Read The Latest Blue Zenith Blog Posts
The User Experience: When Should You Redesign Your Website?
Unless your website is broken in some way – in which either parts or the whole of your website doesn’t load properly in modern web browsers – deciding when to update your website is a very subjective decision. As with many other decisions regarding the design and functionality of your website, how often you update should depend on a number of factors.
The User Experience: User Feedback
Valuable user feedback can be collected in more basic ways, including asking family and friends to test a new or redesigned website and provide feedback. Some business owners provide a small incentive, such as a coupon or an entry to a contest, to solicit user feedback from customers through the use of surveys.
The User Experience: What is Findability?
The best way to begin measuring the findability of your website is to identify a product or service, a resource such as a web form or document, or web content such as a blog post or video and attempt to locate this content on your website, both by using a search engine like Google and by visiting the homepage of your website and utilizing menus and internal search capabilities that are present on your homepage.
The User Experience: How Accessible is Your Website
How accessible is your website to your visitors and customers with disabilities? Making sure your website is accessible to everyone is the right thing to do, but how do you determine the accessibility of a website?
The User Experience: The Look and Feel of Your Website
Determining the appropriate image you want to convey for your business or organization is an important first step towards designing and building the perfect website. If you are experiencing difficulty with this process, contact us today for a personal consultation and we will be happy to assist you!
The User Experience: How Do People View Websites?
Yes! It may be hard to believe, but most of us read websites and web content the same way – by following a very specific pattern with our eyes.
The User Experience: Is Your Site User-Friendly?
Some of the other factors of a user-friendly website include how accessible the website is to users on various platforms, including mobile visitors and those with disabilities who use special software to surf the Internet; how quickly the website loads; how easily the website redirects visitors who enter an incorrect URL address or who fill out a form incorrectly; how easy it is to scan content and glean important or highlighted information; and how “clean” the HTML, CSS and JavaScript markup and coding are on your website.
WordPress.org versus WordPress.com
Many people regularly confuse the websites WordPress.org and WordPress.com, which is understandable because they are very similar and many people assume that websites should end in “dot com”. However, these two sites are very different – WordPress.org is the homepage of the WordPress Foundation and provides free access to the WordPress software, support for WordPress and other resources. WordPress.com is a for-profit service owned by Automattic.
WordPress and Free and Open Source Software
The main challenge for businesses and individuals who require long-term support for FOSS projects is judging the viability of FOSS projects. Since there is not a for-profit business financing development, further development of the software and bug fixes all rely on volunteer efforts. Also, changes to the software based on feedback and bug reports also rely on volunteers as well. Many FOSS projects are abandoned due to disagreements, apathy and loss of momentum, which in turn leads to a fatal loss of volunteers.
WordPress and Web Standards
Do not be alarmed if your website or blog is not 100% compliant – it is difficult for a modern website to be 100% compliant and all mainstream web browsers are designed to compensate for some variations. However, if you test your website or blog and there are significant problems or a significant number of minor problems, it is advisable to fix them in a timely manner. While your site may or may not be completely compatible in different browsers, you must also remember that different versions of different browsers act differently.