In 2021, having a website for your business is essential. But it’s not merely enough to secure a domain, a host, a CMS, a web designer, and a white label SEO reseller program. You need to make sure that your site is truly accessible to all users — […]
Whether you manage a personal WordPress website or you run a business website, it’s vital that you take the time to do updates. Because technology continually evolves and WordPress stays at the forefront of the industry, you can trust that the updates are designed to improve your website and […]
If there’s one thing the Internet and technology isn’t, it’s consistent. Both are constantly evolving and changing up what we once knew. So it can be an exasperating task to stay on top of the Internet trends. Fortunately, we’ve done our research. Here are the three current Internet trends […]
In 2021, having a website for your business is essential. But it’s not merely enough to secure a domain, a host, a CMS, a web designer, and a white label SEO reseller program. You need to make sure that your site is truly accessible to all users — and that means you need to consider the Americans with Disabilities Act during the development and maintenance of your site.
If this isn’t something you’d considered before, you’re not alone. But it’s crucial that you keep accessibility at the forefront in order to protect your business and address all customer needs. Let’s take a closer look at what it means to have an ADA-compliant website, why it matters, and what you can do to get started.
First, it’s important to know what ADA compliance means. “ADA” is shorthand for the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has been around in some form since the 1990s. You might already be familiar with the ADA if you run a brick-and-mortar location, as this legislation is what requires businesses to provide accessible parking spaces, ramps, entrances, and other features. Although this law was amended in 2009 to expand certain definitions, there is still a lot of ambiguity surrounding website accessibility.
ADA compliance, in this context, refers to websites that are fully accessible (meaning they provide an equitable experience) for all users. This means that, in order for your site to be ADA-compliant, you need to provide the same value of experience for people with all kinds of disabilities as you do to those visitors without disabilities.
ADA compliance matters for a couple of big reasons. For one thing, nearly 50 million people in the U.S. are living with a disability of some kind. If you make your site accessible only to those who see, hear, or interact with web content in the same way that you do, your business will potentially be missing out big time. An accessible website can make sure that you reach everyone and that you have no barriers that keep customers away.
Perhaps more importantly, the lack of ADA compliance is a legal liability. While it’s true that there are some businesses whose sites aren’t subject to ADA compliance guidelines, the vast majority of websites are required to meet these standards. If you fail to comply with the ADA, you run the risk of being sued. These lawsuits are becoming more prevalent, with major brands and even celebrities being forced to spend thousands on fixes and on legal settlements. By being proactive about ADA compliance, you can protect your business from legal action and bad press.
Now that you know a little more about what ADA compliance means and why it matters, it’s time to take the next step to ensure your website measures up. But how do you ensure compliance?
If you have an existing website, one of the first steps is to have an accessibility audit performed. An audit can show you the scope of the changes you might need to make and put you on the right track to implementing those improvements. You might be able to make some of those fixes yourself — but if the entire site needs an overhaul (or you’re starting from scratch), you’ll want to meet with an expert who can make changes to your site’s code or perform a more customized manual review of your site.
According to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, an ADA-compliant website is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. This means that your site shouldn’t rely on just one sense for accessibility; that your site should be easily operable with the use of adaptive technologies; that your site should be simple to navigate and understand; and that your site should be responsive on any device or browser.
While there’s a lot more detail that goes into crafting an ADA-compliant site — like the use of descriptive alt text, closed captioning, and certain types of coding — a qualified web designer can help you figure out exactly what your site needs to be accessible to all.
The reality is that ADA compliance is just as important as having a website at all. By keeping this information in mind, you can get started on building or fixing a site that can address every user’s needs while boosting your brand.
Whether you manage a personal WordPress website or you run a business website, it’s vital that you take the time to do updates. Because technology continually evolves and WordPress stays at the forefront of the industry, you can trust that the updates are designed to improve your website and it’s recommended that you do them as soon as they’re available. If you aren’t sure how to update your WordPress website or even back it up, then it’s best to consult an expert to ensure you don’t compromise your website’s customizations.
There are quite a few benefits of updating your WordPress site, and here we’ll look at the three most important.
Plugins are an essential part of your web design, and when you have an updated website, these plugins will seamlessly become compatible. If you have an older version of WordPress, you may be limited. Beyond being limited to what you’re compatible with, you’ll find that current plugins won’t have all of the bells and whistles that the updated versions have.
