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How to Make Hyper-Personalization in Web Design Work For You

Personalization; it’s probably one of the most important design trends to emerge in recent years.

As consumers in all industries become more demanding, they’re increasingly searching for online experiences that are customized to suit their individual needs and expectations.

Today, personalization exists in virtually every digital interaction, from adverts on social media to PPC campaigns and email marketing efforts.

Used correctly, the manipulation of demographic, behavioral, and other in-depth user-data can help designers to create dynamic, highly customized content for each website user. At the same time, these unique websites ensure that designers really make an impact on behalf of their clients, outshining the competition and driving amazing results.

What is Hyper-Personalization?

Basic personalization in web design involves making changes to a design based on what you know about your client’s target audience.

For instance, if you knew that you were designing for an audience that spends more time on their smartphone than their computer, you’d concentrate on building hyper-responsive experiences for small screens. For instance, the Canals-Amsterdam.nl website is specifically designed to support people using smartphones to swipe, tap, and scroll.

If you’re aware that your customer’s target market is other businesses, you might put more testimonials, free demo CTAs and other enticing components on the website to encourage investment.

Hyper-Personalization is an emerging trend for 2020 that focuses on going beyond the basic understanding of a target audience, to look at genuine customer data. Hyper-personalization is all about leveraging in-depth omnichannel data to drive more advanced customer experiences on every page of a website.

For hyper-personalization to be genuinely effective, designers need access to virtually unlimited data, from CMS systems, sales teams, marketing experts, and more. When you have that data handy, you can use it to:

Design websites that showcase dynamic CTAs, featuring content relevant to each user;
Implement sign-in screens for customers vs. demo requests for new leads on home pages;
Showcase products similar to past pages when repeat customers return to a site.

Why is Hyper-Personalization Important?

Personalized experiences have always been important to the sales journey.

However, in an era where companies are constantly competing to grab user attention, you can’t just cater to your site designs to a group of people anymore. Increasingly, users are expecting specific interactive moments on websites, made just for them.

Amazon is an obvious example to consider here. As one of the world’s leading online shopping sites, Amazon’s efforts with website personalization are incredible. The Amazon website uses tools integrated into the back-end of the marketplace to watch everything a customer does on its platform.

As users browse through the website, the site jots down each category that you look at, and which items interest you. Thanks to this, Amazon can suggest which products you may be most interested in.

Websites like Madebyhusk also offer an incredible insight into hyper-personalization, allowing users to browse for the products that appeal to them based on in-depth filters like edging and color.

The result is a higher chance of conversion.

When customers feel as though they have complete control over their buyer journey, and that each step on that journey is tailored to them, they’re more likely to buy.

Better Converting CTAs

A call to action is an excellent way to move things along when you’re encouraging the buying process with your target audience.

Used correctly, your CTAs can encourage more than just cart conversions. They can also convince people to sign up for your newsletter via a subscription form, take a survey, or begin a free demo.

Regardless of the CTAs that you choose to implement, personalization will quickly make your requests more effective. According to studies, CTAs that are personalized are 202% more effective than generic alternatives.

For instance, Byhumankind.com uses a crucial statement: “Great personal care products don’t have to come at earth’s expense.” Followed by an engaging CTA to drive positive action from their audience. The company knows that they’re appealing to a customer interested in saving the planet, so they make the benefits of “Getting Started” obvious immediately.

Using data provided by clients, designers can figure out exactly how to position CTAs and offers for customers. For instance, notice that Humankind has a green colored CTA button.

Most buttons take advantage of bold colors like red and orange, but the green shade for Humankind further highlights the nature-driven personality of the brand.

Relevant Product Recommendations

Repeat customers are infinitely more valuable than people who purchase just one item from your site.

However, convincing a standard customer to become a repeat client isn’t easy. Sometimes, clients need a push to determine what they want to buy next.

Fortunately, as a website designer, you can help with that. Using dynamic modules in the product pages of your customer’s website, you can show individual end-users what they might want to purchase next from a specific brand.

These dynamic modules can use information about what each customer has purchased in the past, to suggest a new product or service. Amazon do particularly well in this regard, leveraging a vast marketplace and treasure trove of information to make quality recommendations. But you don’t need to be designing a considerable website for a global business like Amazon to take advantage of dynamic suggestions. Any business with a focus on hyper-personalization can benefit from this strategy.

Increased Time on Site

Any form of personalization on a website can significantly improve the amount of time a customer spends in that digital environment.

Imagine walking into a restaurant that seems as though it was designed specifically for you. The décor, the seating arrangements, and even the menu are customized to your taste. You’re more likely to spend your time and money there than on any generic food place you find on the street.

The same rules apply to website design. The more hyper-personalized you can get with your client’s design, based on what you know about their customers, the easier it will be to keep customers engaged.

For instance, the WarnerMusic.no website entices visitors with various high-quality images of popular bands and artists, before providing them with endless information about the brand and what it does. The designer of this site knew that it needed to appeal to the visual demands of the audience first, before offering useful information like featured artist lists, News, and blog posts to keep the users on site.

Hyper personalization is all about figuring out what kind of end-user you’re designing for, so you can build the digital environment that’s more engaging and compelling to them. Some designers even create dynamic pages that change depending on whether a customer is a repeat client or a new visitor.

Improved Loyalty and Affinity

Finally, it’s human nature that we all want to spend time with the people that treat us best.

We all value excellent customer service, which is why customer experience is the most significant differentiating factor for any organization today.

Web-based personalization works in a similar way. When you use your design tools to make the site experience that you give to each visitor warm, individualized, and welcoming, then your clients are sure to see a boost in customer loyalty.

Around 89% of consumers say that they’ll only consider buying from brands that care about them. As a designer, you can convince every website visitor that they’re going to get the experience they deserve. Just look at how TheHappyHero.com instantly lets clients know that they can expect a fun and friendly interaction on every page.

Accessing useful data from the companies that you’re working with before you begin developing and designing a website could be the key to creating happier customers and higher conversions.

The more delighted end-users are with the experience that a website gives them, the happier that your client will be with you – increasing the impact of your design portfolio.

If you can create customer loyalty and affinity for your client, then you will be able to develop the same feelings between yourself and your client. This could mean that you earn more recommendations as a designer and build your position as a leader in the industry.

Hyper-Personalization is Crucial for 2021

As companies continue to worry about how they can safely use data without crossing the line when it comes to customer privacy, hyper-personalization has stayed just out of the mainstream. While it may be a while before we see every website designer starting their process with piles of in-depth data, it seems that we are heading in that direction.

Customers in 2021 and beyond will undoubtedly want a more advanced and customized experience from the brands that they interact with – particularly in an era where it’s becoming much easier to deliver meaningful moments online.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

Autre source / On the same theme

18 novembre 2020/par Service comm.

So, You’Ve Won An Exciting Redesign…What Now?

Actualités, Actualités

The transitioning of power is fraught with difficulties. Different teams have different values, different experience, different expertise, different priorities, and that leads to different tooling, and different methodologies.

It’s tempting to think of web design as an end-to-end process, starting with research and concluding with metrics. The reality is that most designers and developers join projects part-way through an ongoing process.

That leaves us with a difficult choice: do we try and meet the client’s expectations with our own toolset, or adapt to the tools and processes that are already in place?

For anyone who’s taking over a web project from a different designer/developer/agency (D/D/A), here’s a practical guide to help you make a success of the transition.

Step 1: Find Out What Went Wrong

99.99% of the time, something broke down in the previous client-D/D/A relationship.

In my experience it’s almost never about money. Most clients are willing to pay above the basic market rate if they believe they’re receiving a good return on their investment. A client that tells you the previous D/D/A is simply too expensive is anticipating negotiating your fees.

happy clients don’t shop around

Occasionally you’ll find that a freelance designer has been headhunted by an agency, and is no longer available. Occasionally the company outgrows a D/D/A, moving into areas that the D/D/A doesn’t support. But these situations are rare, happy clients — even moderately content clients — don’t shop around. If they’re speaking to you, something motivated them to do so.

It is alarmingly common that a D/D/A simply goes AWOL. It’s most common at the lower end of the market where the sums of money involved are less likely to prompt a legal dispute. Frequently, an unreputable D/D/A will ghost a client in favour of a better, newer opportunity.

Sometimes the client hires a new manager, and the new manager ushers in revised expectations that the previous D/D/A can’t meet.

Most commonly, the previous D/D/A has dropped the ball one too many times — mistakes happen, and reasonable clients will tolerate them provided they are rectified promptly, but everyone has their limits.

Most clients will be more than happy to explain what went wrong in the previous relationship; it will inevitably be a one-sided explanation, but it will help you to understand the client’s expectations.

Be extremely wary of a client who doesn’t know what went wrong. Be even more wary of a client who talks about “upgrading” their outsourcing — they’re trying to flatter you. In these cases the client may well be hiding something — like their failure to pay invoices.

Remember: at some point the previous D/D/A was new, and excited about having a new client, was optimistic about the project, and it didn’t end well. The best way to not repeat mistakes is to learn from them, and to do that you need to know what they were.

Step 2: Carry Out a Comprehensive Audit

We’re often so eager to secure new work, that we rush to have the client sign on the dotted line, expecting to be able to tackle any problems later.

It is imperative that as a professional, you keep your promises. Before you make those promises, take your time to understand the project and related business. If a client is invested enough to sign a contract with you they won’t mind you doing due diligence first.

Is There Still a Relationship With the Previous Designer/Developer/Agency?

Clients rarely have a full picture of their project — they’re not web professionals, if they were they’d be building their own sites. Your best source of information is the previous D/D/A.

