Reading Time: 2 min When working to make your website more accessible, one area to work on is adding alternative attributes to images. This text is what vision-impaired users will hear as a representation of the image (and it’s useful to Google as well), so it’s worth doing right. Using WordPress, for example, you can simply click an image […]
Websites
Some first steps with Google Search Console
Reading Time: 4 min You may be familiar with Google Analytics, used to track traffic on a website, but not as many are as familiar with Google Search Console. I thought I’d take a minute to explain why you might want to set it up. The great thing about Google Search Console is that there is nothing you need […]
If you want to improve, keep the comments open
Reading Time: 2 min One of the big questions new bloggers face is whether or not to allow readers to leave comments. In almost every case, I think the answer is a solid yes. Here’s a bit about why: Take back your content As I shared late last year, I think more people need to be blogging in order […]
Website Accessibility: Help your users, help your rankings
Reading Time: < 1 min Yesterday at the A Brighter Web Meetup, we had a great discussion about website accessibility, why it’s important, and steps to take to get started. You can download the slides as a PDF, or view them all here: Website Accessibility: Help your users, help your rankings from Mickey Mellen You can also check out this […]
Does your website pass “The Grunt Test”?
Reading Time: < 1 min While building a proper messaging strategy for your company can take some time, an easy place to start is with “the grunt test”, as popularized by Storybrand. Put simply, can someone look at your content, with no prior experience with your company, and quickly understand what you do? Specifically, they should be able to find […]
Speeding up this blog
Reading Time: 2 min Over the past day, I’ve done a few things to speed up the load time of this site. It wasn’t particularly slow to begin with, but these changes should help make it a bit snappier. Here’s a before and after of the speed scores for the site: Hosting The biggest change I made was with […]
Thinking through “A Brighter Web”
Reading Time: < 1 min We’ve been running various aspect of A Brighter Web, an educational arm of our agency, for quite a while now. We’ve hosted our Meetup every month (sometimes more) for about nine years now, we have a reasonably active Facebook group, and we’ve played with podcasting and other media. So what’s next? To be honest, I’m […]
“Designed by” is a big red flag
Reading Time: 2 min It’s generally not a good idea for a web designer to put a “designed by” link in the footer of websites that they create, and they usually know it too. The main reason is Google; putting that link down there will hurt the site that it’s on. It’s a tiny amount, but it’ll still hurt. […]
Why do I care if your company is 50 years old?
Reading Time: 2 min Why do I care if your company is 50 years old? I don’t, really. At least not yet. Yet many websites continue to lead with something like that at the front of their site. When a users visits your site for the first time, they don’t care about you — they just want to know […]
Making RSS about people
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve been talking about RSS feeds for about 13 years now, and have been using them much longer than that. I recently suggested that most everyone should be using them, and you can see how they fit into my larger system here. That said, I’m constantly adjusting how I use them, which is part of […]