Security is important to everyone that gets online these days, and that’s A LOT of people. WordPress makes their upgrades public because they are an open source software. If they have changed anything having to do with security or corrected a security issue in the update, hackers will know, and those guys always target WordPress sites that haven’t upgraded.
Who doesn’t want access to the latest features WordPress has to offer? Remember, their job is to make your experience better, and they’re pretty good at it. When you get an update, you should be excited to see what’s new and what will save you time.
When updating your website, there are a few best practices that you should follow. Here we list three of those, but trust that there are more based on the size of your website and other factors. One thing that is vital that you understand is that updating a WordPress site isn’t always as easy as it seems. While the platform is excellent and efficient, there are many details that you need to pay attention to. Simply hitting the update button may work sometimes, but it can also lead to troubles that can fracture your website and interrupt the normal activity.
There are a range of skills that you’ll want to have an in-depth understanding of from CSS to MSQL to navigating around the cPanel. If you aren’t confident in with areas like HTML, it’s a good rule of thumb to either have a web designer prepared for disaster relief in case something goes wrong when you update or to just bring in the pros for the entire process. That way, if there is a problem, your site can be restored accordingly.
Backup your database to ensure you don’t lose anything. Don’t skip this step because you think its only purpose is to give you peace of mind (which it will) or because you think it won’t happen to you (it can). Make sure you have a reliable backup system in place.
There are some excellent premium plugins that are created just for the job. You can also backup files manually in the cPanel or through hosting. There are a few other methods you can apply. Just be sure that you are confident in using the backup system that you have in place because this is the primary way to resolve issues when the update doesn’t go as planned.
The process of upgrading is going to require that you pay attention to each step. The changelogs need to be looked at (so you can see the summary of changes), and you should note any modifications made to source files (if any). If you use WordPress versions for themes, plugins, software, and everything in between, begin by updating these and then update third-party themes and plugins.
A few other techniques you can apply to the process of updating your website is to activate a plugin that lets people know your site is being worked on or is maintenance mode. This prevents an error message from appearing if something doesn’t update correctly. Also, research the plugins that you use and see if other customers have had issues with it when updating their WordPress site. You may be able to troubleshoot a few problems ahead of the curve.
Once you’ve updated the themes, plugins, and other necessary parts of your website, run through and make sure everything looks good. If there are errors, you can correct those and then get your website back up and running!
If you can, use the staging area for the updates before updating the live site. By testing the site this way, you get a chance to see any changes that are made and if there’s an issue that needs to be corrected before going live. You can create staging areas through your host, a plugin, manually, and by creating a dedicated stage site.
There are pros and cons to updating your website, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons. By knowing what to expect, whether it is a positive impact or a negative one, you can easily combat the issues or enhance your website when you keep WordPress updated.
Don’t forget, if you’re not comfortable with the updating process for WordPress, let the pros take care of the job for. Even when your tech-savvy, the learning curve for an area as specific as website updates is time-consuming, and you want to make sure you get it right. After all, an update should be viewed as a good thing because it’s keeping your website protected and functioning properly.
If there’s one thing the Internet and technology isn’t, it’s consistent. Both are constantly evolving and changing up what we once knew. So it can be an exasperating task to stay on top of the Internet trends. Fortunately, we’ve done our research. Here are the three current Internet trends you need to know about.
It’s no surprise that mobile devices are dominating the Internet. After all, just think about your own habits. When you want to quickly search something online, you probably reach for your iPhone or iPad instead of loading up the desktop or laptop.
So it’s no shocker that today, Internet usage from devices other than a computer is over 30%, in comparison to only 10% in 2011. Break that math down a little further and that means almost one third of your website traffic comes from people not using a computer.
Smartphones and tablets aren’t the only devices being used to access the Internet either. With Smart TVs, smart watches, wristbands and gaming consoles quickly becoming must-have items, your website needs to responsive across all devices.
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With so much content and websites online, people no longer expect to find exactly what they’re looking for when they conduct a search via Google or any other search engine. So, people changed the way they were searching.
Instead of typing generic search terms into search engines, such as “smartphone repair”, they’re searching for something more specific such as, “iPhone 6s cracked screen repair.”
Additionally, people are starting to enter full questions into search engines instead of basic terms, such as “cold symptoms”. Instead, they are typing in “what are the common cold symptoms in adults?”
You can take advantage of this Internet trend by producing quality content that incorporates long tail keywords and specific search term. Create blog posts that answer questions, so you can put the question search terms right in your content, and provide specifics and details of your product/services available to target specific search terms.