Before you contact the previous D/D/A check with your client; it’s possible they don’t know they’re being replaced yet. If your client is fine with it, then reach out.

When you speak to the previous D/D/A be sensitive to the fact that you’re taking money out of their pocket. Certainly the previous D/D/A may tell you where to go, they may ignore you altogether, but most will be pragmatic about handing over a project if only to ensure their final invoice to their now ex-client is paid promptly.

Every site has its idiosyncrasies, if you can establish a friendly rapport with the previous D/D/A then the transition will be considerably less bumpy.

Who Controls the Domain Name(s)?

In my opinion a company’s domain name(s) should always be held by the company; it’s such an essential business asset that it should be guarded as jealously as the company’s bank accounts.

Unfortunately there are businesses that outsource everything to do with the web. If the break with the previous D/D/A is acrimonious then securing the domain name could be problematic.

It’s not your job to secure the domain name — you have no leverage, the client does. It is your job to impress upon the client how mission-critical the domain name(s) is.

Who Controls the Hosting?

Hosting arrangements vary from project to project. It’s not uncommon, nor unreasonable, for the previous D/D/A to be hosting the client’s site on their own space. If that is the case, be prepared to migrate it quickly either to your own server, or a dedicated space.

If you’re migrating onto a new space pay particular attention to the email provision. Taking over a project usually means taking over a live project, and that usually means email accounts.

In any case, you need full access to the hosting space. You certainly need FTP access, you probably need SSH access.

In addition to hosting, check if your client’s site uses a CDN, and if it does, who has control of it.

Backend Source Code

Once you have FTP access to the hosting server you can probably grab all backend code from the server.

The benefit of grabbing the code from the server — as opposed to accepting files from the previous D/D/A — is that you can be absolutely certain you’re getting the current (working) code.

If the client has broken with the previous D/D/A because they were unable to deliver on a particular task, you do not want to be working with files that have been partially modified.

Fresh Installs

If you’re working with something like a CMS, it’s often a good idea to run a fresh install on your server, and then copy across any templates, plugins, and migrate the database.

Frontend Source Code

When it comes to acquiring source code, frontend code is far more problematic than backend.

frontend code is far more problematic than backend

If the previous D/D/A is even part-way competent then the CSS and JavaScript on the web space is minified. Minified CSS is not too problematic and can be unminified fairly easily, but you do not want to be unpicking a minified JavaScript file — I once had a project in which a developer had minified his own code in the same file with all of his dependencies, including both Vue and jQuery [yes, I know].

Dealing with frontend source code can take on an additional dimension if you discover that the previous D/D/A used techniques you don’t — using Less instead of Sass, or writing scripts in TypeScript.

Unminifying CSS & JavaScript

Unminifying (or beautifying, or prettifying) code is reasonably easy. There are tools online that will help, including Unminify, Online CSS Unminifier, FreeFormatter, JS Minify Unminify, and more. You’ll also find plenty of extensions for code editors including HTML-CSS-JS Prettify for Sublime Text, and Atom-Beautify for Atom. You’ll find that some editors have the functionality built in.

A word of warning: code beautification does not restore comments, and in the case of JavaScript, does not unobfuscate variable names. Beautifying code is no substitute for a copy of the original, unminified source code.

Emergency Measures

If unminifying the source code isn’t possible for any reason, or more likely, the unminified JavaScript still looks like minified code — albeit nicely formatted minified code — then your last resort is to import the code and override it where necessary.

The first thing to do in this case is to explain the situation to your client. Make sure they understand this is a temporary patch that you’ll iron-out as you rebuild parts of the project.

Then, copy and paste the old minified code into a fresh project setup. For CSS that probably means creating a legacy.scss file, including the old CSS, and importing it into your own Sass. For JavaScript, create a legacy.js file, add all the old JS, and import that.

This will result in a much bigger set of files than necessary, you may end up using !important in your style declarations [yuck], and you’ll trigger lots of Lighthouse warnings about surplus code.

However, in the likely event that your client has a long list of changes they wanted live yesterday, this dirty hack will give you a working site that you can then rebuild piece by piece over time.

Assets

Assets normally means images, and images can normally be grabbed via FTP.

Occasionally — although less occasionally now image files rarely contain text — you’ll need the source files to make changes to images.

Whether or not the client has them, or if the previous D/D/A will hand them over, depends largely on the agreement between the client and the previous D/D/A.

Most businesses are reasonably aware of the importance of brand assets, so you’ll probably find they at least have a copy of their logo; whether it’s an SVG or a JPG is another matter entirely. Impress upon them the importance of locating those files for you.

Third Party Code

It is rare to receive a project that doesn’t rely on third party code. That third party code is probably entwined in the custom source code, and unpicking it is a time-consuming job.

It is very likely the previous D/D/A used a library or framework, and given the increasing number of them, it’s even more likely that the library or framework they used is not the one you prefer.

Whether you choose to unpick the code and swap out the previous D/D/A’s dependencies for your own preferences (usually faster in the long term), or whether you choose to work with what you’re given (usually faster in the short term) is entirely up to you.

In my experience it’s no hardship to pick up another CSS library; switching from one JavaScript framework to another is a substantially bigger job involving not just syntax but core concepts.

Beware Build Environments

Everyone has their own way of doing things. Some D/D/As embrace build environments, some do not. Some build environments are simple to use, some are not. Some build environments are adaptable to your process, some are not.

Unlike adopting a library, or even a framework, adopting a new build process is rarely a good idea

Build environments are numerous — Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack are all popular — and D/D/As are almost as opinionated about them as they are about CMS.

In lieu of raw files, it’s not uncommon for the previous D/D/A to tell you to “just run such-and-such CLI” command, to match up your local environment to theirs. Unlike adopting a library, or even a framework, adopting a new build process is rarely a good idea because you’re relegating yourself from expert to novice at a time when you’ve yet to earn your new client’s trust.

Stand your ground. Their approach failed, that’s why you’ve been brought in. You do you.

Who is Licensed?

Any third part code that has been paid for is licensed. Always check who holds these licenses. As well as being legally required, valid licenses are normally required for updates, bug fixes, and in some cases support.

Common pitfalls include: font licenses (which may be licensed under the previous D/D/A’s Creative Cloud, Fontstand, Monotype, etc. account); stock image licenses (which may be licensed for use by the previous D/D/A alone); and plugins (which are frequently bulk-licensed to D/D/As in bundles).

It’s depressingly common to find clients using unlicensed assets. On more than one occasion I’ve had to explain to a client the potential consequences of using pirated fonts.

Fortunately it’s increasingly common for third party providers to attach a licence to a specified domain, which means you may be able to claim the licence on behalf of your client. Major suppliers like CMS and ecommerce solutions frequently have an option for the previous developer to release a licence and allow you to claim it.

In the case of licensing, if you’re unsure, do not be afraid to reach out to the third party provider and check with them if your client is licensed once they break ties with their previous D/D/A.

The only thing that sours a client relationship faster than telling them they need to buy a license they thought they’d already paid for, is telling them they’re being sued for copyright infringement.

Protect your client, and protect yourself, by making sure everything is licensed properly. If you can get something in writing to that effect from the previous D/D/A, do.

Who Has the Research and Analytics?

One of the major benefits of taking over a site, as opposed to building from scratch, is that you have a measurable set of site-specific data to guide your decision making.

This only applies if you have the data, so ask to be added to the client’s analytics account.

There’s a strong chance that the design research carried out by the previous D/D/A is considered an internal document, not a deliverable, by the previous D/D/A. Check with your client: if they paid for the research (is it specified on an invoice?) then they’re entitled to a copy.

We Have a Blog Too…

Clients have a tendency to use the term “website” as a catch-all term for everything digital.

When you take responsibility for a website, you’re almost always expected to take responsibility for any digital service the client uses. That means, newsletter services like Mailchimp, customer service accounts like Intercom, and 227,000 page WordPress blogs that they forgot to mention in the initial brief.

Repeat the whole of Step 2 for every additional app, micro-site, blog, and anything else the client has, unless you are expressly told by the client not to.

Step 3: The Point of No Return

Up until now, you haven’t asked the client to sign on the dotted line. This whole process is part of your due diligence.

By checking these things you can identify unforeseen problems, and potential costs. Are you tied to an obscure build process? Do you need to relicense the CMS? Do you need to recreate all of the site assets?

Some of these conversations are hard to have, but the time to have them is now

If there is any question of the project being more complex than anticipated, have an honest conversation with your client — they will appreciate your transparency, and they’ll appreciate being kept informed. Any client who doesn’t value a clear picture of what they’re paying you for, isn’t a client you want.

Some of these conversations are hard to have, but the time to have them is now, not three months down the line.

This is the point of no return. From this point on, any problems aren’t the previous D/D/A’s, they’re yours.

Change the Passwords

For every service you have, from the newsletter login, to the CMS login, to the FTP details, change the password. (Make sure you notify the client.)

Set Up a Staging Site

You’re going to need a staging site so your new client can preview the work you’ve done for them.

Set the staging site up immediately, before you’ve made any changes to the code. In doing so you’ll discover early on if there are files missing, or issues with the files you do have.

Successfully Transitioning a Project

When a client commissions a site from scratch they are filled with expectation. The fact that they are leaving their previous D/D/A and seeking you out demonstrates that their experience fell short of their hopes.

You now have a client with realistic — perhaps even pessimistic — expectations. You have a benchmark against which your work can be objectively measured.

When problems arise, as they invariably will, never try to blame the previous D/D/A; it was your job to assess the state of play before you started work. If there is an issue with legacy assets, you should have brought it to your client’s attention early on.

If you learn from the previous D/D/A’s mistakes, you won’t be handing the project on to someone else any time soon.

