Content marketing is a vital tool for businesses because it instils a level of confidence in a brand by demonstrating expertise, trustworthiness and authority on relevant topics as well as satisfying search needs.
This can help to win sales and conversions alike as well as earning valuable backlinks from high-quality websites.
As an online learning platform, your business could significantly benefit from the power of content marketing and search engine optimisation efforts. This is down to the level of confidence that visitors will need prior to enrolling with you or signing up for more information.
With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look into the relationship between content and digital education organisations. Here are five key reasons why quality content is key to the success of online learning platforms:
Demonstrate Your Credibility
When it comes to online learning, one of the most significant ways of building conversions is through demonstrating your credibility.
Online courses, in particular, can be significantly time-consuming and demanding challenges for users, and it’s of the utmost importance that they know their efforts will be rewarded with a recognisable qualification in return for their hard work.
By creating content for an on-site blog or news feed, you have a large canvas in which to not only build keywords and backlinks but to also build trust in your services and forge some levels of confidence in your platform.
Content marketing can influence users by showing that your education website is well run and possesses a great deal of industry expertise.
It’s also possible to make content from testimonials and product reviews as a means of getting the message across that your company is a great choice for customers.
The topic of education is a tricky one to demonstrate credibility in. While pass rates and satisfaction scores can help to show that your courses are successful, it’s only from content that interested visitors will gain a better understanding of exactly what you’re offering.
Make Your Platform Visible
Content gets you noticed. Search engine optimisation forms the cornerstone to great content and carries the power to drive traffic to your website as well as high-quality do-follow backlinks.
Primarily, your learning platform needs to be visible to the right audiences at the right time. Because so many users look to Google to find the things they’re looking for online, it can be easy to create content that utilises searchable keywords.
Simply speaking, if you can build articles that use the right blend of keywords and on-page SEO, you can make your platform much more visible at the top of Google’s results pages, as opposed to vying for space among rival organisations with advertising campaigns.
The best thing about optimising your content is that it can create a steady stream of traffic over time, rather than the more short-term approaches of PPC advertising campaigns.
Generate Awareness
Creating awareness of your organisation and brand can run up expensive PR bills. Content marketing, however, could be significantly more cost-efficient and every bit as expensive for your target audiences.
Here, it could be written content, video-based insights into your office environment, or copy optimised for social media, as long as it helps potential customers to feel more familiar with your company it can be a great asset.
When you produce on-site content, always make sure you talk of your business as if it were a living organism, as opposed to conveying yourself as an independent author. Readers can identify with a personable approach and build a level of trust in your organisation.
While brand awareness isn’t typically easy for companies to actually quantify, it’s an integral goal for marketing departments to get some form of branding under the noses of target audiences in order to build familiarity. High-quality and engaging content is one of the most effective and non-intrusive ways of developing branding.
Accommodate Niche Audiences
The great thing about content is that it can appeal directly to your readers’ wants and needs. The better you know your target audience, the more specific your content can be in appealing to their motivations. While sales and service pages need to be appealing in a more general sense, content pieces can cherrypick specific talking points among groups that you’ve identified as among the most likely to enrol into your learning platform.
It’s important to note that this approach requires a significant level of pre-planning and audience knowledge. If you can identify the needs of your target market, it should be down to your company to satisfy them through your content.
It may seem counterintuitive to pigeonhole your content to appeal to niche audiences, but in this current age of saturated content and hyper-competitivity, it’s effective to step back from your goals and look at where you can fine-tune your approach.
Call Your Visitors to Action
Fundamentally, the most effective benefit that content has over other forms of marketing is the discreet way in which calls-to-action (CTAs) can be added to your copy.
For an online learning platform, this is especially useful to encourage visitors to access further information or fill out sign-up forms.
The process of signing up to an online course can take a little time, so it’s vital that platforms can build enough levels of interest in visitors before asking if they’re willing to follow up on their interest online.
Be sure to supply your target audience with a healthy level of information and confidence-building copy before inviting them to sign up to a newsletter or share their email address for alerts.
Remember that online education involves plenty of effort and commitment for digital students. It’s only fair that online learning portals share the same level of enthusiasm.
I was browsing the Svelte docs on my iPhone and came across a blaring UI bug. The notch in the in the REPL knob was totally out of whack. I’m always looking to contribute to open source, and I thought this would be a quick and easy fix. Turns out, there was a lot more to it than just changing one line of CSS.
Replicating, debugging, setting up the local environment was interesting, difficult, and meaningful.
The issue
I opened my browser DevTools, thinking I’d see the same issue in the phone view. But, the bug wasn’t there. Now this is a seriously tricky CSS problem.
? What I learned
If you’re using Chrome on iOS as your browser, you’re still using Safari’s renderer. From Wikipedia:
Chrome uses the iOS WebKit – which is Apple’s own mobile rendering engine and components, developed for their Safari browser – therefore it is restricted from using Google’s own V8 JavaScript engine.
This is backed up by caniuse, which provides this note on iPS Safari:
Now it’s clear why the issue wasn’t showing up on my machine but it was showing up on my phone. Different rendering engines!
Reproduce the issue locally
I pulled down the project and ran it locally. I confirmed it was still an issue by running the local code in a simulator as well as on my actual iPhone. Safari on macOS has an easy way to open up DevTools instances of each one.
This provides access to a console just like you would in the browser but for iOS Safari. I’m not going to lie, Apple’s developer experience is top notch (see what I did there? ?).
I’m able to reproduce the issue locally now.
? What I learned
After pulling down the Svelte repo and looking around the code a bit, I noticed the UI and SVGs were being pulled in via a package called @sveltejs/site-kit. Great, now I need my local version of site kit to get pulled into svelte/site so I can see changes and debug the issue.
I needed to point the node_modules in Svelte’s package.json to my local copy of site-kit. This sounded like a Symlink. After looking through the docs without much luck I Googled around and stumbled upon npm-link. That let me see what I was doing!
I can now make local changes to site-kit and see them reflected in the Svelte project.
Solving the issue
Seriously, all this needed was a one-line change:
border: transparent;
But locating where that one line should go was not as straightforward as you’d think. Source maps on the project are still a little rough around the edges and are showing this CSS coming from the Nav.svelte component when it was really coming from another file. That would be another great way to contribute to the project!
Then you search around and learn that this is being handled and you learn a little more about how it’s done. Everything now looks great on mobile and desktop.
That’s all it needed!
Let’s rewind
What started as a quick, one-line change became a bit of a journey. I had to:
Run the project and component repositories
Learn about system linking
Contribute documentation about lining to site-kit
Learn about different browser renderers
Learn how to emulate an iOS Safari browser
Learn how to get access to its debugger
Find the issue when source maps weren’t working correctly
Fix the issue (finally!)
Working on your own, you normally don’t get to deal with issues like this, or have a large complex system you need to build a mental model of and learn. You don’t get to learn from maintainers. Most importantly, you don’t see all of the hard work that goes into building a popular technical product.
When I submitted this idea to CSS-Tricks. Chris said he had recently dealt with a similar situation. Difficult learning is durable learning. Embrace the struggle.
