Mar 25, 2024 | ADA compliance, Web Design
ADA Compliance for business websites needs to be considered by all business owners. It’s important to provide access for those who use screen readers or other assistive devices to make your goods or services available everyone just as if you owned a storefront or office building. We will be starting a series in August on how to make your websites ADA compliant and hope to make it an easier transition for you.
Government Guidelines for ADA Compliance
The following information on ADA compliance is useful and relevant information to understand guidelines, compliance and timelines for business websites.
1. Guidance on Web Accessibility and ADA describes how State and Local Governments and businesses can ensure their websites are accessible to people with disabilities.
2. Referencing Ogletree Deakins Law, on a recent post, they mentioned:
“In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would make the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) the standard for compliance for state and local governments covered by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)2. The DOJ is proposing to make the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines the ADA Title II compliance standard for local and state governments.
3. If finalized, the standard would apply to websites and mobile apps, and would give governments two to three years for compliance, based on population.
4. The DOJ explicitly recognized the impossibility of designing and maintaining a website that conforms in all respects and at all times to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but what measure of conformance would be adopted is unclear.”
3. Preparing for the unavoidable requirements for compliance for business websites will give businesses advantages:
• Being pro-active and sensitive to the needs of people with disabilities
• Being ahead of the competition meeting compliance
• Being a leader in addressing the needs of its clients, prospects and visitors
— Charles H. Castano | Monday Morning Marketing
But What Does Being ADA Compliant Have to do with Marketing?
1. A successful website involves designing your website for the enjoyment and use of everyone. Designing your website in an effort to meet the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ensures that goal.
2. A well designed website; one that contains useful content and is user friendly, is crucial for improving your rankings in the search results.
3. An improved ranking in the search results will give your business more visibility.
Our hope is that the research we are doing and reporting to you will be helpful to you as you consider the benefits of making your website ADA compliant.
— Jillian Stone | Monday Morning Marketing
Mar 1, 2024 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Small Business Marketing Strategy, Social media marketing, Web Design
Creating Good Content for Your Website and Why it’s Important
Often, in conversation, it’s not what you say, but how you say it that can make all the difference in the world. The same principal can be said for your website content. There are many ways content can be presented, and how it’s presented might make the difference between increasing customer interaction and a customer closing down your website as soon as it’s opened.
Video
Videos provide an entertaining way of presenting content in a short period of time. Because it allows for movement, videos can invoke more impact through motion graphics, visual effects, and musical scoring. Videos can be used to communicate different types of information such as how-tos, demonstrations, testimonials, facts, and statistics.
Charts and Graphs
These have been used for years for visually presenting data. They have their place particularly when providing data in business meetings or research. Statistics add more credibility to your content, but reading them in textual form make them hard to grasp. Turing text into a visualization like a chart or graph makes it easier for people to see why those figures are important.
Infographic
Being a designer, this is my favorite. Infographics have been around alot longer than we think.
Infographics are a great way to present study findings, statistics, and complex information in a way that users can easily grasp and understand. So instead of going through long texts, infographics presents all that essential information at a glance.
You might ask, how are these forms of content used in your marketing. The great news is that once you have them, they can be repurposed in many ways. For example, this article started as an email. The email is created like an outline; snippets of information so as not to force the reader to read through paragraphs of text.
For this blog article, we added a bit more text to the email format. After publishing it here, we post it to various social media platforms. Finally, fleshing out the “outline” more, we use the same content for our newsletter. Developing this process even further, you can create a series of articles on one topic, turn it into an e-book and offer it on your website for people to purchase and download.
As an example of “it’s not what you say, but how you say it,” I created an infographic based on the three forms of content mentioned at the beginning of this article. Which is more interesting to view? Which helps you grasp the data easier? Which takes less time to read?
Feb 5, 2024 | Social media marketing, Web Design
3 Reasons a Small Business Should Have a Professional Website from a Design Perspective
— By Jillian Stone
Home Cooked Meal vs. Fast Food
The difference between using Facebook for marketing versus a professionally designed website is like eating fast food versus eating a 5 course, home cooked meal.
When you have your own website, you have no limitations on how colorful, how interesting, how festive, how spicy, how many courses (pages) you want to have, etc. Having your own website allows you to express who YOU are; with social media, there are restrictions. However, social media platforms are great as a website companion. The two work together wonderfully!
Taking Advantage of e-Commerce
According to Statista, “In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 5.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 56 percent over the next years, reaching about 8.1 trillion dollars by 2026.”
Taking advantage of e-commerce gives you the opportunity to continue bringing in revenue even when your physical store or business is closed. Even service businesses with no products can take advantage of e-commerce.
Taking Control!
Why let social media dictate the terms and conditions the control over when your content is seen and who sees it?
Your credibility is super important. Without control over your content, anybody can create a page on social media with fake data. This is a concern for any business whose only marketing asset is social media. As a companion, social media is great! But every business needs their own platform to present themselves as they want to be perceived and to be able to control the content that is shown.
3 Reasons a Small Business Should Have a Professional Website from a Technical Perspective
— By Charles H. Castano, Web and Cloud Services
Website Layout
Your website gives you the opportunity to control every aspect of its layout, making it a reflection of who you are, and how you want to be perceived by your visitors. Making the website simple to navigate and having visitors find what they need quickly makes them stay longer and want to return.
e-Commerce Benefits
- Lower overhead costs than a brick and mortar option
- Reach a much larger customer base than a store
- Develop a client contact list to stay in touch
- Easier to manage inventory
Managing Content
Visitors come to your site for answers and solutions. The content you provide will determine whether you convert the visitor to a customer or a client. Content does not mean selling a visitor what you want; it mean giving them what they are looking for. Search engines emphasize ranking on content that answers questions or addressed visitor’s needs, rather than information about what you want them to get from you.
Jan 30, 2024 | Web Design
3 Seconds or Less! That’s How Long you have to get the Attention of your Website Visitor Before they go to Another Website
By Jillian Stone | Stone Mountain Solutions, LLC
3 Reasons Why Your Website is Slow from a Design Perspective
Unoptimized Images and video
Images and videos that are large files will cause your website to load slower. Reducing the size of the images or videos before uploading them into your site will speed up the load time.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are important for the robots to read your images. Each image should have an alt tag associated with it that describes the image.
Too many elements on a page
The trick is to keep your website relevant, simple, professional with only the number of elements you absolutely need to describe your page. Too many bells and whistles will slow down you website significantly.