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

9 novembre 2020/par Service comm.

9 Ways To Boost Your Domain Authority

Actualités, Actualités

Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking metric that predicts how well a site will rank online. It goes by a scale of 1 to 100 — the closer you are to 100, the better your odds of ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs), thus giving you more clicks.

To see how your site currently ranks, visit Moz’s free Link Explorer to test your DA. Just type your website URL in the search bar and click “Analyze”. Just remember: don’t kick yourself if your DA is smaller than 30 to 50. If you follow these 9 tips today, you’ll most definitely see your DA score improve.

1. Domain Name Age

You know that old saying, right? Wisdom comes with age. Well, guess what? The same is true for your domain name. If your domain name doesn’t have an ‘old’ age, then it’ll rank lower, and users online might not see your site as legitimate.

But with an older domain name, not only will users see your site as more legitimate, but it’ll also have a much higher DA score than younger domain names. In other words, every time you change your domain, you might be doing more harm than good to it, since you’re actually knocking down the credibility you’ve built up over the years by starting from scratch.

Therefore, pick an easy-to-remember domain name that’s not only relevant to your niche, but it’s also something that you’re willing to keep for a very long time.

2. On-Page Optimization

Then, it’s time to optimize all the following on your pages:

Code;
Content;
Site structure;
Metatags;
Other on-page elements (H1, Title tags, Image alt tag, Site architecture, etc.).

Improving your DA with optimization can make your site be more search-engine-friendly.

3. Create Great Content

Want to attract high-quality links from multiple domains in your niche? Good news! More attraction to your site comes from creating high-quality content that appeals to your target audience. Otherwise, poor-quality content will only scare people away.

So, in providing the best content possible, that will definitely help you improve your DA score (and even give you many additional SEO benefits).

4. Internal Link Improvement

Why worry about earning external links when your internal links need the most attention? Yes, focusing too much on external links can make you lose sight of linking internally.

So, why internal links? These links help nudge visitors to what they’re trying to look for on your website. In that way, visitors are getting the best user experience, while you reap the rewards of having an increased DA score.

5. Link Profile Clean-Up

Having a clean link profile is essential, since it helps you obtain and maintain a great DA score. So, to clean up your link profile, you must remove the bad links from it.

In this process, you can use tools like:

These tools help you figure out any inappropriate or unwanted links.

After the link audit is complete, contact the website owners to have them either delete the link or add the “nofollow tag” (devalues the link). If this doesn’t work, use the Google Disavow tool to remove said links from your profile.

6. Know Your Niche

When running a site, it’s important for you to be the expert in what you have to offer online – and your DA is no exception to this. Becoming an authoritative figure in your niche allows you to gain the confidence of readers, while providing expert advice to the community.

If you have amazing content (i.e. guest blogs on industry-related forums) and clever ways to engage your target audience, then people will see you as an authority to your niche. This not only enhances your brand, but also increases your DA score.

7. Be Mobile-Friendly

Nowadays, people are on their phones, tablets, etc. Whatever device that they can use on the go, they’ll use. In other words, mobile isn’t just the way of the future – it’s happening right now, outpacing laptops since 2014. So, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly yet, then now is the time to fix that!

If your website hasn’t been optimized for mobile use yet, not only will it hurt your search rankings (since Google favors mobile-friendly sites), but you’ll also lose out on users visiting your site to begin with.

So, go to Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, and then run a test for your domain. Afterwards, Google will give you a detailed report of how mobile-friendly your site is, and what you can do to improve it.

8. Improve Page Speed

Let’s face it: No one likes to wait for a webpage to load; they want quick results. So, if your site isn’t loading fast enough, then users will get frustrated and most likely go to another site. So, why not improve your page speed?

First, find the cause of your website running slower than it should. You can do this by running your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights; it’ll analyze the speed of your site. And then, it will identify some effective ways for you to make your site faster and consequently improve your DA score.

9. Utilize Social Media

Finally, it’s important to increase your social signals, when it comes to gaining more authority with your domain. While search engines like Google won’t insist that sites make social signals a priority to increase their rankings, site runners must still take advantage of social media to do the following:

Promote their sites;
Promote their products and services;
Tell people about any events and contests.

As a result, sites are more likely to get likes, shares, and tweets through social media, versus going solo in search engines.

Conclusion

Domain authority is extremely important for your site. First, DA allows you to analyze how well your website does in the search space. Plus, it allows you to compare the performance of your website with that of your rival sites, thus showing you where you stand in search engine results.

So, why not get your site thriving today by improving and maintaining your DA score today? Your site will thank you for it!

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

6 novembre 2020/par Service comm.

The Quest for Convenient and Efficient Speech Recognition

Actualités, Méthodes et organisation des process IT

Introduction

A few years ago, speech recognition technology was a punchline in many a sitcom’s jokes. Understandably, the technology was in its infancy prone to errors. Now, reaching new levels of maturity and wide acceptance, Amazon’s Alexa is just one example of this, the technology is now being implemented in novel ways. The need for developing APIs has now evolved from making the technology work to how it can be done conveniently and efficiently.

Accessibility

Moving beyond the technology’s threat to privacy one of the greatest virtues of speech recognition technology is its accessibility. In providing the disabled with a technology that allows interaction and interfacing with other technologies, speech recognition has become a technology at the forefront of providing accessibility and promoting inclusivity. For the workplace, the benefits range from more productive employees to promoting greater diversity amongst the workforce.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

29 octobre 2020/par Service comm.

Making Minimalism Functional in Web Design

Actualités, Actualités

Today, great design isn’t just about conveying the right amount of information in a certain number of pages.

There’s more to creating the perfect website than experimenting with visuals and sound. Designers need to think carefully about how each element of their site impacts the overall user experience.

After all, with billions of websites available to explore, it takes something truly immersive to convince your client’s audience that they should stay on their pages. The more convenient and attractive your websites are, the more likely it is that visitors will want to stick around.

Minimalism, one of the more popular styles of web design from the last few years, can sometimes assist designers in making attractive and effective websites more functional.

The less clutter and confusion there is on a page, the easier it is to navigate.

So, how do you embrace the benefits of functional minimalism?

Understanding Functional Minimalism

Many webs designers are convinced that minimalism is all about aesthetics.

They see a website like Hugeinc.com and assume that the minimalist appearance is all about making the website as attractive as possible.

However, the underlying ideas of minimalism in web design go much deeper than this. The history of minimalist design begins with Japanese culture. Japan has long focused on balancing simplicity and beauty with its architecture, interior design, and even graphic design. In the Western world, minimalism got its day in the sun in the web design environment, after customers endured years of cluttered and complicated web pages with difficult navigation, overwhelming information and clashing graphics.

Designers began to experiment with the idea that less really could be more — particularly when it came to the digital landscape.

The Functional Rules of Minimalist Web Design

For a while, minimalism was the most popular style for a website. During 2018, in particular, minimalist web design soared to the top of the designer demand list, as companies fell in love with a combination of white space, simple navigation and bold text.

While now, there are other design trends stepping into the industry, designers can still benefit from exploring some of the essential rules of functional minimalism. After all, visual complexity has been proven to damage a person’s perception of a website.

Additionally, a study conducted by the EyeQuant group found that a clean and simple design can lead to a lower bounce rate. Minimalism gives viewers less to contend with on a page, which can allow for a simpler and more straightforward experience. Additionally, a clean website can also drive additional benefits, including faster loading times, better responsivity between screen sizes and more.

Because you’re only using a few images and well-spaced text, you can even experiment with different strategies, like graphics and dynamic fonts. Look at the Manuel Rueda website, for instance, it’s a great example of how a minimalist design can be brimming with activity.

So, how can any designer use the principles of functional minimalism?

1. Focus on the Essentials

First, just like when designing a landing page, designers need to ensure that they’re concentrating only on the elements in the page that really need to be there.

This means removing anything on the website that doesn’t support the end-goals of the specific page that the viewer is using. Any pictures, background noise, buttons, or even navigation features that aren’t going to support the initial experience that the visitor needs, must go.

Think about what’s going to distract your visitors from the things that are important and concentrate on giving everything a purpose. For instance, the Plus63.org website instantly introduces the visitors to the purpose of the website, then allows users to scroll down to get more information. The data is spread clearly through the home page, pulling the viewer into a story.

2. Embrace the Positives of Negative Space

Negative space is one of the fundamental components of good minimalist web design.

Every part of a good website doesn’t need to be filled with noise to make a difference. White, or negative space can help to give your viewer the room they need to fully understand the experience that they’re getting.

From a functional perspective, it’s the difference between placing someone in an overflowing storage container and asking them to find what they need or placing them in a room where items are carefully spaced out, labelled, and waiting for discovery.

The Hatchinc.co website uses negative space to ensure that information is easy to consume. You can find the different pages of the site easily, the social media buttons, and the newsletter subscription tool. Plus, you get a chance to see some of the work behind the site.

3. Make it Obvious

One of the biggest problems that consumers have encountered in recent years, is the concept of “choice overload”.

Whether you’re in a store, or on a website, you’re never sure what to do first. Do you check out the blog posts on the site to learn more about the authority of the company? Do you visit the “About” page, to see where the brand come from? Do you head to their product pages?

As a designer, functional minimalism can help you to make it obvious what your audience should do next. As soon as you arrive on the AYR.com website, you’re not overwhelmed with choice. You can either head to your bag, “shop now”, or check the menu.

Since the “Shop Now” CTA is the biggest and most compelling, the chances are that most visitors will click that first, increasing the company’s chance of conversions.

4. Simplify the Navigation (But Don’t Hide It)

The AYR.com example above brings us to another concept of functional minimalism.