Never stop learning
I grabbed another issue from the Svelte project and now I’m learning about CSSStyleSheet because there’s another issue (I think), with how Safari handles keyframe animations within stylemanager.ts. And so the learning continues down paths I never would have treaded in my day-to-day work.
When something breaks, enjoy the journey of learning the system. You’ll gain valuable insights into why that thing broke and what can be done to fix it. That’s one of the awesome benefits of contributing to open source projects and why I’d encourage you to do the same.
Improvement is a matter of steady, ongoing iteration. If you’ve been around for a good while, you’ll know that Smashing has been through a good number of changes in the past: a new design, a new layout, a new technical stack, and so much more. Still, it was always done with quality content in mind.
For example, we recently rearranged the navigation bar at the top of the page — have you noticed? Take a closer look, and you’ll find some neatly curated guides on major topics covered in the magazine, conference talks, and elsewhere. Each guide brings together the best we have on that subject, to help you explore and learn. And speaking of guides, we just published a comprehensive SEO guide earlier today!
Alongside our guides, printed books, eBooks and printed magazine, we’re thrilled to have yet another addition to our smashingly cherished gems: meet our brand new Interface Design Patterns Checklists. Co-founder of Smashing Magazine, Vitaly Friedman, has been collecting, curating and refining each checklist for years — we’re convinced that this deck of cards will prove to always be useful when designing and building any interface component. Really.
If you’d like to (virtually) meet Vitaly himself and dive deeper into the bits and pieces of smart interface design patterns, you can attend his upcoming online workshop on Smart Interface Design Patterns (2020 Edition) where you’ll explore hundreds of practical examples over 5×2.5h live sessions.
Please note that the cards are currently only available in PDF format — we’re doing our best to print them as soon as it’s possible to ship worldwide!
100 checklists cards on everything from carousels to web forms — carefully curated and designed. Get the PDF ?
Upcoming Online Events: See You There?
With still so many COVID-coaster emotions, we’re very sad about the ongoing situation and not being able to meet you in person, so we have decided to move all of our physical events for 2020 online in order to stay connected with our dear and valued community.
Despite the circumstances, we’re proud to have so many brilliant speakers on board, and to make the best of it all, you don’t even need to travel to meet them. So, we promise to deliver the same community feeling as much as possible, but from your very own home (office).
SmashingConf Live (August 20–21) An event full of interactive and live sessions by a line-up of inspiring and knowledgeable speakers.
SmashingConf Freiburg Online (Sept. 7–8) Our ‘hometown’ conference is now being moved online and open for everybody to join in!
SmashingConf Austin Online (Oct. 13–14) We’ve combined the initial Austin and New York events that will take place in a timezone suitable to everyone.
SmashingConf San Francisco Online (Nov. 10–11) Two full days of front-end, UX and everything else that connects us and helps us get better at what we do.
We always look forward to learning, sharing and connecting with each other. Join in the fun — we provide live captioning in English too!
For the conference experience, we’re using Hopin. It turned out to be the best option in terms of quality, reliability and accessibility, with reception and networking area, sponsor booths and breakout sessions. To join in, no installation is needed! Before the event, we’ll send you a magic link, so you can jump right into the conference.
Learning And Networking, The Smashing Way
We know everyone’s busy — and may even have homeschooling and other things to figure out on top of that — so we want to support you while not wasting any of your precious time. We’ve broken down our workshops into 2.5h-segments across days and weeks, so that you can learn at your own pace and in your own time (workshop materials and recordings included!).
Please do take a look at our bundle discounts if you want to attend more than one workshop — you can save up to US$100 and have a little more to spend on ice cream! ?
Attending a Smashing online event means that you’ll be taking part in live sessions, Q&As, discussion zones, challenges, and so much more! Join in the fun — we provide live captioning in English, too!
By the way, in case you find yourself thinking twice about joining in a Smashing workshops because you’re worried that your boss may need just a little bit of persuasion, then we’ve got your back with a neat lil’ template: Convince Your Boss. Good luck!
Bi-Weekly Podcast: Full Of Inspiration And Insights
Every second Tuesday, Drew McLellan talks to design and development experts about their work on the web. You can subscribe via your favorite app to get new episodes as soon as they’re ready.
Pssst. By the way, is there a topic that you’d love to hear and learn more about? Or perhaps you or someone you know would like to talk about a web- and design-related topic that is dear to your hearts? We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter and we’ll do our best to get back to you as soon as possible.
Catching up with what’s new in the web industry doesn’t mean you have to be tied up to a chair and desk! Do as Topple the Cat does it: grab your headphones and stretch those legs! You can subscribe and tune in anytime with any of your favorite apps.
Shining The Spotlight On Accessibility And Prototyping
Mark your calendars! We’ll have the great pleasure to welcome Chen Hui Jing and Adekunle Oduye to our Smashing TV virtual stage. If you’d like to attend, you’ll need to install the Zoom client for Meetings, which is available for all the main OSs. (It may take a little time to download and install, so please grab it ahead of time if you can.)
“Accessibility With(out) Priorities” on September 1 (14:00 London time) Hui Jing will touch upon the reasons why this is the case, and discuss strategies to convince clients and bosses to still ‘invest’ in accessibility.
“The Good, The Bad And Ugly Of Prototyping” on October 1 (19:00 London time) Adekunle will share techniques on how prototype efficiently and effectively, how to create a framework for prototyping that fits into your organization, and how to utilize a prototype for production.
Smashing TV is a series of webinars and live streams packed with practical tips for designers and developers. Follow @SmashingMembers on Twitter for schedules, transcripts and fancy cats.
Trending Topics On Smashing Magazine
We aim to publish a new article every single day that is dedicated to various hot topics in the web industry. You can always subscribe to our RSS feed to be among the first ones to read new content published in the magazine.
Here are some articles that our readers enjoyed most and have recommended further in the past month:
We’ve got news! We’ll be sending out a weekly edition of the Smashing Newsletter, but aiming for shorter and topic-specific issues. These may be dedicated to accessibility, or CSS, or UX — you’ll just have to wait and see! We want to bring you useful content, and to share all the cool things that we see folks doing across communities within the web industry. No third-party mailings or hidden advertising, and your support really helps us pay the bills. ??
Interested in sponsoring? Feel free to check out our partnership options and get in touch with the team anytime — they’ll be sure to get back to you as soon as they can.
The State Of Things In 2020
With so much happening on the web every day, it’s difficult to keep track, but it’s even more difficult to pause for a moment, and a take a detailed look at where we actually are at the moment. Luckily, there are plenty of surveys and reports gathering some specific developments in a single place. State of CSS and State of JS highlight common trends in CSS and JavaScript. There are also studies on Design Systems in 2019, Front-End Tooling and Open Source Security.
It’s good to know where you stand not only in terms of skills, but also in terms of salaries: that’s where Levels.FYI Salaries helps, as well as UX Designer Salaries and Design Census 2019. Plus, make sure to review State of Remote Work 2020, highlighting trends of how to make remote work more efficient. Word of caution: some of them might be biased due to the demographics that they are targeting, so please take the insights with a grain of doubt.
Diving Into HTML And CSS Vocabs
If you often find yourself looking up the correct word to use for that one particular thing in your CSS and HTML code, we’re sure you’ll bookmark the following resources right away. Thanks to Ville V. Vanninen, you can now learn the difference between doctypes, attribute names, tags, media features — all in an interactive way.
