As a web design and online marketing firm, we interact with the full spectrum of clientele. We thought we’d point out an article that any client, potential client, or any design firm should read before moving forward with a project.  Click Here to check it out.  They take a humorous approach to explaining a very real problem in our industry.  As a rule, web design should be left to web designers.  Let us know what you think!

Never Stop Improving!

As the internet is getting populated by a younger and younger crowd, and children are exposed to the lazy writing found in forums and chat rooms today, an interesting phenomenon is occurring - People as a whole are forgetting how to write, or not caring how to write decently.

When people write poorly, it becomes prevalent throughout the culture, to the point where poor writing no longer means the individual isn’t intelligent. Poor writing now points to the writing being very informal.

A new website intended to be the face of your business should really not be an informal affair. A site written in 1337 sp34|< (leet speak) will give people the wrong impression about you and your business. They will assume that you are a spam site and that you are intending to upload a virus onto their computer, or at least some malware.

Now, to be fair, not many people can write beautiful prose effortlessly when writing about their products and services on the internet. This is where independent proofreaders can come in handy. If you know someone who knows how to write, it’s more than worth it to ask them to look over your work and offer suggestions. If this is your personal website where you maybe sell some home made crafts, then just having a friend look over your text will be living up to your users’ expectations. However, if this is a larger business, and you’re selling something that’s been manufactured, you will want your text to be as professional as you are.

If you do not have a copy writer on your staff already, you will want to hire someone to do this for you. You need your text to not have blatant spelling errors and grammatical errors. It is also good to make sure that when someone is reading your information, that it is easy to read and understand what’s going on. The reason you don’t want to do this yourself is because you already know what you’re talking about and what you mean. Getting someone from outside the company to look at it can help make your information more friendly to people who aren’t already familiar with your product.

Really big companies will also hire professional copywriters. Provided enough information, these people can write about your company and your product and it will sound very good.

In an ever shrinking world where the words “ur a noob” and “lol” prevail, there is still a time and a place for professional prose.

Never Stop Improving!

As some of you may know, Target has been involved in a lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) over their website not being accessible to the blind.  This started back in 2006 and they just settled out of court for $6 million.  In Target’s case, the problem was they didn’t have proper alt tags throughout the site.  This is a relatively easy fix, and as part of the settlement, Target has to pay for the employees that work on the site to get training in making it accessible.  For far more sites out there, the issue may be much more drastic. 

Any sites out there that are not section 508 compliant are vulnerable to this type of lawsuit.  Section 508 is the handicap accessibility standard on the web.  And it is something that we are going to see more and more of as a standard practice moving forward.  The foundation of accessibility is having your site programmed in tableless CSS, which separates your content from the presentation of your site in the code.  There is more to it than just that, but if you don’t start there, you are only going to run into problems.  Using only HTML just isn’t going to cut it anymore, for accessibility or the search engines. 

If you’re looking to start a new website, or revamp your current one, make sure Section 508 compliance is a service offering of whatever company you go with.  Keep in mind that the software that blind people use to search your site for content has the same goal as the search engines:  To easily find your content for the end user.  While there has been a lot of grumbling around the web about what this settlement means for eCommerce as a whole, the fact that accessibility compliance will also help with your natural search engine rankings should, at the very least, soften the blow. 

Let us know what you think about Target’s settlement!

Never Stop Improving!