While minimalism and simplicity aren’t always the same thing, they should go hand-in-hand. When you’re designing for functional minimalism, you should be concentrating on helping visitors to accomplish tasks as quickly and easily as possible, without distraction.

That means that rather than overwhelming your audience with a huge selection of pages that they can visit at the top or side of the screen, it may be worth looking into simpler navigation options. A single menu icon that expands into a full list of items remains a popular design choice – particularly in the era of mobile web design.

For instance, look at the simple menu on newvision-opticien.com.

With this basic approach, designers can ensure that visitors are more likely to click through to the pages that their clients want their customers to visit. They can still find what they need in the menu, but it’s not taking up space on the page, or distracting them.

5. Set Great Expectations with the Top of the Screen

Functional minimalism can also help today’s designers to more quickly capture the attention of their visitors from the moment they click into a website.

The content that’s visible at the top of the page for your visitors is what will encourage them to take the next step in their online experience. Make sure that you’re providing something that keeps your audience interested and gives them the information they need.

That way, you’ll lower the risk of high bounce rates for your clients, while also taking advantage of minimalism’s ability to deliver quick access to information for your audience.

At the top of the page, the Kerem.co website instantly introduces the visitor into what the website is all about, and what they should do next.

You can even deliver more information in one chunk at the top of the page, without cluttering the environment, by using good UI animation.

Consider implementing a slideshow of pictures that flip from one image to the next, or a font section that dynamically changes as your audience has chance to read each sentence.

6. Use Functional Minimalism in the Right Spaces

Remember, functional minimalism isn’t just for home pages.

Depending on what you want to accomplish for your client, you could also embed the components of minimalism into landing pages, portfolios, and squeeze pages too.

After all, when there’s less clutter and confusion on a page to distract a potential audience, there’s a greater chance that your visitors will scroll to the bottom of the page and complete a conversion. For instance, look at how simple and attractive the Muzzleapp.com landing page is.

The page provides useful information and tells customers exactly what they need to do next. There’s no confusion, no complexity, and nothing to hold visitors back.

Just be careful. While functional minimalism can be very useful, it won’t be right for every website. A lack of elements can be harmful to websites that rely heavily on content. That’s because low information density will force your user to scroll excessively for the content that they need. Using functional minimalism correctly requires a careful evaluation of where this technique will be the most suitable.

Minimalism Can be Functional

A minimalist design isn’t just an aesthetic choice. The right aspects of minimalism can simplify interfaces on the web by eliminating unnecessary elements and reducing content that doesn’t support an end goal.

The key is to ensure that you’re focusing on a combination of aesthetics and usability when creating the right design. An easy-to-navigate and beautiful website can be a powerful tool for any business.

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21 octobre 2020/par Service comm.

Top New CMS Plugins, October 2020

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Plugins offer a ton of benefits to developers and website administrators; from flexibility, to saving time in development, the right plugin is priceless to a project.

In this article, we’ll cover a list of the best new plugins for October 2020. You’ll find useful plugins for WordPress, Craft, Shopify, and Joomla.

Let’s get started.

WordPress

Sticky Post Expire

Sticky Post Expire is a simple plugin for WordPress that allows you to add an expiration date to your sticky posts. When the expiration date you set on a post expires, the post will automatically no longer be sticky. All you need to do is install/enable the plugin and a meta checkbox will appear in your posts admin area. It’s in this checkbox you will set the post’s expiration date.

Product page shipping calculator for WooCommerce

The Product Page Shipping Calculator plugin allows your customers to calculate the cost of shipping before adding the product to their cart. The plugin also allows customers to see the available shipping methods for their area. If the product cannot be shipped to the customer’s location, the plugin will notify the customer. All calculations are done using Ajax, so you don’t have to worry about the plugin slowing down your site.

Payment Page

Payment Page makes it easy to collect payments on your WordPress website. The plugin allows you to connect to any payment gateway platform of choice. You can also receive one-time or recurring payments using Payment Page. The plugin comes with beautifully designed templates that you can customize to fit your brand and style. The form builder helps you increase your sales and conversions. You can collect payment in any currency. After payment, customers will also receive a confirmation message.

WP Roadmap

Wp Roadmap is a product feedback board for WordPress. The plugins allow you to display your company’s product roadmap on your WordPress website or blog. The plugin will display your new products, business developments, upcoming events, achievements, awards, and future projects on your site. WP Roadmap also gives you the option to collect and create feedback boards. The plugin comes with an intuitive interface and works with any WordPress theme.

LiveSession

LiveSession is a session replay plugin for WordPress. The plugin allows you to record everything happening on your site, including clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements. This plugin helps you understand how your visitors interact with your website. You can rewatch the videos as many times as you like. Instead of recording every single visitor on your site, LiveSession will record visitors with a high engagement score.

The plugin also comes with a feature called Rage Clicks. This feature helps you identify when visitors encounter Javascript errors. The plugin also has a beta feature called Clickmap. It helps you identify the specific elements on your site that visitors clicked and how many times. There is also a heatmap feature that identifies which pages on your site get the most interaction. The plugin is very useful in improving your user experience (UX) and conversion rates. It easily integrates with Google Analytics, Segment, Intercom, LiveChat, HelpScout, Olark, Wix, Shopify, and WooCommerce.

Auction Feed

Auction Feed makes it easy to display eBay items on your WordPress website. Visitors to your website will be able to search and buy products directly from your site. The plugin comes with a variety of styles to fit any WordPress theme. You can also add a product description above or below the product image. Customers won’t have to leave your website before making their purchases. The plugin is also free to use.

Floating Related Posts

Floating Related Posts is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display a banner with a list of related posts on your website. The banner can appear at the top or bottom of the web page. You can set the banner to pop up using a time filter or scroll trigger. The plugin is also compatible with Google Analytics. You can customize the banner background color, font size, button style, and text color. The plugin can be translated into any language.

Simple Restrict Content

The Simple Restrict Content plugin allows you to restrict the content that visitors can access on your WordPress site. You can choose who can access content on your website by setting up roles. The simple lightweight plugin restricts different content types, including, posts, web pages, and WooCommerce products. The plugin is available in Spanish and English.

Easy Video Publisher

Easy Video Publisher is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily publish YouTube videos on your website. You can import YouTube videos from multiple channels. You can also schedule the YouTube videos to automatically upload to your website. Note that a YouTube API key is needed to import multiple videos at a time from a specific channel. The plugin allows you to use multiple API keys.

Preloader Awesome

Preloader Awesome is a preloader plugin for WordPress that allows you to create a page preloader interface while the rest of the webpage is still loading. Preloaders are interface elements that notify visitors that your website hasn’t crashed, just processing before serving content. Some of the features of the plugin include 14 page transition styles, progress bar, GIF support, 10+ default CSS loader, progress status counter, unlimited color, and counter font size options. The plugin is responsive and works on all modern browsers.

Menu Hover Effect

The Menu Hover Effect plugin allows you to add hover effects to the menu bar on your website. With this plugin, you don’t need to learn CSS. This plugin gives you 20 CSS menu hover options to choose from. It is a lightweight plugin and won’t affect your website speed.

Better Comments

The Better Comments plugin allows WordPress users to easily customize the comment section of their website. With the plugin, you can customize the look of your comment form fields, match the submit button with the colors of your site, and hide the comment’s date. The plugin also allows you to create a comment policy section. You can further customize the comment fields to highlight when they are selected and typed in. If you find rounded avatars common, the plugin also offers a hexagonal avatar option.

WP Pocket URLs

WP Pocket URLs is a handy WordPress Plugin that helps you manage your affiliate links. The plugin allows users to automatically shorten and track any affiliate link on their website. You can also manually shorten the links on your website. Each time a visitor clicks on a link you get access to information like click date/time, country, IP address, etc. You can also categorize your links and also create custom permalinks. There is also a dashboard widget that displays your top 10 links. On the “Reports” page, you can generate clicks reports. You can filter the reports by Month/Year, link category, country, and link title.

Craft CMS

Formie

Formie is a Craft CMS plugin that allows you to create user-friendly forms. The plugin comes with a drag and drop builder for creating forms. You can store user form submissions in your control panel in case you want to review them later. When a user submits a form, you will get an email notification. Formie also has an in-built keyword blocking feature to protect you from spam. The plugin has several integrationS: API for Elements, Address Providers, Captchas, CRM tools, Webhooks, and Email Marketing software. You can also create your custom integration. You can add over 25 fields to your forms using Formie.

Craftagram

Craftagram is a Craft CMS plugin for adding any Instagram feed to your website. Since the plugin uses the official Instagram API, you don’t have to worry about your website getting blacklisted. Craftagram also handles pagination for your Instagram feed.

Shopify

We’re Open

We’re Open is a handy plugin for Shopify users. The plugin lets your customers know when you are open to receive new orders. Once your business hours are close, customers won’t be able to make new orders. A message will be displayed in your store that you are closed. The plugin ensures that you only receive orders when you are open. It works in any time zone and the API easily integrates with mobile apps.

Punch Metrics

Punch Metrics is a Shopify Plugin that helps you track your store’s visitors and also analyze their behavior. The plugin offers real-time data on your site’s visitors, the pages that see the most engagement, and which devices are the most popular. You can also record and replay visitors’ sessions so you can know exactly what they did on your site. Punch Metrics also has a heatmap tracking feature to understand which elements on your site get the most clicks.