You’ll find a nice interactive list of CSS terms as well as another useful one dedicated to HTML vocabulary where you can click on any of the terms shown on the right side to highlight the relevant parts in the code sample presented on the page. The lists are also available in different languages.
Practical Tips For Rebranding A Product
Do we rebrand? And when is the right time to do so? A lot of product people are asking themselves these questions as their product becomes more mature. The team at Overflow was in the same situation a while ago.
To reflect the evolution of their product from an easy-to-use, practical flow diagramming tool into a tool that is used for design communication and presentation workflows, they decided that it was time for a rebranding. In the article “Evolving the Overflow Brand”, they share their approach and what they learned along the way. Interesting ideas and takeaways that you can incorporate into your own redesign process. One that particularly helps make the challenge more approachable: Think of your product as a human being and imagine what they are like and how they feel to visualize your brand’s new identity.
Disabled Buttons And How To Do Better
“Disabled buttons suck.” It’s a strong statement that Hampus Sethfors makes against this widespread UI pattern. As Hampus argues, disabled buttons usually harm the user experience, causing irritation and confusion when nothing happens when a button that carries an action word like “Send” is clicked. But they do not only prevent people from completing tasks with as little effort as possible, disabled buttons also create barriers for people with disabilities — due to issues with low contrast and assistive technologies not being able to navigate to disabled buttons. Now, how can we do better?
Hampus suggests to keep buttons enabled by default and show an error message when a user clicks it. If you want to indicate that a button is disabled, you could use CSS to make it look a bit grayed out (considering contrast, of course) but keep it enabled and put focus on a meaningful error message. A small detail that makes a difference.
The “Back” Button UX
We often spend quite a bit of time to get a feature just right, or enhance the design with bold interactive features. We measure the impact of our decisions in A/B tests, study conversion and click-through-rates, analyze traffic and search for common funnel issues. But the data conveys just a part of the story. More often than not, customers have very different issues, often unrelated with our features or design.
The quality of an experience shows in situations when something goes unexpectedly. What happens when the customer accidentally reloads the page in the middle of a checkout, e.g. when scrolling up and down on a mobile phone? Does the payment form get cleared out as a user notices a name’s typo on a review page? What happens when a customer hits the “Back” button in a multi-step-process within our single-page-application?
In fact, the unexpected “Back” button behavior often has severe usability issues, and some of them are highlighted in Baymard Institute’s article Design Patterns That Violate “Back” Button Expectations. It’s worth testing the “Back” button for overlays, lightboxes, anchor links and content jumps, infinite scroll and “load more” behavior, filtering and sorting, accordions, checkout and inline editing.
We can use the HTML5 History API, or specifically history.pushState() to invoke a URL change without a page reload. The article goes into detail highlighting common issues and solutions to get things just right. Worth reading and bookmarking, and coming back to every now and again.
Modern CSS Solutions For Old Problems
When it comes to layout and styling, some problems keep appearing in every other project — styling checkboxes and radio buttons, fluid type scale, custom list styles or accessible dropdown navigation.
In her series, Modern CSS, Stephanie Eckles dives into modern CSS solutions for old CSS problems, taking a closer look into each of them, and exploring the most reliable techniques to make things work well in modern browsers. Stephanie also provides demos and ready-to-be-used code snippets. A fantastic series worth checking out and subscribing to!
Fun With Forms
Web forms are literally everywhere — from subscription forms to filters and dashboards, yet they aren’t easy to get right. How do we deal with inline validation? Where and how do we display error messages? How do we design and build autocomplete controls? No wonder that there is no shortage in resources on form design — and there are a few new ones that appeared recently.
Geri Reid has collected Form Design Guidelines, with best practices, research insights, resources and examples. In Fun With Forms, Michael Scharnagl collect a few obscure facts and fun things to do with forms. Adam Silver has been writing quite a bit about web form best practices in his blog — and release a web forms design system, too. Finally, Heydon Pickering still has some inclusive components patterns for forms in his blog. All wonderful resources to keep track of when designing or building forms — to ensure we don’t make costly mistakes down the line.
A CSS-Only, Animated, Wrapping Underline
Underlines are hard, especially if you want to do something that goes beyond the good ol’ text-decoration: underline. Inspired by a hover effect he saw in the link underline on Cassie Evans’ blog, Nicky Meulemann decided to create something similar: a colored underline with a hover effect where the line retreats and is replaced by a differently colored line.
The twist: The lines should not touch during the animation and, most importantly, links that wrap onto new lines should have the underline beneath all lines. If you want to follow along step by step how it’s done, be sure to check out Nicky’s tutorial.
A Guide To Setting Up A Development Workflow On Mac
Setting up a development environment on a new computer can be confusing, not only if you’re new to programming. Together with contributors from the web community, Sourabh Bajaj published a comprehensive guide that helps you get the job done with ease.
The guide is a reference for everyone who wants to set up an environment or install new languages or libraries on a Mac. From Homebrew to Node, Python, C++, Ruby, and a lot more, it takes you step by step through everything you need to know to get things up and running. Contributions to the guide are welcome.
Not surprising. Webinars are a great tool for marketing, training, internal communication, and networking. If you use the right tools and plan your webinars well, you can use webinars to promote your business with a limited marketing budget.
Additionally, the multi-dimensional experience and two-way communication of webinars makes them engaging and resultful.
Not convinced?
ON24 surveyed 2,000 organizations and found that 23% of respondents hosted 50-150 webinars in 2019. Moreover, 55% of them planned to step up their webinar games in 2020.
But, planning and hosting webinars is just half the task done. You need to draw a good number of attendees to make your webinars a success. You could wait for target audiences to discover your webinars organically. But there is no guarantee of a good attendee turnout with this approach.
The solution?
You can reach out to potential attendees using clever tactics and ensure that your webinars garner the attention that they deserve.
If this proactive approach sounds good to you, read this post carefully. I’ll explain eight smart ways to attract attendees to your webinar.
Let’s get started.
8 Super-Effective Ways to Improve Webinar Attendeeship
All your effort to ideate and execute great webinars can fall flat if no one turns up to attend them. If that happens, your webinars’ business objectives will not be fulfilled and your marketing spend will not be justified.
That’s why you need sure-shot methods to get people to register for your webinars. Here are eight great webinar marketing strategies.
1. Optimized Landing Page
Even before you start your webinar promotion, you need to create an optimized landing page for webinar registration. This is the page where people land when they click any of your webinar promotion links.
Your landing page helps convey vital information about your webinars to registrants, including the date and time, topic, and speakers. It explains the key questions that will be covered in the webinar so that people can decide if they want to attend or not.
From the brand’s point of view, landing pages are invaluable. They contain a form to capture details of registrants, which helps brands build their leads database.
Anything else?
To make your landing pages more compelling, you can include short teaser videos about the webinar or customer testimonials from past webinars.
Your landing page should be linked to a thank you page that thanks people for registering for your webinar. You can also pitch your next webinar or other content offerings on this page. Some thank you pages allow people to submit any questions they might have about the upcoming webinar.
