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In a recent post titled “ADA Accessibility Compliance for College and University Websites,” the question of how to ensure WCAG 2.0 compliance was covered briefly. In this post, I will expand on a couple of the challenges of making an existing website compliant. A trip to the theme park Bringing an existing website into compliance can be extremely tedious depending on the technology it was initially created with, any subsequent patches to this technology, and any themes, plug-ins, or modules which extend the site’s functionality. For example, let’s consider an existing website using WordPress, which by some accounts powers 26% of the Web, and commands almost 60% of the Content Management System (CMS) market share. While WordPress is a great open-source CMS, and affords you lots of control over the content being generated, their ecosystem does not come without caveats. On top of WordPress’s back-end core of functional code and database, sits the visual design in the form of theme … Continue reading
Posted in: accessibility compliance, WCAG 2.0
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Anyone who has ever suffered through a migraine knows the symptoms: headache, distorted vision, irritability, dizziness, nausea, etc. Anyone who has ever gone through a website content migration has probably experienced some of these same symptoms. Whether we all like it or not, in the world of digital media content migration is a necessary evil. Actually, strike that, it is a necessary good. Without the ability to perform a migration, all content would have to be manually copied from the current content management system (CMS) or entered manually into the new system. As with migraines, the key to a headache-free migration is prevention. The most important preventative steps are to understand: how your content is represented in the source system; how you would like it represented in the destination system; and how you will you need to process or transform the content while moving it. Once you have defined these three points in detail, you have essentially defined your migration path. We recently … Continue reading
As the band Led Zeppelin aptly put it—way back in 1969: “Communication breakdown. It’s always the same.” Truer words may have never been spoken; or wailed. Just search the phrase “communication breakdown in an organization” and you’ll get over a million results. Given the amount that has been written on this subject, it clearly effects many organizations and people. The photo on the left is meant to illustrate one cause of communication breakdown in (or between) organizations: lack of transparency. This can happen for a number of reasons, both innocent and otherwise. One example of a seemingly innocuous situation is where an employee of Company ABC communicates directly with an employee of Company XYZ. Together, they begin to make decisions which allow them to complete their individual tasks. Unfortunately, these independent decisions are unknown to their respective organizations, so the effects go unheeded until they surface at a later time. The ramifications of these decisions can come in the form of sullied relationships, … Continue reading
Mark Twain is rumored to have said: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”1 We believe the same holds for the U.S. manufacturing sector. Pundits would have us believe that manufacturing is dead in America, but we beg to differ. Working in a former “Rust Belt” city like Pittsburgh gives us a unique perspective on this. Clichés aside, manufacturing in Pittsburgh (and indeed in the rest of the country) took a big hit in the 1980’s and struggled for a while. But, we are all tired of hearing that American manufacturing is dead. It would seem that manufacturing has found a way to adapt and overcome. Quality at Scale Ford Motor Company, arguably one of the America’s largest manufacturers, realized that the old way of painting cars (by hand) was not working at scale. Rather than limit production in order to preserve the old way of doing things, they created robots to paint the cars, with human overseers ensuring that … Continue reading
Posted in: Manufacturing Marketing
If you have ever seen the tango being performed, you have witnessed the ebb and flow of tension and release, and the perfect balance of power and acquiescence. (By Anouchka Unel (Own work) [FAL], via Wikimedia Commons) As with all so-called “lead and follow” dances, the lead must be willing to push and steer; the follow must yield in service of the dance. Client engagements are a lot like this type of dance. Typically, a client reaches out to an outside firm to help them to choreograph their efforts when they cannot seem to find the steps. Perhaps they are stepping on each other’s toes internally, or need a new partner to lead them through unfamiliar moves. Whatever the reason, it is important that when the music starts, the participants in the dance understand whether they are to lead or follow. Without such understanding, steps will be missed, cues will go unnoticed, and the rhythm will be lost. When a … Continue reading
In an earlier post on preserving session state for analytics sake, I described a challenging technical hurdle, and mentioned the importance of thinking outside the box when researching possible solutions. Recently, a similar challenge presented itself. We were moving a client’s blogs from their servers to ours, and they wanted to change the URL for one of them. Generally, this is not a problem. However, the blog in question had garnered a great deal of social proof (Facebook and LinkedIn shares), and those share counts would be lost with the URL switch. Since social proof is increasingly important in winning customers in the Digital Age, we needed to ensure that this didn’t happen. A cursory search said that this couldn’t be done, as social proof counts were all based on the domain name in the URL. Being creative problem-solvers, we refused to accept that. By reframing the problem, we found a way to alter the URL of the social share, based on the original post … Continue reading
Posted in: social media integration
There is an old saying here in Pittsburgh: you can’t get there from here, which refers to the difficulty in getting around due to all of the rivers and streams in the area. I don’t think it’s said to be discouraging, as much as it is said out of laziness — directions tend to be a bit convoluted*. However, if there’s a will, there’s a way. In my prior work with a university, I was confronted with a technical challenge. How could they follow a prospective student’s path from their website, through an embedded third-party inquiry form, and back to the academic program landing page they started on, without losing session state? Oh, and they wanted to capture this in their usual Google Analytics dashboard. No pressure there. Conventional wisdom dictated that this was not possible; the student would be considered a third-party referral upon return from the form submission. I wasn’t convinced. After a bit of research, I found the solution … Continue reading