Joomla

Simple Sliders

Simple Sliders is a content plugin for Joomla. The plugin allows users to easily create accordion sliders in their articles. You can add the sliders to your Joomla articles by adding this code:

{slider title="Slider 1 Title" class="blue"}
Slider 1 content.
{slider title="Slider 2 Title" class="red"}
Slider 2 content.
{/sliders}

Jitsi Conferencing

Jitsi Conferencing is a video conferencing plugin for Joomla. The plugin will allow you to host meetings and easily connect with your clients. The module is simple and effective to use.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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19 octobre 2020/par Service comm.

How to Get Dark Mode Design Right

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Dark themes are everywhere these days.

As human beings continue to spend more of their time interacting with technology, dark themes provide a more relaxing way to engage with the digital world. More often than not, these themes are easier on the eyes, more attractive, and perfect for the dedicated user.

Throughout 2020, countless leading brands have debuted their own version of the dark theme. Google has a solution for your Drive, while Apple and Android have built dark theme performance right into their operating systems.

If you haven’t learned how to make the most out of dark mode yet, then you could be missing out on an excellent opportunity to differentiate your design skills, and earn more clients going forward.

Why Dark Mode?

Before we dive too deeply into the possibilities of creating your own dark theme, let’s examine what dark mode is, and why it’s so effective.

Ultimately, dark themes are created to reduce the amount of luminance emitted by everything from your desktop and laptop, to your smartphone and smartwatch. Dark themes help to improve the visual ergonomics of design, by reducing eye strain, adjusting brightness to suit current lighting conditions, and more. Additionally, many dark mode offerings are also fantastic at conserving battery life.

Here are some of the main benefits of adding dark themes to your design portfolio.

Better user experience: A focus on user experience is one of the most important trends of the digital age. You need to be willing to deliver incredible experiences to everyone who visits your website if you want to stand out today. Dark mode reduces everything from eye strain, to battery power consumption. This helps to keep customers on a website for longer.
Innovation and cutting edge appeal: Most companies want to prove that they can stay on the cutting edge of their industry. The ability to offer an opt-in dark mode version of a website theme or appearance can help your clients to stand out from the crowd. As the environment becomes more mobile-focused, more companies will be looking for designers that can provide the best mobile experiences.
Support for universal design: Dark mode isn’t just great for people who have light sensitivity at night. This solution could be more comfortable for visually-impaired users who would struggle with eye strain when visiting your websites otherwise. If you want your content to be more inclusive for a wider range of viewers, then learning how to design for dark mode is a good way to start.

Best Practices When Designing for Dark Mode

Designing for dark mode is easier than you’d think. Most of the time, it involves simply thinking about how you can replace some of the brighter, more overwhelming aspects of your site, with something deeper and darker.

Here are some useful tips that will get you moving in the right direction.

1. Experiment with Colors

A big issue for a lot of web designers when it comes to developing a dark mode solution is that they get too caught up with things like pure white text against pure black backgrounds. However, this high-contrast option can be a little much after a while.

It’s often much easier to use a dark grey as your primary surface color, instead of a true black. Additionally, rather than using bright white, think about slightly off-white alternatives that will be warmer to the eye.

Experiment with surfaces and color combinations that are unlikely to cause too much eye strain. Dark grey foundations often offer a wider range of depth, too, because you can demonstrate shadows on grey.

Additionally, when you are experimenting with colors, remember that saturated colors often vibrate painfully against very dark surfaces, making them harder to read. Desaturating your colors will help to reduce the contrast and make your websites more welcoming.

Lighter tones in the 200-50 range will have better readability on dark themes. However, you can always experiment with your choices. Google Material Design recommends using a contrast level of around 15:8:1 between your background and text.

2. Consider the Emotional Impact

Much of the effort involved with dark mode design is figuring out how certain colors work together. It’s easy to get carried away with stark contrasts, particularly when you’re used to working with a white background. However, you need to remember that you’re designing for a user that’s primarily looking for an easier and more subdued browsing experience.

While you’re working, remember to consider the emotional aspect of the design too. The emotion in colors can make or break a buyer’s journey in any environment. However, an often overlooked-aspect of color psychology, is that people perceive shades differently when they’re on a black background.

For instance, think of the color green. On a light background, it conveys nature and even financial wealth. However, on a dark background, the same green could come across as something venomous, toxic, or even sickly. It’s important to think about the kind of impressions end users are going to get when they arrive on your site.

3. Give Users the Freedom to Choose

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when you begin designing for dark mode, is thinking that you should focus entirely on your dark themes, and nothing else. This lines you up for a problem if you interact with users who want the best of both worlds. If you’re designing for apps in particular, you’re going to need web pages that can switch naturally between light and dark themes.

Learning how to implement both a dark mode and a light mode option into the desks you create will help you to reach a wider selection of customers. Remember, you’ll need to test the performance and impact of your designs in both themes, to check that they deliver the same kind of experience, no matter how your user chooses to browse.

Although dark mode should offer a different experience to end-users, it still needs to feel as though they’re browsing on the same website. That means that you’re going to need to experiment with the most natural combination of light and dark mode options.

4. Remember the Basics

Remember, although the three tips above will help you to get on the right path for dark mode design, you’ll also need to consider the opportunities and limitations of the platforms that you’re designing for. The kind of dark mode experience you can deliver for Google Chrome websites is going to be very different to what you can create for something running on iOS.

Examining the documentation provided by the system that you’re designing for will help you to develop something with a close insight into what’s actually possible.

Other top tips for dark mode design include:

Focus on your content: Make sure that your content stands out on the page, without being too overwhelming.
Test your design: In both light and dark appearances, you need to make sure everything is working as it should be.
Adopt vibrancy for your interfaces: Vibrancy helps to improve the contrast between your background and foreground.
Use semantic colors: Semantic colors adapt to the current appearance of a website automatically. Hard-coded color values that don’t adapt can seem more aggressive.
Desktop tinting: Try experiment with things like transparency and filters to give your websites and apps a slightly warmer tint – ideal for late-night browsing
Icons: Use individual glyphs and icons for dark and light modes if necessary.

Ready to Design for Dark Mode?

Preparing your web development and design portfolio for an era addicted to dark mode can be a complex experience. You need to think carefully about how people are going to browse through your websites and apps when they’re searching for something more subtle, and less visually overwhelming than the websites that we’re used to making.

The most important thing to remember is that everything on your website or application should look just as beautifully tailor-made in dark mode as it does in light mode. Simply adding a dynamic black background when people want to switch settings in an app isn’t enough. You need to go in-depth with your designs and examine how different fonts, colors, and images work together.

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16 octobre 2020/par Service comm.

Branding 101: Choosing the Right Business Name

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When starting a new business (or even venturing into the world of freelancing for the first time), there are some really big, important steps you have to take.

Step #1 is choosing the right business name for your brand identity.

Your business name isn’t something you can casually choose either — especially if you have lofty long-term goals for your company. It’s not as though you can’t change the name down the road, but that comes with a ton of work and will require you to rebuild pretty much everything all over again: your visual brand identity, your reputation, and your SEO…

So, it’s a good idea to spend time choosing a business name that’s going to work for you now and long into the future.

Today, we’re going to go through the process of how to name your brand. These questions will have you thinking beyond just “What name do I like the sound of?” and have you more focused on important questions like “What is my unique value proposition?”.

Let’s get started:

How to Name Your New Business

For those of you considering taking the easy way out and using a business name generator tool, let me show you why that’s a bad idea:

This is a list of business names suggested to me when I told the generator that my business is related to “design”:

Design
Normal Design
Regional Design
Design Partner
Design Stock

Even the more unique names on the list are unusable; they have no connection to me personally or to the kind of business I plan to start.

This is why it’s so important to sort out your brand identity and make sure you pick a business name that resonates with you, and your target audience. To do this yourself, answer the following seven questions:

1. What Services Will You Provide Or Products Will You Sell?

The one thing that name generators get right is including a descriptive word related to your business. That way, it doesn’t take an actual visit to your website or a look through your portfolio to figure out what you do.

Even if you have a very niche specialty, sum up your offering in one or two words. For instance:

Web design
Digital design
Design & development
UX design
Graphic design

Unless you run your business through your own name (which I’ll talk about shortly), your business name should include a simplified version of your offering in it.

2. Who Is Your Target User Persona?

A user persona is a fictional character created using the demographics and psychology of your ideal customer or client. You can use Hubspot’s Make My Persona generator to create a card that documents these details:

Once you sort out who you serve, what makes them tick, and how it fits into the bigger picture of their business, you can better pitch your solution to them.

For instance, Joanna above is a real estate agent and owner whose primary goal is to capture leads and generate sales. You know how effective a real estate website can be for improving an agent’s visibility online and streamlining how they earn money.

So, including words in your business name that speak to that persona as well as their goals might be really useful.

Just keep in mind that web designers don’t always commit to one niche or stick with the same niche over the long run. So, you might not want to make your business name too specific to an industry (e.g. “Real Estate Design Solutions”) and more related to higher level themes and goals.

3. What Are The Names Of Your Top Competitors?

Do you know who your main competitors will be upon entering this space? If not, now’s the time to look them up.

When it comes to business names, you want to see if you can identify common threads among them. Perhaps they use puns or include location-specific descriptors. Or they just stick with the names they were born with.

While you don’t want to come off as a copycat, you can imbue your business name with a similar theme or tone if it’s proven to be successful with your shared audience.

4. What Makes You Different?

Every business has a unique value proposition (UVP) — something that sets them apart from everyone else in the space. What’s yours?

Do you operate within a large metropolitan area where your prospective clients’ industry is booming?

Did you previously work in the industry for which you now build websites?

Are you an SEO expert who builds enterprise websites that rank?

In business, it’s good to be different — so long as it benefits your clients.

If you have a particular UVP that’s going to make you stand out, you’re going to use it everywhere to market yourself — your website, social media, sales pitches, etc. So, you might want to consider using a unique keyword from it within your business name.