2. Hello Bars in Your Website
Your website is one of the best places to get sign-ups for your webinar.
But how?
You can embed plugins called “hello bars” on your branded website to convert your website visitors into attendees. As soon as a person lands on your website, a full-width pop-up appears and sits atop the page. You can add to it a line or two about your webinar and a strong call-to-action (CTA).
When visitors click on the CTA, they are redirected to your webinar landing page from where they can register.
Hello Bars are a great tool for drawing the attention of visitors. Using animated buttons and strong typography can enhance their impact.
Need a pro tip?
Quizzes in hello bars are irresistible. Instead of straightaway pitching your webinar in a hello bar, lead people to the webinar registration page by getting them to answer objective-type questions.
Image via LeadQuizzes
The answer options should be available as buttons, which should lead to the next hello bar, eventually leading to the webinar landing page. LeadQuizzes used this tactic to improve their website capture rates by 37.96%.
3. Exit-Intent Pop-Ups
Another way to multiply your webinar sign-ups from your website is by using exit-intent pop-ups. As the name suggests, these pop-ups appear when a visitor clicks to exit your website without converting.
When a visitor hovers outside your page or near the “X” button, you can program an exit-intent pop-up to flash an enticing offer about your webinar. There’s a good chance that the person will pause and read the offer. They might even hit the register button if the pop-up copy is catchy.
To create buzz about your webinar, start sharing short teaser videos on your website and social pages. Add these videos in your email newsletters as well. Make the videos shareable so that the word spreads faster.
If possible, get all of your webinar speakers to contribute to the teaser videos. Keep the videos really concise so that they don’t get fragmented when you post them on social Stories.
Animated trailer videos are also very popular. Whatever format you choose, make sure that you add a registration link at the end of the video.
Typically, webinars are live events. But simulated webinars can be watched on-demand. You record the content first and broadcast it later.
To improve your webinar attendee count, you should take advantage of simulated webinars. 38% of people prefer on-demand webinar viewing, according to the ON24 report cited earlier.
However, only sophisticated webinar-hosting platforms like FLOW allow you to simulate webinars. These platforms let you upload pre-recorded content blocks, along with all interactivities and screen controls. At screening time, you simply run the webinar and start interacting with attendees.
6. Paid Searches
If you have the budget, invest in advertising your webinar on search engines like Google and Bing. Paid campaigns have more targeted reach and better results as compared to organic campaigns.
Paid searches show your webinar ads in the search results pages (SERP) when a searcher types contextually-relevant queries.
For instance, if your webinar is about digital marketing hacks, your ad can show up if someone types queries like “how to ace digital marketing” or “digital marketing tips.”
Often, people compare paid search and paid social when it comes to webinar promotions. I’ll say it all boils down to costs and webinar objectives.
Paid search ads are costlier but have a more direct impact on conversions. If your domain authority is less than perfect, social media ads are a better bet since you can catch attention better in social feeds than on Google.
Want another pro tip?
To make your Google ads even more targeted, draw on historical registration data.
Analyze registration records from past webinars to find high-potential targets. By source attribution, you can understand which channels brought in maximum sign-ups. Then, you can use these insights to target your ads more precisely and optimize your returns.
7. Social Media Ads
Paid ads on social media platforms are excellent for attracting attendees to your webinars. These ads are more interruptive than paid search ads. However, they give you a broader reach as they are shareable.
Among social ads, Facebook Lead Ads can get maximum exposure for your webinars. They allow people to sign up for your webinar in-app thus, making the registration process seamless. Plus, Facebook’s huge user base and unbeatable targeting can give your webinars enhanced visibility.
Don’t believe me?
Wishpond advertised their webinar on Facebook and derived a 458% return on investment.
Image via Wishpond
For crafting their Facebook ad campaign, the brand followed a four-step formula:
Compose brilliant ad copy with relevant trigger words like “free”, “discount”, and “reserve”.
Follow advertising best practices to decide on colors, typography, and CTA placement.
Leverage Facebook’s advanced targeting to reach people with a potential to convert.
Test ad variants to drill down into an ad that is producing good sign-up volumes.
8. Emails
Last but arguably the most important webinar promotional tactic is email marketing.
You need to schedule email workflows for before, during, and after your webinar. 1-2 weeks in advance, start sending out emails inviting your contacts to the webinar. Additionally, add a registration link in your email signature for reaching out to people outside your subscriber list.
Your email subject lines should create urgency with words like limited offers, grab a seat, and so on. Follow email deliverability best practices to send your emails at optimal times.
Follow up initial emails with regular messages reminding people about the upcoming webinar. Since webinars can be recorded and watched later, the registration process continues after the event as well. This means you need to keep sending emails after the event for a few weeks till the leads dry up.
Are You Ready to Promote Your Webinars?
To get a decent turnout in your webinars, start promoting them weeks in advance. Try a combination of the tactics I’ve suggested above to formulate a feasible marketing plan. Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying too many new strategies at one go.
Do you have any questions about webinars or promotions in general? Leave your questions in the comments below. I’m always happy to help.
Time and again, Google has proved that its name is synonymous with innovation. The release of the Android 11 developer preview emphasizes precisely that.
Android 10 brought with it significant changes in Google’s operating system environment. It put an end to the practice of naming operating systems behind desserts- after Android Pie, we were introduced to Android 10. Android 10 gave its users the much-awaited Dark Mode. It also included several changes in the app permission front, giving priority to users’ security.
Android 10 was a demonstration of Google’s evolution over the years. Android has always walked hand in hand with new technologies, paving the path for the future of mobile. And with Android 11, Google is carrying the same principles forward.
Users’ security and privacy is a top concern in Android 11. They do this while focusing on helping users make the most of the recent advances in technology. It comes with tons of new capabilities for developers to enhance android app development. Let us take a look at the highlights of Android 11 before we talk about its impact on mobile apps.
What is New in Android 11
1. Better Messaging Experience
With Android 11, users will have a deeper conversational experience.
Notification Center will have a dedicated section for conversations, making messaging real-time and offering instant access to all ongoing conversations.
To make conversations accessible during multitasking, chat bubbles are introduced. These bubbles hide all ongoing conversations and will be visible on-screen at all times. Users can tap the bubbles to expand any conversation.
With Android 11, while replying to messages from notifications, it will be possible to insert images.
2. 5G ready
Android 11 is set to enhance connectivity by taking advantage of the high speed offered by 5G. It uses an API called ‘Dynamic Meterdness API’ to detect whether a user is connected to a 5G network. Once a 5G network is detected, it allows the user to take advantage of the speed by loading high-resolution graphics or streaming top-quality videos.
3. Built-in screen recorder
iOS has already released a built-in screen recorder that has made a positive impact on iPhone app development. With Android 11, Google brings this functionality to its audience as well. The developer preview shows a feature-filled screen recorder with a delightful UI.
4. Adaptation to various screen types
The device market is under continuous innovation with advancements in new form factors and device screens. Foldable devices are going to rule the smartphone market in the coming years. Android 11 extends support for these with APIs that lets you optimize your apps.
5. One time permission
Android 10 gave users better control over their privacy by giving them the option to allow permissions for an app “only while in use”.
