Strategic Internet Marketing for Small Businesses
It happens every now and then. You may come across a page that is “Under Construction.” It used to be a common phenomenon, but the incidence has been dwindling steadily since its heyday back in the late 1990s. (There are more “Under Construction” search results than ever, but that is due to the much higher number of sites online.) Continue reading ‘Why Website Updates Are Important, Courtesy of "The Office"’
What is website accessibility all about, you ask? Simply put, it is constructing your site in such a way that visitors with disabilities can access your web content. What happens when someone using a screen reader encounters that mind-blowing graphical banner that your designer created? Is there an awkward pause, or does your page handle the situation gracefully and keep the conversation going?
The checklists below offer a set of standards and best practices that will put you well on your way to ensuring that your site’s content is available to as wide an audience as possible. As an added bonus, making your site accessible helps improve SEO as well as the experience of users with mobile devices.
Accessibility Checklists:
When starting a new design, usually one of the first orders of business is establishing a basic color palette. Sometimes a client provides one as part of their branding guidelines, sometimes it’s up to the designer. Regardless of the situation, chances are you’re initially going to be spending a fair amount of time choosing colors.
That’s where colorlovers.com can make your life a little easier. In addition to lots of nice user submitted palettes, their Trend section uses a color slider to search for examples of color usage for both magazines and websites. With the web quickly becoming saturated with 2.0 widgets, it’s nice to stumble across sites like this that harness those tools to create something useful.
One caveat… the color search seems to work much better with magazine colors than websites for some reason.
Feeling limited by the same old handful of standard web fonts? The following pages have some useful statistics on fonts that are installed by default on various operating systems. You may be surprised by how many options there actually are. Just be sure to define safe fall-backs if you decide to venture off the beaten track.
Both of these sites have good lists, the first provides actual samples of the fonts and the second gives side by side stats showing the percentage of win, mac and linux machines that have them installed.
www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-CombinedResults.shtml
www.webspaceworks.com/resources/fonts-web-typography/48/
Carol Lukas and Rebecca Andrews have identified four keys “essential to a well-functioning collaboration”:
1) Clarify the purpose: misunderstandings can occur when people don’t recognize and agree on a way of working together. You may think you’re getting together for just a few meetings while your colleague has the whole year planned out for both of you! Working together involves varying levels of intensity, from cooperation (low-level) to coordination (mid-level) to collaboration (high-level). Lukas and Andrews provide a useful chart that clarifies this further. Ultimately, “it’s important that everyone understands and agrees to the purpose of the collaboration, the degree of commitment required, and the expectations of the partners involved in the effort.”
2) Let form follow function: “Just as there are different ways of working together, there are also different types of collaborations.” The three main types of collaboration include 1) administration, 2) development/advocacy, and 3) service delivery. View the chart on their website to learn more about how to determine the level of difficulty, time, and impact, as well as the degree of intensity, for each type of collaborative.
3) Involve the right people: “As a rule, work with as few people as necessary to get the job done. The more people involved, the greater the number of communications; the greater the intensity; and the greater the difficulty of learning about each other, balancing power, and coordinating your work.” Ask yourself these questions when choosing partners:
4) Get it in writing: “The most common reason for a collaboration meltdown is disagreements and uncertainty about operating norms.” To avoid this, it is helpful to put the following items in writing: “the collaboration’s mission and purpose; values and assumptions; vision, timelines and milestones; members and membership policies; roles and contributions, policies (competition, conflicts of interest, financial relationships); and norms (participation, decision-making, communication, conflict, meetings). It’s especially important to decide what the agreements are for leadership and decision-making.”
They conclude, “Collaboration is a powerful way to accomplish what no single organization can. It’s also a complex way to work. Following these four keys will increase the likelihood of your success—and of ultimately getting the results you’re after . So take heart and remember—struggle precedes growth!”
Source: Fieldstone Alliance
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