5. Where Do You Envision Yourself In Five Years?

No one’s future is set in stone. However, if you’re seriously thinking about starting a new web design business, you have some ideas about where you want to go with it:

Do you like the idea of being a lifelong freelancer or digital nomad?
Would you like to operate your own design agency?
Do you have aspirations to build and sell website products, like plugins, themes, or UI kits instead?

If you expect to pivot your business at some point, be careful about choosing a business name that paints you into a corner. Keep it broader so that prospects don’t have to wonder what it is you really do.

And if you plan on scaling your business beyond yourself, using your own name might not be the best idea. You’ll want clients to associate the brand name with your agency, not with you specifically.

6. Will Your Business Name Be Easy To Remember?

At this point, you have some business names brewing. So, now we need to look at the more technical aspects of naming your brand.

Here’s what you need to do.

a. Write down no more than three to five business names you like.

For example:

Honeymooners Web Design
Charles Murphy Design & Development
FoREver Websites
SOLD Web Design Agency

b. Mash each name into one long lowercase string. Don’t include any punctuation.

For example:

honeymoonerswebdesign
charlesmurphydesignanddevelopment
foreverwebsites
soldwebdesignagency

c. Are any of the names difficult to read? Too long? Do any of them cause confusion and look like they mean something else?

If so, get rid of them as a matching domain name won’t work. Or, if you absolutely love them, fix the name so it’s clear, readable, and short. For instance:

charlesmurphydesignanddevelopment becomes charlesmurphydesign or just charlesmurphy.

7. Does The Name You Want Already Exist?

It’s a good idea to have a backup name in case you discover that the name you want already exists. Due to trademarking issues as well as possible confusion for your clients, you’ll want to avoid using a name that overlaps with or is the same as any other company (in or outside of web design).

Do a Google search for the business name you want to use. Check out the top 10 search results to see if there are any other matches.

You’ll also want to test out the domain name. Go to Domain.com and run your business name string through it:

You have a few options if this happens:

Choose a different top-level domain (e.g. .tech, .io, .design).
Use an abbreviated version of your business name (e.g. solddesignagency.com).
Move your backup business name to the front of the line and see if it’s available.

It all depends on how attached you are to the business name you’ve chosen. Just make sure that any changes you make to it (like shortening the domain name or using an alternate TLD) doesn’t cause confusion for prospects who look you up online. You don’t want them confusing someone else’s domain name for yours if business name and domain name don’t line up.

Choosing a Business Name Is Just the First Step…

Once you’ve settled on your business name, share it with a few people you trust. They’ll let you know if you’ve totally missed the mark or if it’s something you should be excited to run with.

As soon as you’re 100% sure it’s the right name, buy the domain name and register your company. Then, it’ll be official!

Of course, this isn’t the end to branding your new business. In our next Branding 101 post, we’re going to look at the next step: How to create the visual identity for your business.

Stay tuned!

Featured image via Pexels.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

14 octobre 2020/par Service comm.

7 All-Too-Common Landing Page Errors You Must Avoid

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And it does this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year without ever asking for a pay raise.

But this is true only if your website landing page is designed well, maintained, and optimized to the gills. The art and science of a flawless landing page is beyond the scope of a single article, but we can start with helping you spot seven of the most common – and damaging – trouble spots.

1. Unclear Value Statement

Typically, new visitors to your page will only stay on it 3 to 15 seconds before they get distracted. In that span of time, you must offer a clear and visible reason to stick around and interact with the page.

That reason is your value statement. What value do your readers get in exchange for the time you ask them to spend? High-quality content is a must (and hopefully a given), but you also need to pull them in so they experience that content.

Does your landing page do that? If yes, great! If no, you should fix that. If you’re not sure, ask yourself:

Is there a compelling, visible headline that expresses the end benefits clearly and succinctly?
Is there a subheadline explaining your offering in more detail?
Are there supporting graphics that pull the eye toward your headline and subheadline?

If there aren’t, add them now.

2. Poor Signposting

Your landing page isn’t just there to be pretty. It’s meant to convince people to take action. If you don’t make it easy to find your call to action, most viewers won’t look for it.

deliver enough value to make it worth the hassle

You must make it clear — in as succinct and efficient terms as possible — why the action you want a reader to take will deliver enough value to make it worth the hassle. Tell them, in words that stand out from the rest of the page, what you want them to do next and what they’ll receive for doing so.

Improving your signposting stats by asking yourself the following questions:

Do you have a clear understanding of what the next step in a visitor’s customer journey should be?
Is it easy to find and take that step on your website?
Does your copy make a clear and compelling argument in favor of taking that step?

If you can answer yes to all three questions, your signposting is likely good (or at least good enough for now). If not, now you know what you have to do to improve it.

3. Slow Loading Time

Remember that 3 to 15-second maximum time limit we mentioned earlier? That span includes time spent waiting for your landing page to load, and every microsecond of that wait increases a reader’s likelihood of bailing on the whole thing. You must get your loading time to be as quick as possible.

Viewers who exit your landing page early – including while still waiting for it to load – increase your site’s bounce rate. Higher bounce rates reduce your rankings on Google and other search engines, meaning a page that loads too slowly not only impresses fewer viewers, but it also gets fewer viewers overall.

Improving your loading time is usually a job for your tech team or whoever in the office is responsible for overseeing your hosting service. That said, here are a few of the most important ways to optimize this important factor:

Optimize image size, file format, and compression;
Clean up your database by deleting saved drafts, old revisions, unused plugins, and similar virtual detritus;
Confirm that your WordPress theme (if applicable) is optimized for quick loading;
Use a content distribution network for file storage;
Analyze server response time with your hosting service, and work with them to reduce it;
Install tools that leverage browser caching;
Fix all your broken links;
Remove all render-blocking from JavaScript;
Reduce the number of redirects necessary to reach your page;
Optimize your code, especially in CSS, JavaScript, and HTML;
Enable file compression — except for on images;
Replace all PHP content with HTML wherever possible.

This is technical, detailed work, but it’s important. If you don’t have team members up to these tasks, it can be worth hiring an outside consulting company to do it for you.

4. Only One Landing Page

You have a good idea of your ideal customer’s hopes, fears, pain points, demographics, likes and dislikes, and other important information. If you have several different types of customers, you can’t use the same landing page for each of your customer groups. Each group has different characteristics that will prompt them to follow your call to action, so you don’t want to offer just one landing page.

Similarly, you also probably have more than one product or set of content and offerings to generate sales. Having only one landing page can lose leads because the page is only optimized for one of those products or content sets.

Ideally, you should have a unique landing page with a tailored offer for each of your customer models that would send those individuals to each of the products and content sets. An ad for professionals in their 30s making over $50,000 a year would lead to a landing page built for them, while an ad for heads of households working from home would lead to a landing page built for them.

Yes, that means a company with three profiles and four content sets would need 12 landing pages. And yes, it’s worth that kind of effort.

5. Insufficient Visuals

“A picture is worth 1,000 words” is ancient wisdom, but it’s far from true in the internet world – it’s actually worth more. A quick look at social media and blog performance will tell you many people will look at, enjoy, and share a photo or video, but not many will read an entire 1,000-word post on the same topic.

How well your landing page performs depends on the images you use and how you present them. Does your page’s layout conform to the best practices of visual web design:

Including images that emotionally reinforce the value expressions of your product’s core benefits;
Containing sufficient white space to not be intimidating;
Providing data images to indicate the worth of what you do;
Using visual design cues to lead the eye toward your conversion points;
Applying color gradients to highlight offers and your call to action;
Using infographics to replace the dreaded “wall of text”.

If you can say yes for half of these things, carry on. If not, this point may be among the better places to start with a landing page redesign.

6. Asking For Too Much, Too Soon

Craft a custom calls to action that meet all levels of interest, need, and desire

Not every landing page visitor is created equal. Some are hardcore fans and experts in what you do, ready for a 10,000-word white paper that dives deeply into the research supporting your use case. Others might have heard about your industry on an Instagram page and want to know the basics of what you do.

There’s nothing worse than going to a website and being asked for all of your personal information right away. If your call to action requires too much knowledge, too deep a commitment, or even too much personal information, consider scaling back. Otherwise, you risk turning away potential customers.

Better yet, go back to No. 5 above and build a new landing page for beginners and early-stage leads. Craft a custom calls to action that meet all levels of interest, need, and desire.

7. No Trust Elements

Offering some type of authentic customer referral or testimonial is important. It all boils down to the same thing: telling those who read your landing page that other people already like what you do and how you do it.

Examples of effective modern trust elements include:

Quotes from positive reviews next to a photo of the reviewer;
Screenshots of social media posts praising your company or product;
Short video interviews of happy clients;
Blurbs for industry thought leaders approving of you;
Images portraying business credentials and certifications;
Links to positive press coverage;
Logos of known business customers who buy and trust your brand.

Final Thought: What’s Next?

There isn’t one guaranteed way to turn a landing page from something full of holes into something perfect. But first, run an audit of your landing page using this list as a guide. Note which errors are there. Next, sort them in order of what takes the least time to fix to what takes the most time to fix.

Then, fix them in that order. We find that getting the quick fixes done builds excitement and momentum, whereas starting with a harder fix can mire down the whole process.

If none of these errors exist on your landing page, congratulations. There’s still lots of work to do on your website and content marketing, but it’s not among these rookie mistakes.

Featured image via Pexels.

Source

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

2 octobre 2020/par Service comm.

AccessiBe Review 2020: Solving Web Accessibility with AI and Scalability

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Web accessibility is important for two reasons:

Being ADA & WCAG compliant is required by law (we’ll explain this further) so if your website isn’t compliant, you can get sued.
It allows people with disabilities to browse your website, which increases your potential audience and it is the decent thing to do.