Android 11 takes this a step ahead by introducing One-time permission. It means users can allow access to location, microphone, or camera on a single-time basis. Applications will be able to use this permission for that time alone. The permission will be revoked once the user quits the app, and the app must request permission again during the next access.
Impact of Android 11 on Mobile Applications
Now that we have looked into the features of Android 11 let us see how the introduction of it will impact mobile applications’ performance.
1. Restricted app permission
Android 11 will restrict repeated permission requests. If a user clicks “Deny” twice for specific permission, the OS will consider it as “Do not ask again”. This means the app providers will need to convey the reasons for permission in marketing methods or through the app features.
2. Privacy for app usage statistics
To ensure better privacy for users’ data, the app usage statistics are stored in credential encrypted storage. So neither the app nor any other system will be able to access this data. In order to access the app usage statistics, the developers will have to do some specific coding.
3. Reduced data redundancy
Android 11 uses shared blobs for safer sharing of data within applications. This helps to reduce data redundancy on local storage and network by caching large datasets using data blobs.
In earlier Android versions, each application had to download a separate copy of the dataset in such cases.
4. Process termination reports
In Android 11, reports carrying reasons for application termination will be generated. However, the mobile app owners will not be able to get detailed crash diagnostics. They cannot know if the app crashed due to memory issues or if it became unresponsive. This is one main ?advantage of users’ privacy offered by Android 11.
5. Faster APK installations
APK installations generally take a long time, even for minor changes in the application. Understanding the demand for frequent app updates, Google has made this process perform faster in Android 11 by introducing incremental APK installations.
This feature accelerates the process by initially installing enough of the APK required to launch the app and then continuing the rest of the app installed in the background.
6. Neural network support
Android 11 expands the operation and control provided for Android app developers to develop neural network-based applications. It introduces the Neural Network API for making the machine learning apps operate smoothly by efficiently handling the related computationally intensive operations. Thus, Android 11 provides greater support for applications based on machine learning and neural networks.
7. Benefits of 5G
The support for the 5G network provided by Android 11 brings a lot of benefits to apps. It will result in faster file transfers, zero latency, and high-speed streaming, which will increase the user experience by tenfold.
The Countdown Begins
Android 11 is a much-awaited release, both for android app developers and for android app owners. With the incredible new features and the functionalities that it brings, there is no doubt that the Android 11 will bring a heightened user experience.
Every android app development company is gearing up for this release. Developers worldwide have started evaluating the Android 11 development preview document, and are doing experiments around it on test applications. And Google is trusting on this strong development community support to provide them with early and thoughtful feedback, which will help them deliver a robust platform that will delight the world.
Search engine optimization is essential to most websites. The industry is worth more than $70 billion a year, and it’s only going to grow. It has specialists, sub-specialists, thought leaders, dedicated publications, fantastically complex tools, and constant uncertainty at its heart. As Bob Dylan says, it’s just a shadow we’re all chasing.
All the more reason to stay sharp, no? Every tweak to major search engine algorithms sends shockwaves throughout the web. For those who don’t follow the SEO space it can be easy to lose track of the latest trends, authorities, and resources.
That’s what this page is for. It will break down SEO’s hot topics, common questions, and the best resources for staying up to date with that world. As such, this isn’t so much a guide to SEO as it is a guide to the world of SEO. Think of it as a cliff-notes, a primer for those looking to top up their knowledge and understand the latest trends.
For those really in a rush to get back into the groove, skip ahead to the cheat sheet rounding up all the resources included in this piece. As for the rest of you, on we go. It’s quite Google-heavy, because Google currently holds 85%+ market share, but rest assured the points apply to the likes of Baidu and DuckDuckGo as well.
And remember, this is a live document. If there’s something we’ve missed, tell us. In a world as fast-changing as SEO no resources can afford to sit on their hands.
Why SEO Matters
We won’t linger on this point, but it’s useful to remind ourselves what SEO is, why it’s important, and how it has evolved over the years. Keeping the foundational principles in mind allow you to see the woods rather than the trees.
So, in a nutshell, search engine optimisation is the means by which websites appear in search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo. It remains one of the best ways for websites to be found. More than 90% of web traffic comes through search engines, with Google alone processing trillions of searches a year. If you want your website to be seen, you want to be appearing in relevant search results.
Although SEO isn’t controversy-free, it is in principle the great equalizer. Positions can’t be bought; they’re based on relevance and quality. It is in the interest of search engines to deliver the best results possible, so SEO is the process by which a site becomes the best results possible.
In a word, the appeal of SEO is traffic. It’s getting people to drop by and hopefully stick around. More traffic means more readers, more viewers, more customers, more attention.
Whatever your motivation is, the game is fundamentally the same. From content to site design, implementing makes websites better. Design is clearer and content is more focused, with visitors’ needs always front and centre. In a sense it gives you a 3D vision of the web, seeing web experiences from both human and computer perspectives.
Despite quick-fix guides to the contrary, SEO is best not retrofitted. As Suzanne Scacca writes, SEO belongs at the heart of the web design process. It can’t — and shouldn’t — be pushed off to writers or SEO executives. It is a sitewide concern, requiring sitewide attention.
Hot Topics
If you’re not comfortable with the basics of SEO — meta tags, alt text, link building, etc. — this page is not for you. This piece assumes a certain amount of foundational knowledge. Don’t panic, though, we won’t leave you hanging. Here are several terrific resources for getting started from scratch:
As for the rest of you, what follows are some of the SEO space’s slightly more technical hot topics, complete with conventional wisdom and resources for keeping up with their evolutions.
Great Content
I had to put this first. The sheer amount of data involved in SEO makes it easy to lose sight of an important fact: you’re making websites for people, not search engines. As corny as it sounds, in the long term the best way to perform well in organic search is to be the best you possible.
Search engines value good content above all else. However much the intricacies of SEO change, this remains true. It’s a rock solid foundation for SEO. Optimising a brilliant website is easy; optimising a bad one is hard, and often leads to black hat behaviour. (More on that below.) Yes, there are poorly optimised websites that perform well in search, for a variety of reasons, but grumbling about will get you nowhere.
What does ‘good content’ mean in concrete terms? It’s not as arbitrary as you might think. Search engines generally keep their cards close to their chest, but where content quality is concerned they’re as transparent as you could hope.
For those out of the SEO loop there are few better ways of getting up to speed than reading through Google’s latest Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Why guess what search engines want when they’ve written a book’s worth of documentation on the subject? Topics covered in the latest edition include:
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T),
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages,
The reputation of websites and creators,
Mobile user needs,
Auto-generated content,
Deceptive page design,
What low quality pages look like.
Whether you’re a designer or a copywriter, this is all valuable information.
Say what you like about Google’s more nefarious practices, but where organic search is concerned they want websites to be goodie two shoes. Write brilliant articles; build fast, practical sites; use beautiful visuals; design ethically; be transparent about who you are and what you do; and never, ever let SEO be the tail that wags the dog. Quality will win out in the end.
Accessibility
Happily, the web development space seems to be warming up to talk of accessibility. There is plenty of natural overlap between SEO and accessibility, though sadly there is currently little evidence that super accessible websites get a boost in search. Accessibility barely features in Google’s mammoth Search Quality Guidelines document.
