will fall for your stupid scam! Yet another valuable lesson in owning a business. The main thing I have come away from after this is I am not letting anyone tell me how to run my business. Michelle and I know how we want to do things. We have a way that we want it done, and once it starts feeling bad, we need to walk away from that person. If we say Friday, we mean Friday!!

Oh, and our con man did finally tell us how he found us. Google.

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Why Would You Want to Start Your Own Business?

Your Own Business

Michelle and I had an interesting experience today. We were participants on a student panel at a Technology Enterprise Summit for the Technical College System of Georgia today at the Grand Hyatt in Atlanta. When I was asked to do this, I let them know that I was no longer a student, but they also wanted “success stories” of recent graduates, and someone had submitted my name. That was very flattering, and I figured why not? There were three other people on the panel who were actually still students. Two were from Atlanta Tech, and one was from Gwinnett Tech, which is where Michelle and I received our web design training. The other three students were pursuing degrees in bio technology.

The Summit was being held for people who worked with technology support for the technical college system. We were there to answer questions from the student perspective. We were told by the moderator Derek, who was the one who had requested that we be on the panel in the first place, that the participants in the summit did not generally get much of a chance to interact with the students, so this was a good opportunity to find out what it was really like to work with the software systems that were in place. Derek had some prewritten questions for us, but the audience was able to text him questions as well. We were in a large ballroom in front of a crowd of people, set up on a stage on tall chairs with spotlights on us, being filmed and given microphones. It looked intense, but was surprisingly relaxed and fun.

One of the first questions that was asked of Michelle and me was why would you want to start your own business? We get asked this question often, and it is easy for us to answer. First, I think that web design is a natural field in which to do this. Many of the firms that hire web designers are already small, so starting one of your own isn’t that big of a stretch. When people suggest that we may be rushing into this because we may not have enough experience, I remind them that I have worked on my church’s site since 2009, I worked on Shiloh High School’s website for a year, and Michelle has worked on her blog since 2011 and spent a lot of time working on it, not only with content, but with development and design as well. I also have owned my own transcription business for the past 15 years, so I am used to having my own business. I think there is a certain type of person who likes to work for themselves, and Michelle and I have felt all along that we are both that type of person. You have to have a certain level of risk-taking personality to take it on. It is not for everyone. There are definitely sleepless nights, but it is also exciting and rewarding, and we are learning so much. I have always wanted to have my own business, and I have always been impressed by people who have started their own businesses. They make their own money, and they create jobs for others. It is not easy, and those that go into it thinking that they will not have to work much are fooling themselves. I especially enjoy talking with other small business owners and sharing similar experiences with them. They get it, and these are the people we really want to work with in helping build or improve their websites.

Supposedly, we will get a copy of the video of today’s event, so we may get to post that on here at a later date.

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Custom vs. Customization

Custom vs Customization

You see the terms custom and customization being thrown around and used interchangeably quite a bit in web design and development, especially in WordPress design and development. But, they really don’t mean the same thing. And, you might not need the one you think you do.

First, the front-end display of a WordPress site is determined by the theme you are using. You can get many themes for free, some even better ones that are paid, or you can have one built especially for you. If you or your developer uses a ready-made theme, you will almost certainly want some customization of that theme. You will want the colors to match your branding. You might want to change the font. You will want to add graphics, images, and verbiage that make it your own. And, you will probably need to have some plugins installed and configured to add functionality. Yes, ready-made themes can be used “out of the box” by just adding your content, but most people just are not happy with that, so they need to have their themes customized.

A custom theme is very different. It is a theme built from scratch especially for you. Building a theme from scratch is a lot more work for your developer. You don’t need to change it because it will have been built the way you want it from the beginning. It will take longer and cost more than a customized theme, but it is yours. You can have it exactly like you want it, for the most part. And, you won’t run into anything exactly like yours somewhere else on the internet.

So, what do you need and how do you decide? Many times it boils down to time and budget. If you have the time and money, I would absolutely have a custom site built especially for you. It is more personal, and you can have it the way you like it. But, if you need something fairly quickly and/or don’t have a big budget, you may want to consider a customized theme. While the developer in me would much rather build one from scratch, a customized theme really isn’t a bad thing, especially if you are a new business with limited funds. Look around at sites you like. There is probably an existing theme out there with a similar layout. And, once we customize it with your colors, your logo, your images, and your words, it will seem pretty custom.

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Do Fashion Trends Translate into Web Design Trends?

Marimekko Joonas Fabric
Marimekko Joonas Fabric

This morning, I was watching “Good Morning America,” and they showed off Target’s new line of Marimekko products. My ears perked up when I heard Marimekko. Long ago, when I first moved to Atlanta back in the early 1990s, I had a job at Crate & Barrel. Crate & Barrel was very proud of the fact that they used Marimekko fabric in their design concept within the store. They used it all over the place, hanging from ceilings, draped over the walls, rolled out in the windows displays. You could buy pillows, shower curtains, and all sorts of things made out of the fabric. I liked it. It had a very European look to it, with bold colors and big, graphic patterns. They are a Finnish company.

So when I heard that Target was now launching a line of Marimekko products, two things went through my head. Number one, Marimekko is now slumming it with us regular folks who like to shop at Target, and number 2, giant graphic, colorful fabrics must be a fashion trend for spring and summer. Does this translate into web design as well? There has been so much subdued white, dark gray and light gray on websites lately, is it now time for some bold colors? Are we going to see some interesting graphic prints on websites as well? I hope so, but if web design is anything like fashion, as Heidi Klum always says “one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out.”