In this accessiBe review, we’ll cover:

How Does accessiBe Work
How to Install and Setup accessiBe
Why ongoing compliance is important
accessiBe front end features: the accessibility interface
Accessibility profiles
Content adjustments
Color adjustments
Orientation adjustments
accessiBe back end features:
Screen-reader and keyboard navigation compatibility
Background processing
Image recognition
Menus
accessiBe vs. free plugins
accessiBe vs. manual solutions
How to check your web accessibility compliance status

How Does accessiBe Work

accessiBe is an automated solution that combines two applications to achieve full compliance.

Foreground application: the accessibility interface. This is the accessibility menu that allows users with disabilities to adjust the various UI and design elements on your website so it meets their unique needs.

Background application: proprietary AI technology that’s responsible for the ‘heavy lifting’, screen-reader, and keyboard navigation optimization.

The combination of these two applications is unique for accessiBe for a few reasons. While most available accessibility solutions offer just one of the two or rely on manual remediation, accessiBe checks both boxes and does it in a fully automated way.

Additionally, and most importantly, accessiBe continuously scans your website, every 24 hours, identifying and fixing new accessibility issues as they arise. Websites are dynamic – meaning, keep updating constantly with new content, pages, images and so on; being ADA and WCAG compliant is an ongoing concern, not a one-time fix.

How to Install and Setup accessiBe

You install accessiBe by inserting a single line of code on your website.

From your end, that’s all it takes.

The first thing that happens is that the accessibility interface appears on your website. The menu is available via the accessibility icon (that also appears automatically.)

Source: accessiBe website

Next, the AI application scans and analyzes your website for accessibility issues and compatibility with screen-readers and keyboard navigation requirements and fixes them. This automated process takes 48 hours.

Once the initial 48 hours have elapsed, your website is compliant.

From here on, accessiBe automatically scans your website every 24 hours to identify and fix new accessibility issues as they arise due to website updates.

Why Ongoing Compliance is Important

We’ve mentioned this already, but it’s important to stress this point.

Whether you have an e-commerce website or a company website, you keep updating and changing your website; new items go up for sale, new videos and content pieces are added. Every addition or removal from your website has the potential of creating accessibility gaps (like missing alt text for images.)

By continuously scanning and fixing your website, accessiBe ensures that you stay compliant. An accessibility audit remediates your website for the specific point in time the audit took place. Meaning, you’ll need to audit your website periodically to remain compliant, which is a costly affair. With accessiBe you don’t need to worry about this.

accessiBe Front End Features – The Accessibility Interface

The accessiBe accessibility interface (the menu that is available for users) is installed automatically on your website once you insert the line of code. Let’s look at the various features that are available for people with disabilities.

Accessibility Profiles Explained

First, it allows you to choose from a pre-defined set of profiles optimized for various disability needs:

When one of the profiles is selected, the required adjustments are instantly applied to your entire website.

For example, The ADHD Friendly Profile creates a reading mark that follows your mouse movements that diminish distractions and allows better focus:

The Cognitive Disability Profile frames all the elements in bounding boxes and adds an ‘reading cursor’ that acts as your mouse to allow enhanced orientation:

Each of the predefined profiles includes a suite of features that target the unique accessibility needs of the disability; the Epilepsy Safe Profile prevents videos from playing automatically, dims all the colors on your website and eliminates flashing and blinking animations; the Visually Impaired Profile enhances all your website’s visuals, enlarges all fonts to allow most visual impairments conditions (degrading eyesight, tunnel vision, cataract, glaucoma and more) to be able to browse your website with ease.

The last two profiles, Blind Users and Keyboard Navigation, work in unison. They allow blind and motor-impaired individuals to browse and use your website as they are used to, through screen-readers and keyboard functionality, respectively.

Two things need to be mentioned here:

Blind individuals have screen-readers installed on their computers in the OS-level, meaning, on the hard drive of the computer. They use them to navigate the internet by having the software read for them every text that appears on the screen. As can be seen in the screenshot above, the Blind User profile is ‘launched’ automatically once accessiBe detects that the user is using a screen-reader. This is a crucial functionality since obviously blind users aren’t able to locate the accessibility icon.
The same goes for individuals that are using the keyboard instead of a mouse to navigate the web, both the motor-impaired and the blind. accessiBe detects and automatically enables keyboard navigation on your website.

On top of the predefined accessibility profiles, accessiBe’s interface allows for further adjustments that can be controlled specifically to allow a personalized browsing experience according to the user’s needs. Let’s look at these adjustments.

Accessibility Content Adjustments Explained

The content adjustments allow you to control every aspect of the written content on your website. The menu looks like this:

Each of these elements allows for granular control of the way content, or text, is presented. From altering the entire website’s text to a readable, sans-serif font that is easier to follow, to highlighting titles and links, to adjusting font size, the spacing between lines and letters and using a text magnifier that follows your cursor on the screen.

Here’s how it looks with Highlight Titles and Highlight Links turned on:

You can see all the links are highlighted with an orange bounding box while all titles are highlighted with a blue bounding box.

Accessibility Color Adjustments Explained

The color adjustments allows users to control every aspect of the color scheme on the website:

From adjusting contrast and saturation, to switching the entire website to a monochrome color scheme, to adjusting textual elements and background colors. Let’s look at a few examples.

Here’s a side-by-side of default appearance and the Dark Contrast adjustment turned on:

And here’s how it looks with the Monochrome adjustment turned on:

Accessibility Orientation Adjustments Explained

The orientation adjustments allow full control of ‘distractions’ that make it hard for individuals with epilepsy, ADHD, and cognitive disability to browse the web:

As such, the orientation adjustments allow users to mute sound, hide images, stop animations and additional ‘focus’ features such as an enlarged cursor and reading assistance that highlights the text being read.

Here’s how the Remove Images adjustment works:

accessiBe Back End Features

Unlike ‘accessibility plugins’ (more on that later) accessiBe provides a comprehensive back end treatment to your website – automated, AI-powered analysis of compatibility with accessibility requirements and fixing of the elements that need adjustment.

It should be noted that 70% of the WCAG compliance requirements deal with screen-reader and keyboard navigation compatibility and all these requirements are not answered by installing an accessibility interface widget that merely makes UI and design adjustments.

For example, an accessibility widget will enable you to enlarge the font on your website, to adjust the saturation or to highlight links, but it won’t enable a blind individual to differentiate between a shopping cart icon and a checkout icon, nor will it enable a motor impaired individual to easily navigate a menu.

This is a crucial consideration to make when choosing a web accessibility solution. Being WCAG compliant is a YES / NO situation. Your website is either compliant or it’s not, there is no middle ground here.

accessiBe’s back end features come to solve and answer all these compatibility issues that enable full screen-reader and keyboard navigation functionalities.

Screen Reader Compatibility Explained

Screen Reader is a software for blind individuals to use computers and browse the web. As the name suggests, the software reads aloud what is seen on the screen for blind individuals.

The screen reader software is installed on the computer. But in order for it to work with websites, the website needs to be compatible with the software. To achieve compatibility with screen reader software, WCAG requires that a website should adhere to a set of attributes called Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) that are installed within the website’s code, allowing it to ‘communicate’ with the screen reader.

Let’s take social icons as an example. We are all familiar with those icons – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – they are instantly recognizable for us visually. A screen reader software doesn’t actually ‘see’ elements on the screen, rather it scans the website’s code to understand what appears on the screen. As such, a Facebook icon code simply says ‘link’ and has the URL that directs the user when clicking the link.

So with a website that isn’t compatible with a screen reader, that doesn’t have ARIA tags implemented, the screen reader will read to the blind person “link” for the Facebook icon; not very helpful, is it?

When ARIA tags are implemented, additional information is added to the Facebook icon – and any other visual link on the website – that describes what is the link. So the screen reader will read to the blind person “Facebook link”.

It’s not difficult to imagine the scope and effort of the work needed in order to implement ARIA tags on your entire website.

Keyboard Navigation Compatibility Explained

Keyboard navigation means that motor-impaired individuals are using their computers only through their keyboard, rather than a mouse. Scrolling, clicking links and menu buttons, opening and closing tabs – everything is done using designated keys.

There are many issues relating to keyboard navigation as today’s websites are highly complex, layered with content elements, and react dynamically to user behavior. Any element of the website must be compatible to allow full keyboard navigation.

Let’s look at a popup as an example.

Popups can be triggered for a variety of reasons. For mouse users, it is a simple occurrence; you can bring the cursor to the area of the popup, click on one of the fields to input details or click the X to close the popup.

But how do you handle the popup using only the keyboard? How do you differentiate between ‘regular’ functionalities of the website and that of the popup? How do you ‘shift the focus’ of the keystrokes to a layered element? You need to allow unique keystrokes to operate the popup, keystrokes that are activated only when a popup appears.

It’s one example of the many challenges making your website compatible with keyboard navigation. The list of WCAG requirements for compatibility with keyboard navigation is a long one, and understandably so as it needs to enable motor-impaired individuals to navigate your website with the same ease as the rest of us using a mouse.

How accessiBe’s Background Processing Achieves Screen Reader and Keyboard Navigation Compatibility

Without getting too technical, what accessiBe does is scan the entire code of your website and adds keyboard functionalities and ARIA tags to various elements on your website directly. It won’t interfere with your site’s code, but rather add an additional ‘layer’.

accessiBe’s AI ‘learned’ all of ARIA’s tags and keyboard functionalities required by WCAG and when scanning your website’s code implements all the required adjustments to achieve full compliance.