There is, however, a huge amount of overlap between accessibility best practice and SEO best practice. These include:
JavaScript has grown into the third pillar of web design — joining HTML and CSS. The language allows for all manner of fancy interactive features that aren’t possible on static sites. That sophistication has brought with it some confusion where SEO is concerned.
Can JavaScript-heavy websites perform well in search? Yes, they can and do. When issues arise it’s almost always in the indexing process, when search engines crawl and render web pages for their databases.
Google has a finite crawl budget. If your page takes ages to load, there’s a decent chance search engines will skip over it. Render-blocking JavaScript is also frowned upon, especially for above the fold content. If possible, execute scripts after the page is loaded.
In short, let search engines see pages the way people see them. Google Search Console has a URL Inspection Tool that will show you what it retrieves, what it renders, and any glaring issues.
Developers should not shy away from JavaScript for fear of angering the SEO gods. Yes, bloated, slow, gratuitous JavaScript will hurt your website’s search performance, but applied properly the language can also improve it. Indeed, formats like JSON are a staple of more sophisticated SEO markup, like Schema.
Here are some resources for getting into the weeds of JavaScript and SEO:
Remember also that the more solid your SEO foundations are, the less pressure there is on JavaScript to perform. Think of it as something that enhances the browsing experience rather than carries the water.
Structured Data
Metadata has come a long way since the early days of SEO. Meta titles and descriptions remain important, but there’s a whole other level becoming increasingly difficult to ignore — structured data.
Structured data, more specifically Schema, has been adopted by all the major search engines. Part of the Semantic Web push to make online data machine-readable, it allows you to label content with specificity that simply wasn’t possible before. Structured data is how search engines display rich results like recipes, reviews excerpts, event details, and more.
Schema vocabulary works alongside Microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD formats, and there are plenty of free tools to help you learn the language and how to implement it. These include:
Search engines are ominously clever, but they’re not that clever. Structured data removes much of the guesswork from the crawling process, making it easier to understand and index content for relevant searches.
Search engines like fast websites. They’re easier to crawl, and they’re easier for users to browse. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your site is, if it takes ages to load people aren’t going to stick around to find out. Search engines are similarly impatient.
Like most things SEO, site speed best practice covers a spectrum all the way from common sense to highly technical tinkering. On the common sense side, don’t upload 12MB images when 200KB ones look exactly the same. If you absolutely must have massive high resolution images, link away to them instead. Images are the most popular resource type on the web, so don’t skimp on the compression. Most people will be browsing on their phones anyway.
Beyond that you get into more technical waters, though the goal remains the same: load quickly and smoothly. Streamline your code, cut out superfluous HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Most importantly, as always, test what you’ve done. Site speed isn’t a theoretical concern; it’s a practical one.
Typically, Google has a dedicated tool for that purpose:
It will tell you exactly what’s wrong with a URL’s content and what you can do to improve it. Site speed is no great mystery; more often than not it’s simply a case of trimming the fat.
People are understandably drawn to the broad canvas offered by desktop-first design, but it’s not where our skills are most useful. If your website is a work of art on desktop but a mess on mobile your SEO will suffer — and that’s to say nothing of user experience.
Think with your mobile cap on. Are ads monopolising above the fold space? Google dedicates 20 pages of its Search Quality Guidelines to understanding mobile user needs, covering everything from search engine result pages (SERPs) to location-specific search queries. Again, what search engines want needn’t be a mystery.
The Dark Side Of SEO
It would be remiss not to address the seedier side of SEO. There’s a lot of money to be made from ranking well for popular search terms. One of the main reasons search engines are so secretive about how they work is they know a number of websites will try to game the system in the name of Quick Wins™.
Black Hat SEO is quite a vibrant world in its own mustache-twirling way. From cramming keywords out of sight to purchasing backlinks from reputable websites, there’s an almost cartoonish instinct among some to avoid the hard work and self-improvement that good SEO entails.
Has black hat SEO worked in the past? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes very well indeed. However, search engines are always on the watch for bad behaviour, and they will punish it when they find it. The damage can be irreparable and besides, nobody likes a sleazeball.
There’s no substitute for quality long-term SEO strategies. Which brings us to…
Playing The Long Game
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Implementing best practice can produce immediate results, but long-term performance requires long-term maintenance. Besides, the journey is more important than the destination, isn’t it?
This article does not presume to give you a comprehensive guide to SEO. This is a resource for those who want to stay up to date with the industry as part of long-term self-improvement. In that spirit, the cheat sheet below is one of documentation, tools, journalists, thought leaders, podcasts, and other resources.
A reminder also that this is a live document, so don’t be shy about suggesting adjustments and additions as the SEO world continues to change.
Happy searching.
A Smashing SEO Cheat Sheet
This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully there is enough for you to fall down the SEO rabbit hole. Please note that this cheat sheet will be updated occasionally, so if something/someone is missing, feel free to let us know! We’ll consider it for inclusion the next time we update the sheet.
The other day, I spotted this particularly lovely bit from Corey Ginnivan’s website where a collection of cards stack on top of one another as you scroll.
I started wondering how much JavaScript this would involve and how you’d go about making it when I realized — ah! — this must be the work of position: sticky and a tiny amount of Sass. So, without diving into how Corey did this, I decided to take a crack at it myself.
But how do we get each of these elements to look like a stack on top of one another? Well, we can use some fancy Sass magic to fix the position of each card. First we’ll loop over every card element and then change the value with each iteration:
@for $i from 1 through 8 {
.card:nth-child(#{$i}n) {
top: $i * 20px;
}
}
Which results in this demo, which is totally charming, if I do say so myself:
CodePen Embed Fallback
And there we have it! We could make a few visual changes here to improve things. For example, the box-shadow and color of each card, just like Corey’s example. But I wanted to keep experimenting here. What if we switch the order of the cards and made them horizontal instead?
We already do that on this very website:
After experimenting for a little bit I changed the order of the cards with flexbox and made each item slide in from right to left:
In today’s day and age, digital presence is incredibly important. You need to get yourself out there, show your work and your skills. Especially if you are a graphic designer, building your online portfolio is a must.
Portfolio Platforms
There are many ways you can create your online portfolio. There are platforms that you can use to showcase your work, they also are kind of like a social media platform. The most popular ones are Behance, ArtStation, and Dribbble.
Many artists choose to display their work on these platforms, that doesn’t mean that they limit themselves to a single platform though. You shouldn’t, either. It’s important to be on every platform you can be.
Your Own Portfolio Space
Having your own website to showcase your work, your achievements, your story and anything you want is also a great way to get yourself out there. If you have a professional and crisp website it shows you mean business.
Adobe Portfolio is a great way to make this happen. It enables you to create a responsive, multi-page website that you can showcase all your work.
Responsive design is pretty important, it means that your images will be optimized for all screen sizes. You don’t want your images to look in weird dimensions when somebody is browsing on their mobile device. Adobe Portfolio automatically optimizes your images and change the resolution of your images to better optimize your page performance.
Adobe Portfolio Benefits
The good thing about Adobe Portfolio is you don’t need to know HTML or CSS. There are themes that you can choose from to make your page stand out. The themes look great for showcasing your photographs and other creative work.
