Writing for the web requires a different style of writing than other formats. You need to be succinct, but also clear. Getting the tone right (not too formal, not too informal) is important.
(more…)Author: Yvonne Aburrow
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Responsive Websites
A responsive website is one that you can view equally well on a mobile or desktop device. The font size and layout should be readable without zooming, panning, or scrolling horizontally.
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Styling your Website
Since the invention of the web, styling on websites has improved in leaps and bounds. You can have gradients, rounded corners, overlapping elements, drop-shadow, scalable and responsive content, and much more. This is all made possible by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
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Land Acknowledgements
In many parts of the world, the majority of the population of a country or region is not indigenous to that area. This is true for Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, for example. In these countries, it is customary to acknowledge that we are living and working on Indigenous lands.
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Personal Pronouns
Many people are confused by the topic of pronouns. A pronoun is the particle of speech that you use to refer to someone instead of using their name. The fact that someone uses a pronoun does not tell you anything about them beyond their pronoun; they may be transgender, cisgender, or nonbinary.
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Agile Methodologies
The key benefit of agile approaches to software development is being able to respond to changing customer requirements and feedback from user testing. It also means that you can roll out a system that meets the basic requirements and then refine it incrementally over time.
The most well-known agile methodology is Scrum, but other systems exist, including Kanban, Smart/ADP, Scrum-ban, and Agile Unified Process. In this article, I will compare the different methodologies.
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Organizing your Content
When you are building or updating your website, you need to think about what your target audience will expect to see.
There are various ways to find out what they will expect; you can ask a group of people who are likely to use your site what they would expect to see; you can look at other websites offering a similar product or service; or you can experiment with different ways of presenting your information and see which is the most effective.
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User Stories and Personas
A user story is a way of describing a website or product feature in relation to the person who will use it, how they will use it, and why it is useful.
User stories usually follow the format “as a [role], I want to do [task], so that I can achieve [goal]”. This can also be written “as who, I want what, so that why”.
The role, the task, and the goal are all equally important, and a user story is incomplete without all three being present.
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Migrating to TypeScript
When a company hires a new developer, it can take up to six months for them to get fully up to speed on the company’s codebase.
One way to make this process less painful for the developer, and less expensive for the company, is to use a strongly-typed language like TypeScript.
A product manager commented to me that he had noticed that developing with TypeScript is faster.
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Writing for the Web
Have you ever experienced the fatigue that results from being presented with a giant wall of text on the screen?
Sure, if you’re committed to learning about a topic in depth, you’ll read a whole long-form article, but if you are not committed, and just want to see the salient details, you’ll likely skip the verbiage and leave.
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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Here at Carnelian Web Services, we believe that a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is a good start, but it’s a series of steps on the road to justice. Before you can have a diverse cohort of employees, you need to remove the systemic barriers that are preventing them from even applying to your company, and the barriers preventing them from succeeding once you’ve employed them.
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Accessibility
Making websites accessible is a very important aspect of user experience. Accessibility benefits everyone, because it makes websites easier for everyone to use. It is also a legal requirement in most countries, including Canada.
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User Experience
User experience is an important aspect of website design. Remember the bad old days of the 1990s, with marquees, animated graphics everywhere, an excess of links that were just labelled “click here”, and garish background colours?
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Localization
When you’re building a website which will be viewed by people from different cultures and countries, it is important to build it so that it can be easily and efficiently translated into different languages (internationalization), and then to provide versions of the content that are optimized for the relevant country and culture (localization).
Website localization is more than translating the website into the target language; it is important to take the local culture and economy into account as well. This involves user and market research in the target country.
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Search Engine Optimization
Many people think of search engine optimization (SEO) as a bit of a dark art. But in reality, if your website is navigable and usable for human visitors, this will also hold true for search engines.
When you are creating a page, it is important to think about what your target audience would be looking for, and make sure that the information they need to make a decision is displayed prominently on the page.
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