How accessiBe Makes Menus Accessible

Menus are a good example for understanding what the accessiBe background processing does and the benefits it provides.

We recognize menus on websites instantly, because we saw thousands and thousands of them. We know how they look, we know what their functionality is, and we know where to hover and click in order to reach the various pages of the website.

But if you remember, we said that screen readers don’t ‘look’ at the screen, but rather scan the site’s code to understand structure, identify links and read them aloud with all the text that appears on the page.

So menus are coded as a list structure, because in a way they are. A screen reader will announce a menu as a list, which might be confusing for a blind user. Additionally, many menus have drop-down sub-menus, accessible via a hover or by clicking a little triangle. Without proper ARIA tagging, a screen reader will miss the sub-menu.

What accessiBe does is adding readable tags for every element in the menu so a screen reader will recognize and announce each element properly. The ‘list’ code structure will get a “menu” tag, and the sub-menu will get a tag for ‘sub-menu’, thus allowing the blind individual to utilize the full functionality of the website.

Additionally, accessiBe alternates the tags on-the-fly while the site is being browsed. Once a sub-menu has been opened, a tag that says “sub-menu open” will be added to indicate to the screen reader what has happened, and will be changed with the tag “sub-menu close” once the sub-menu has been closed.

Image Recognition

One of the key elements of accessibility compliance with screen readers is to provide accurate alternative descriptions for images, known as alt text.

accessiBe utilizes various image, object and character recognition technologies (OCR and Iris) to provide highly descriptive and accurate depictions of images displayed on the website. Without adding screen-reader compatible alt tags to images a blind individual would simply not be aware of the existence of images, and miss out on the information usually displayed on images.

Let’s look at the following banner images from an e-commerce website:

As you can see, valuable information is communicated via the images – sales and discounts – the kind of information any shopper would want to know.

This is the descriptive text that accessiBe’s AI assigned to these images, completely automated with no human intervention (from left to right):

Image contains: shopping, shorts, woman, ashion; image text: extra 50% off shorts
Image contains: shopping, red top, woman, jeans, fashion; image text: 50% off bottoms
Image contains: shopping, blue jumpsuit, woman, fashion, bed, ; image text: 50% off jumpsuits & rompers
Image contains: shopping, shoes, ocean, woman, fashion; image text: 50% off shoes

Again, doing this kind of work for the hundreds to thousands of images that are displayed on every e-commerce website requires a lot of time and effort. accessiBe achieves this in a completely automated way, and every image added to your website instantly gets its alt text.

Comparison of accessiBe with Accessibility Plugins

There are many web accessibility plugins out there. They offer a ‘quick fix’ for ADA and WCAG compliance – add an accessibility menu and you’re done.

As tempting as it may sound, the distinction between an accessibility menu and being fully compliant must be made.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, there are two parallel tasks that need to handle in order to achieve ADA and WCAG compliance:

Front end – UI and design adjustments, achieved by the Accessibility Interface (the visible menu for content, font, color and orientation adjustments)
Back end – screen-reader and keyboard navigation compatibility, achieved by implementing ARIA tags and further code adjustments

Reminder: 70% of accessibility compliance requirements deal with back end adjustments, meaning, screen-readers, and keyboard navigation compatibility.

Accessibility plugins, whether free or paid, only answer the front-end requirements. Meaning, after installing an accessibility plugin, you are just 30% compliant. Since accessibility compliance is not a scale (you don’t ‘get points’ for making it halfway through) you’ll need to turn to an additional provider to do the back end work.

accessiBe, on the other hand, provides a full accessibility compliance solution, covering both UI and design requirements through the accessibility interface AND screen-reader and keyboard navigation compatibility requirements through it’s automated AI technology that analyzes and makes adjustments in the code-level of the website.

Benefits of Using accessiBe Over Accessibility Plugins

Achieving complete accessibility compliance
Dealing with a single provider, rather than two or more
Cost-efficiency (manual audit and remediation service are expensive)
Complete compatibility with screen-readers and keyboard navigation
Enabling true accessibility to individuals with disabilities

Comparison of accessiBe with Manual Accessibility Services

Manual accessibility services can help you achieve full accessibility compliance, but it comes with two major disclaimers:

You’ll still need an additional solution for an accessibility interface, which the service companies don’t provide
The compliance achieved is for the point in time the audit and remediation were performed. Let’s explain this point further.

Companies that offer a manual accessibility service assign a team of accessibility experts to do an audit of your website. The result of this audit is a lengthy document detailing all the accessibility faults that your website has. It is a valuable document as it gives you a precise depiction of what needs to be fixed in order to achieve compliance.

From here there are two possible paths:

You can either take the audit results to your development team and have them remediate your website accordingly.

Or, some of the service companies offer a remediation service, meaning, they’ll assign their own engineers to manually make the necessary changes in your website. Needless to say this extra service isn’t given for free.

In both cases, you are looking at a process that takes weeks if not months (depending on the number of pages your website has.)

Additionally, since it is a manual process done by experts, it comes with a hefty price tag.

But most importantly, the audit and remediation hold for the time they were done. Unless you have a 100% static website, meaning, you do not make any changes to your website – never add or remove products, never update content – the ‘effect’ of the audit and remediation fades away with time.

Since the process was manual, any changes you make to your website must be handled manually accessibility-wise. You added a new banner with a link to items on sale, you’ll need to go into the code and add ARIA tags. You added a new image, you’ll need to go into the code and add alt text compatible with screen-readers. And so on.

Some of the manual accessibility service companies offer maintenance services as well. They will periodically audit your website (manually) and provide a remediation document that will need to be implemented (manually) either by your development team or by theirs for an additional cost.

These costs add up. Having your website audited and remediated for compliance on an ongoing basis takes time, effort, and money. But you don’t have a choice. Being ADA and WCAG compliant is an ongoing task, since websites are dynamic and being updated regularly.

accessiBe, on the other hand, offers a 100% automated and ongoing compliance solution. The initial audit and remediation process is carried out – with no human intervention – in 48 hours (compared to weeks or months by a manual provider). Then, your website is scanned every 24 hours to identify and fix accessibility issues using accessiBe AI technology. Meaning, compliance maintenance is constantly carried out ‘in the background’ keeping you ADA & WCAG compliant at all times.

Which brings us to another crucial point regarding manual accessibility services. They make it extremely hard for you to scale up. Every business has a constant aim to grow, but with a manual accessibility service, scalability becomes a pain point. The more you grow the more time, effort and money you need to put in to remain compliant. You want to add another section to your website, you want to launch an additional website? Using a manual accessibility service will hold you back. You’ll need to account for additional time before going live to manually enable accessibility and additional funds. For fast-moving companies, time becomes a serious burden.

Since accessiBe offers an automated and ongoing accessibility solution, scalability is not an issue.

Benefits of Using accessiBe Over Manual Accessibility Services

Time-efficient
Cost-effective
100% automated
Ongoing compliance
Infinite scale
Single provider for full compliance (front end and back end)

How to Check Your Web Accessibility Compliance Level

Before you get started on your path to being ADA & WCAG compliant it’s important to understand the current state of accessibility your website provides.

Obviously, if you’ve never taken any steps to make your website accessible to individuals with disabilities, there’s no need for this – your website isn’t accessible in any way.

This is actually highly important if you have taken steps to make your website accessible, like for example, installing one of the accessibility plugins. You might be under the impression that by doing so your website is both compliant and accessible to individuals with disabilities.

There’s a simple and quick way to face the accessibility reality.

accessiBe offers a free, automated compliance audit tool available online named aCe. It uses accessiBe AI technology to scan your site, detect accessibility issues and provide quite a detailed report on the various elements that impact your website’s accessibility, and those include:

General score
Clickables
Titles
Orientation
Menus
Graphics
Forms
Documents
Readability
Carousels
Tables

Each of these elements is given a score and some explanations to the specific issues that need attention within the context of these elements.

In addition to gaining a compliance audit with the remediation steps needed to be taken in order to fix these issues, aCe gives you a very clear idea of where you stand and what needs your attention in order to achieve compliance.

We gave it a try. We ran a website that has installed one of the accessibility plugins (which was recognized, by name, by the aCe audit tool) and the results cement the point that these plugins aren’t comprehensive enough of a solution for true ADA & WCAG compliance.

Here are the results:

As can be expected, the UI and design side got relatively high scores, due to the accessibility plugin installed on the website, but anything that has to do with back end compatibility with screen readers and keyboard navigation got a failing score.

Conclusion

accessiBe is an automated and comprehensive web accessibility solution that achieves ongoing compliance with ADA and WCAG regulations for your website.

It offers a unique combination of front end and back end compatibility, meaning, it provides an end-to-end solution for both user-facing accessibility interface, and compatibility with screen readers and keyboard navigation.

The solution offered by accessiBe is a no-touch, no-code, continuous compliance utilizing proprietary AI technology that audits and remediates your website.

It is by far one of the most affordable web accessibility solutions, starting at $490 for websites with up to 1,000 unique pages.

When compared to accessibility plugins, accessiBe’s offering is robust and comprehensive, delivering full compliance that plugins aren’t able to.

When compared to accessibility manual services, accessiBe offers a speedy and automated audit and remediation process compared to the lengthy, manual and highly expensive offering of the service companies. Additionally, accessiBe, unlike accessibility manual services, delivers ongoing compliance and the ability to scale with ease and speed.

The combination of AI-based audit and remediation, the most comprehensive accessibility interface on the market, ongoing compliance, scalability, and a highly affordable plan makes accessiBe stand out from the competition by offering a unique end-to-end solution for achieving ADA and WCAG compliance in a fast and simple way.

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

25 septembre 2020/par Service comm.