Remember the part about being active on many platforms as possible? Adobe Portfolio has integration with Behance, so both your accounts are connected. You can import your work from Behance to your website easily with the help of integration.
Adobe Creative Cloud is a great ecosystem, and if you decide to use Adobe Portfolio you can take advantage of the Creative Cloud. You’ll have access to thousands of Adobe fonts. You will also be able to easily import and access your photos from Lightroom through your Adobe Creative Cloud account.
The great thing about Adobe Portfolio is that if you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, it’s completely free. It’s included in the subscription.
Adobe Portfolio Tips
Adobe portfolio also comes with unlimited pages and hosting. This means you can create different pages other than the page you showcase your work. It’s always a good idea to include an “About” and “Pricing” section on your personal website. You also don’t have to pay for a hosting service for your website. You have unlimited bandwidth and hosting, which means you can upload as many photos as you like.
When you set up your Adobe Portfolio site, it comes with the username.myportfolio.com domain, but you can change it with a custom domain. Although it’s not completely necessary, we suggest you purchase a domain for yourself. There are a number of benefits including better search engine results, easier promotion, and a more professional look.
If you decide to buy yourself a domain, you can do it through Adobe Portfolio. The domain names you buy through Adobe Portfolio are powered by Namecheap. But you don’t have to do it through Adobe, you can also purchase your own domain through 3rd party domain providers such as GoDaddy, Hover, and Domain.com.
If you have an active Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you should definitely start using Adobe Portfolio. It’d definitely have a positive impact on your career.
In 2019, to keep pace with an interior redesign of its visitor experience, the Empire State Building decided to redesign its website. Blue Fountain Media were engaged to deliver the project. With the new site launching, we spoke to Head of Design, Tatyana Khamdamova about designing for the world’s most famous building.
Webdesigner Depot: The Empire State Building is probably the most iconic building in America, if not the world. Were there any points at which you thought, “Oh God, this is too much pressure”?
Tatyana Khamdamova: Yes, of course, it was a lot of pressure knowing that people all over the world will be looking at your work. But with the pressure, we also felt excitement and pride that we got to work on such an iconic project. Just thinking that we are doing the site for Empire State Building made us feel proud of all that other work we did during our whole life that gave us the opportunity to be a part of this project.
WD: Blue Fountain Media is a large agency. Did you utilize the whole company, or was there a smaller, dedicated team tasked with creating the site?
TK: On a project like this one, you need the expertise of the team members from all departments in the agency. You want people to work together from the beginning to ensure that their knowledge helps to shape the project and produce the best possible outcome. It’s important for designers and marketers, for example, to be a part of the strategy and UX phase to provide their input which minimizes tunnel vision and generates more ideas. You can only achieve the best results if every single detail from strategy to design to development is done right.
WD: That’s a lot of people to coordinate. Did any roles naturally come to the fore, or is design leadership a quality that varies from person to person?
TK: Some people are natural leaders in their fields. But, sometimes a certain project requires people to take responsibility and show their leadership skills within the team. So I would say that it’s a quality that varies from person to person and doesn’t depend on a role or a title at all.
WD: What were the central aims of the redesign?
TK: ESB’s previous website did not reflect the level of design to match their iconic brand, UX was not user friendly, the content was outdated, and they wanted to grow online individual and group ticket sales. In addition to competing with global and NYC based tourist attractions, ESB was also faced with growing competition in the NYC Observatory market with Top of The Rock, One World Observatory, and Edge at Hudson Yards.
While the building underwent a $165 million renovation, BFM was tasked with creating a best in class website that reclaimed their iconic brand identity while providing an intuitive, and enjoyable user experience for both domestic and international visitors looking to learn about the building, exhibits, and the many ticket experience packages that they offer to visitors.
WD: How do you approach researching a unique project like this?
TK: We went to the source! First, we spoke to visitors of the Empire State Building while they were in line. What was their experience, did they use the website, what made them choose to visit the observatory instead of or in addition to some of the other competing observatories in the city. We then looked at other key tourist towers worldwide to see how they are positioning themselves globally to draw inspiration. We did in-depth stakeholder interviews that included folks working at the building every day and the types of interaction and questions they field from visitors. We conducted surveys of international travelers to understand their motivations and concerns. Finally, we dug into the website itself by testing using various protocols and platforms to understand the visitor paths, what they were able to easily do, and what tasks they may have found challenging. Drawing from all of those insights, we planned and designed the site using an iterative process.
WD: ESB visitors come from all over the world; how did you tackle designing for an international audience?
TK: People across the globe speak different languages, have different cultures and needs. Our goal was to learn about the audience and give them a site that looks and feels like it was created for them. Luckily we were working for the iconic building that is well known internationally and capturing the design aesthetic of the building itself already made the site recognizable across the globe. When working on the project we also were making sure that all users can see the information in their local language when they land on the site and have easy access to the language selector in case they want to change it. When you translate from one language to another the number of words and characters is not always the same. It was important to make sure that the site is designed and developed with an understanding of how the content will be displayed in other languages. With the localization help of our parent company Pactera EDGE we successfully translated the site in several languages and tested it to ensure that it looks right for the local and international audience.
WD: The famous view of the ESB is the external view, but your design feels more in keeping with the experience of the building’s interior. Was that a conscious decision?
TK: It was a conscious decision to create a site that makes you feel like you are visiting the building. Our goal was to make the visitor excited to buy a ticket and see all that beauty with their own eyes. But, if someone doesn’t have an opportunity to come to NY we wanted to make that online experience as close to the real one as possible. We understand that nothing will replace the actual visit to the Empire State Building but we wanted the website to feel real and by using the great photography and amazing Art Deco design elements, we were able to do so.
WD: How did you interpolate such a complex style as Art Deco into a functional site?
TK: Fortunately for us, our office is located a couple blocks away from the building and we had the opportunity to go there and see some of the details. We also had access to the great photos of the renovated hallways, exhibits, and observatory decks, which gave us the idea of how the Art Deco elements were used in the interior design of the building. We all know that interior design and web design have different needs and goals so it was an interesting challenge to design a site that makes you feel like you are inside the building without overwhelming users and that content is easy to read and the ticket purchasing process is simple and clean. We re-created a lot of design elements used on the ceiling, walls, and floor of the building simplified those elements and made them part of the website design. A lot of those elements were used in the background, call to actions, icons, and maps, and combined with the brand colors used in both interior and web designs we were able to give the site the Art Deco look.
WD: There’s been speculation in the design community recently that Art Deco may re-emerge as a trend in the 2020s. Having worked with the style, do you think it could benefit the wider web?
TK: This was a very specific design approach for a very specific project that takes us back to the 1920’s and emphasizes that era through modern twists in web design. I do not see how it can be applied on the web in general unless the client specifically asks for it, for example, architecture website, real estate, or furniture site. Every project is unique and has its own goals and style and there is no one solution that will fit all. As of today, The ESB is Art Deco in a sense and it truly owns that style.
WD: Can you share some details on the technology stack you employed?
TK: The site was built on the Drupal CMS, integrates with Empire’s partner Gateway Ticketing System, and is hosted on Acquia.