Anyone can build a website, but like most things in life, not all websites are created equally. Today, there are so many high quality websites that have been built by multi-billion dollar corporations, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Google, Apple, etc.
As a result, people expect to see similar quality across the board, or Internet, rather. They expect to see high quality, professional designs that are aesthetically pleasing.
If your web design is outdated, it will stick out – and not for the right reasons. A poor website design leaves your visitors with a bad impression of your business. On the contrary, if you have an excellent web design that is visually appealing, your traffic is likely to stay on your website 3 times longer. This also increases the chances of them making a purchase.
So one of the biggest Internet trends of today is that more and more businesses have high quality websites.
Now that you know the top 3 Internet trends of today and what they’ll do for you, it’s time to put them into action.
Using a content management system (CMS) is a popular way for web designers to easily allow the addition and updating of content in a relatively simple package. In fact, there are plenty of web designers that believe that every website should use a content management system. However, a CMS shouldn’t be taken as a “one-solution-fits-all” approach to design and content management. Being able to edit your own content with a CMS has plenty of benefits and drawbacks that can easily affect how your website ultimately looks and feels to your users.
Why Go With a CMS?
One major advantage for having a content management system on your website is that it offers plenty of useful plug-ins and add-ons that allow a great degree of customization. Instead of developing your own individual scripts for shopping carts, photo galleries and other features, the average CMS already offers those features as add-on installations. Although many of these add-ons have been tested to work for the CMS they were designed for, you can still run into compatibility issues that can cause anything from minor issues to catastrophic outages.
The key thing to keep in mind about a CMS is that it still requires ongoing maintenance and updating, despite appearances to the contrary. Like just about any website, a CMS still needs upgrades, patches and other forms of maintenance to function properly. In fact, you probably factor in the cost of having your web designer or yourself maintaining the website as needed.
Can My Website Do Without a CMS?
Your website can do without a CMS, but you have to be prepared to put in plenty of effort to make this work. For starters, you’ll probably end up having to learn a great deal about web design in order to replicate some of the features offered in the average CMS package.
Plenty of web designers go out of their way to include a CMS within their client’s websites, mainly to decrease the possibility of the client breaking their site in the process of doing something as simple as updating their content. In these cases, a CMS works fine since most clients only want to update text content and quite possibly a few images to go with said text content.
Not every CMS can work smoothly within the design of a website. In many cases, you’re probably better off not having a CMS if it severely compromises the webpage’s overall design. Nevertheless, many people opt to incorporate CMS into their websites regardless of how it impacts design.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, having a content management system is not a mandatory requirement. In fact, not every website needs a CMS. The choice of whether or not to use a CMS depends on what you want out of your website. If you’re looking for a feature-rich website, then a CMS might be a better option than having a web designer at those features on individually. In other cases, you might feel that your website will be better off aesthetically without the use of a CMS.
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If you are building a website for the first time, it is imperative that you hire an experienced web designer. However, given the sheer number of prospective designers out there, the hiring process can easily overwhelm you. Here are some tips you can follow to help you hire the right professional.
First off, you must never replace experience with low rates. If a web designer is asking for dubiously cheap professional fees, you might want to be careful when decidng to get the service. It might be wise to ask for some samples you can evaluate before making a decision. If you are a business owner who depends on his website for sales and other business transactions, you cannot settle for something that was poorly designed because your business will ultimately suffer.
Ask a prospect designer how many websites he had already designed. It would be best if your designer was able to work with a business website like yours in the past. This way, you know that he already has an idea about how to make a design fit for the website of your business.
When meeting a prospective designer for the first time, immediately ask for a work portfolio. Examine the designer’s style and determine whether your target market group will be able to connect with the styles of your designer. Keep in mind that it is not enough that you like your website—your customers should respond to it.
Your designer must also cover all ends of the project. Thus, it is important to ask about the process the designer uses to test the website. Browser testing is important in order to find out if your website works properly on all known browsers and operating systems. This process will take some time in order to work out the bugs, but it will be worth it. If done right the first time, it could spare you from future headaches once the website is launched.
Aside from the aesthetics, your designer must fully understand why you are building a website. He must have a good grasp of your business objectives. This will enable him to come up with styles that are in-line with your business themes and goals.
To make sure your designer will produce a design that would suit your taste, don’t hesitate to throw in your suggestions or what you would like to see in the design. This goes without saying that you must find a designer who is easy to work with. After all, coming up with a great design for your website does not solely depend on your designer but also with how you are able to work together.
All these pointers will help you identify the right web designer for your business website.
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