Tag: web accessibility

Content Strategy Proposal: Fairmont State University

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Content Strategy

A content strategy provides a plan for how to use content to simultaneously meet user needs and support business goals. When redesigning a website it may be very tempting to just transfer all of the content from your old site to your new site – after all, it already exists, right? The problem is that just having content doesn’t mean it’s successful at doing what you need it to do for your business. Check out a sample content strategy proposal I've created for a redesign of Fairmont State University’s (FSU) main website.

Content Audit: Doctors Without Borders

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Content Strategy

In her book The Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey (2015) lists 3 methods for identifying the problems and opportunities of a website’s content: a content audit, an analytics review, and user testing. This first option – a content audit – is what she recommends starting with. For this post I’ve conducted a sample content audit of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders' (MSF) external-facing website for the United States. Read my full content audit report to learn more about how I evaluated the MSF site and what I found.

Learn Web Development: It’s Empowering as F@#!

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Web Technologies

I finally got around to that “someday” task of taking a deeper dive into web development than just the hunt-and-peck-through-code-that-I-didn’t-know-how-to-read approach I’ve been using for the last 5 years. I figured this experience would confirm or deny once and for all whether my interest was genuine or a novelty. What I found is that learning how to build a website provided me with more than just a new skill.

An Introduction to Responsive Web Design

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Web Technologies

As the mobile revolution developed over the last decade, designers and programmers suddenly had to worry about supporting an ever-increasing list of devices and screen sizes. At first, the solution seemed to be to design unique experiences for each, but a leading school of thought has become designing one site to rule them all, or responsive web design. This creates a seamless cross-device user experience and future-proofs designs.

5 Ways to Optimize Images for Web

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Web Technologies

Users always have a need for speed. Think about it. Have you ever thought, “I wish this webpage would load slower?” And it’s not just because technological advances have skewed our expectations in favor of the fast lane. We rely on the internet more now than ever to provide basic information and services. But economic inequality or geography means users are accessing these on devices and networks with a wide spectrum of speeds. To build webpages to perform as identically as possible in all conditions is to show care and consideration for all users. One of the biggest impacts you can make on load speed is optimizing your images.

Communicating More Clearly with HTML5 Semantics

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Web Technologies

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and in computer language making something semantic means using terms that both humans and machines can discern the meaning of. If you look at any chunk of HTML, you can easily identify terms that have no immediate meaning outside the language. HTML semantic tags more clearly describe the content within them, making webpages more accessible.

8 Usability Musts for Good Web Design

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Web Technologies

Users’ attention spans are short. They make judgments they may not even consciously realize about websites in seconds. Every element of a website’s design works in coordination to sway those judgments negatively or positively. There’s an overwhelming list of elements to consider for web design, but to be helpful I’ve highlighted the following 8 design areas I think are important to offer a good user experience.