WD: Why Drupal? Does it have qualities that suit a project of this scale, or is it simply the case that BFM had the pre-existing expertise of Drupal to facilitate the build?
TK: BFM is a dev-agnostic production team and we always ensure we’re making the best recommendation to our clients. In this case, the previous website was built on Drupal, so in order to decrease the effect of a new platform rollout that would be unfamiliar to the internal ESB teams, we decided to keep the site on the Drupal platform. Luckily, Drupal is an extremely flexible CMS and the needs of the site perfectly align with what Drupal provides.
WD: With visitors from around the world, the range of browsers and devices you had to consider was vastly larger than most projects. Did you draw a line for support? If so, where was it?
TK: BFM constantly updates our list of supported browsers and devices to stay in line with changing technology trends and device usage around the world. We’re extremely lucky that our larger organization, Pactera EDGE, has deep roots in globalization and localization, so we leveraged their team to help us with all aspects of website visitors from the many regions around the world, including translation services and testing. Since this was a complete overhaul, we ensured the baseline standard for all devices was met and will continue to enhance as the future technology needs become apparent.
WD: The Empire State Building gets millions of visits each year, what sort of server resources do you need to throw at it to guarantee uptime?
TK: BFM is a partner of Acquia, and Empire State Building is hosting their new site with them. Acquia is a wonderful ecosystem built specifically for high performing drupal websites and provide many tools for their hosted sites to be able to handle fluctuations in visitors, traffic surges, and with the 24/7 support offered, they can easily manage the changing needs of worldwide visitors.
WD: Now it’s live, how does the new ESB site relate to its real world presence?
TK: The Empire State Building defines the New York City skyline. The world’s most magnificent Art Deco skyscraper, it’s a living piece of New York history and an instantly recognizable symbol of city culture today. The old site did not reflect the amazing interior and exterior design of the building and we had a chance to showcase the redesigned interior and bring more attention to the beautiful Art Deco design elements. We wanted to create the site to make you feel like you are visiting the building. By showcasing the exhibits, renovated halls, and observatories through compelling photography and architectural details, our goal is to make the visitor excited to buy a ticket and see all that beauty with their own eyes.
We’d like to thank Tatyana for taking the time out of her day to talk to us.
I spend a lot of time in DevTools, and in doing so, I’ve come to learn about some of the more ‘hidden’ features in DevTools and would love to share some of them with you in this article — specifically around accessibility.
This article uses Google Chrome since it’s a browser I use and feel comfortable with. That being said, Firefox, Safari, and Edge have all made great strides in their developer tools, and they definitely have some great accessibility-related features of their own.
You might already be familiar with DevTools, but here’s a quick reminder how to inspect an element on a webpage:
Open a webpage you are interested in inspecting, in Google Chrome
Use the shortcut Cmd + Shift + C (Ctrl + Shift + C on Windows)
Your pointer is in Inspect Element mode, go ahead and click an element on the webpage
Just like that, you’ve opened up DevTools and have begun inspecting elements. The different panels correspond to different features, e.g. around JavaScript debugging, performance, and so on.
There are accessibility-related features scattered throughout, so let us explore what they do, where they live, and how to use them.
Contrast Ratio
This is a feature to check whether the inspected text has a satisfactory color contrast against the background color.
Typically, a high level of contrast between the text color and underlying background color means more legible text for users of different abilities. In addition, it helps support users reading your text in a variety of environmental conditions, consider these examples which can impact how a user perceives text legibility:
Looking at a screen while outside with lots of sunlight
A mobile device has lowered its screen brightness all the way down to preserve battery life
“The intent is to provide enough contrast between text and its background so that it can be read by people with moderately low vision.”
Using the contrast ratio tool can give us an immediate yes/no answer to the question: does this text meet the minimum contrast standard. Using this tool can help influence the design and color scheme of your website, which can lead to more readable content for users with low vision.
Contrast ratio in the color picker tool (Large preview)
Available in the color picker tool, the contrast ratio feature can inform you on whether a minimum contrast requirement has been met. To access this feature:
Inspect a text element with the DevTools
Find the color property in the Styles pane, and click the small colored square to bring up the color picker tool
Click on the text which says ‘Contrast ratio’ which presents further information on this subject
As an exercise for yourself: drag the circular color picker tool across the color spectrum and observe the points at which the minimum contrast and enhanced contrast ratios are satisfied.
This feature can also be reported to you through a Lighthouse Report, covered in Lighthouse section of this article.
Accessibility Inspector
This refers to a DevTools pane which lets you view various accessibility properties and ARIA information for DOM nodes.
ARIA refers to a collection of properties, typically used in HTML, which in turn makes your website more accessible to individuals of different abilities. It’s absolutely worth using on your own websites, but it does require understanding the fundamentals of web accessibility to ensure you’re using it in a way which will help your users.
For example consider the following piece of HTML:
<p class="alert" role="alert">
That transaction was successful
</p>
An assistive device, such as a screen reader, can use the role="alert" property to announce such information to the user. The Accessibility pane within DevTools can cherry-pick such a property (role) and present it to you, so it’s clear what accessibility-related properties an element has.
Validating the information you see in this pane can help answer the question: “Am I coding accessibility incorrectly”, whether it’s syntactically or structurally, just keep in mind, applying accessibility techniques with the correct syntax, and having an accessible website, are two different things!
The accessibility pane within the Elements Panel (Large preview)
To start using this, you can open up the Accessibility pane with an inspected element:
Inspect any element on the page, e.g. a hyperlink or search box
Open up the Accessibility pane which is found in the Elements Panel Bonus tip: rather than having to locate the pane (it’s not open by default), I search for ‘Show Accessibility’ in the Command Menu (Cmd + Shift + P).
Computed accessibility properties (e.g. is something focusable, is it editable, does it pass form validation)
Depending on the inspected element, some of this information may not be applicable, for example, maybe an element legitimately does not need ARIA attributes.
As with most features in DevTools, what you see in this pane is ‘live’ — changes you make in the Elements Panel DOM Tree are reflected back to this pane immediately, making it helpful for correcting a misspelled ARIA attribute for example.
If you’re confident in your use of Accessibility, possibly because you’re using an alternative automated testing tool such as axe, then you may not use this pane very often, and that’s okay.
Video on Accessibility debugging with Chrome DevTools
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an automated website checker that can scan for best practices, accessibility, security, and more.
If you’ve done some reading on accessibility theory, and you want to learn how to effectively apply it to your own website, this is a great tool to use since it’s quite literally a point-and-click interface — no installation required. In addition, all of its audits are very instructional, informing you what failed, and why something failed.
Following the suggestions from this tool will almost certainly help improve the accessibility of your site.
While checking for security, general web best practices, performance is helpful. Let’s focus on how to run an accessibility audit in Lighthouse:
Navigate to the Lighthouse panel in DevTools
Uncheck all categories, but keep ‘Accessibility’ checked
Click ‘Generate Report’
In the resulting report, click through the different suggestions to learn more about them
Passed audits are still a good learning opportunity (Large preview)
If you want to learn more about Accessibility (I certainly do!), clicking through failed, but even passed audits are a great way to learn since almost each audit links off to dedicated web developer documentation on the audit itself, and why it’s important.
