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An Introduction to Accessibility

August 11th, 2010

By Matt Cook
Point Click Media

What do you think about when you hear the word ‘accessibility’? Is it just another web buzzword that sounds important? Let’s break it down into its two parts – Access and Ability, or to sum it up in a phrase, the ability to access.

The web is great for so many reasons. I mean of course besides the abundance of lolcats and fail blogs.

Yes really. On the web everyone can essentially be treated as equals regardless of location, ethnicity, physical disability or social background. For business purposes you can communicate or sell to a deaf, wheelchair-bound person in Cameroon just as you could to the guy standing at the cash in your physical store right now. The web breaks down so many barriers that otherwise make the world a pretty socially awkward place.

Hi Screech, great party!

photo credit: dno1967 - kind of like the 1980’s

As the web evolves though, new challenges keep popping up with regard to accessibility. In the early days of the internet, web pages were quite simply text with a few images used sparingly. Accessibility was pretty simple, so long as you could afford the equipment to do so. Now, with the majority of people owning some sort of device that connects to the internet, it has grown into an information hub for our everyday lives, incorporating text, imagery, sound, video and more. But with the addition of these new features comes accessibility problems. The hearing impaired will have difficulty with audio clips. Those with vision problems may have trouble reading smaller text or watching videos. Granted, technologies are constantly being developed to ensure worldwide accessibility to the web, but until worldwide web accessibility becomes a reality, it’s up to each of us as independent website owners to make sure our content is accessible.

Why should I care about such small demographics?

For starters that’s a pretty narrow-minded statement. Accessibility doesn’t lend itself only to the physical features of the people using your website. It extends even to the products we use to visit the web. Are you aware that your Mac reads even the simplest of web pages different than a PC? Suddenly our demographic isn’t so small.

Second, if you have any sort of social conscience at all, you certainly don’t want to discriminate. It’s good business to open your doors to everyone.

Third, it could very well become the law. Just as in most municipalities it is a law to have a wheelchair ramp or some other form of entry to your location for the disabled, such laws could very well make their way to the web. In 2006, retail giant Target was locked in a 2-year court battle over website inaccessibility to the visually impaired. They ultimately ended up settling the case but the precedent exists for more of these cases to pop up in the future. Do you want to take that kind of risk? By planning out your website beforehand  to contain accessible information, you avoid the much more costly solution of jury-rigging a solution down the road.

Next week we’ll examine what to look for on your site to ensure accessibility.

Posted in Web Tools

Should Your Website Be Mobile Ready?

July 14th, 2010

Openness: FaceTime

photo credit: myuibe - If Steve Jobs knows two things, it's the iPhone and how to get a crazy good deal on buying black turtlenecks in bulk.

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination by any means to realize that mobile devices are quickly becoming the wave of the future for browsing the internet. With the ability to access the billions of web pages on the web from the luxury of your phone or hand-held device from anywhere on the planet, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why the trend is becoming so popular.

Let me throw some quick statistics at you:

  • 100 million. That’s the number of Blackberries sold to date.
  • 85 million. That’s the total number of iPhones and iPod Touches that have been sold as of April 2010.
  • 3 million. That’s the number of iPads that have been sold in the last 80 days.
  • 1.7 million. That’s the number of iPhone 4 units alone that have been sold since launch on June 21st. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General News, Web Tools

Social Media Mistake #5: Expecting Too Much

June 9th, 2010

Contrary to what you may have read, Twitter is not simply Amway for internet nerds

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

The following is the final article in our series about social media mistakes. To refresh yourself on the previous 4 topics, see these links:

Mistake #1: Being a Guru
Mistake #2: Live and Let Die
Mistake #3: Policy Shmolicy
Mistake #4: Who Needs Metrics?

Have you ever seen those infomercials on at 4:00 in the morning where some guy in a 3 piece suit is standing in front of his 1o million dollar mansion and 3 pimped out Lamborghinis with his supermodel girlfriend bragging about how he raked in a billion dollars over the weekend on the internet? Lucky for you he’s willing to share his secret if you buy his 10 page book for 19 easy installments of $700. He’s even going to throw in a ShamWOW to sweeten the deal.

Well, contrary to what this jailbird is telling you… there’s really no get rich quick schemes out there for social media. If there were, they wouldn’t be schemes at all would they? They would make for a pretty popular business model. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

Social Media Mistake #4: Who Needs Metrics?

June 2nd, 2010

Birdland!

photo credit: TheeErin - With the Ronco Rotisserie you can set it and forget it. With social media... not so much.

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

The following is part 4 of 5 in our series about social media mistakes. To refresh yourself on the previous topics, see these links:

Mistake #1: Being a Guru
Mistake #2: Live and Let Die
Mistake #3: Policy Shmolicy

Unless you’re operating a do-it-yourself car wash that allows you to show up and empty the coin box once a week, it’s pretty likely that your day to day customer relationships are kept up by people and not by the PowerScrubber 5000. In addition to the people you have working behind the scenes, this also makes your business itself a living, breathing entity. It’s constantly growing and expanding and consistently reaching out to new avenues and always focusing on how to improve things. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

Social Media Mistake #3: Policy Shmolicy

May 26th, 2010

SUE

photo credit: Lunchbox Photography - Poor customer service will get you eaten up by your clients quicker than this guy, and by the looks of him, he's pretty hungry

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

The following is part 3 of 5 in our series about social media mistakes. To refresh yourself on the previous topics, see these links:

Mistake #1: Being a Guru
Mistake #2: Live and Let Die

It should be noted that your personal social media efforts should be separated by a giant Jurassic Park-style electric fence from your business social media efforts. Now, that is not to say that you shouldn’t be joining your own company Facebook group (wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?), but it’s important to know that if you are going to pursue any type of social media that involves your business and your employees that there should be some well established ground rules laid first. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

Social Media Mistake #2: Live and Let Die

May 19th, 2010

Abbey Road- The Beatles

photo credit: beatles maniac11 - If you're going to be bigger than Jesus, you better be ready to put some serious effort into it.

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

The following is part 2 in our series about social media mistakes. To refresh yourself on the previous topic, see this link:

Mistake #1: Being a guru

A common consequence of Mistake #1 is that after signing up on 30 different social media sites and bombarding your email inbox full of automatic friend requests from deceased presidents and adult film stars, you quickly realize that you have no idea how to keep all of your accounts up to date and relevant with fresh content. So, what happens next? Your social media endeavors quickly fall to the wayside because you can’t keep up with the workload. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

Social Media Mistake #1: Being a Guru

May 12th, 2010

Ashton Kutcher Talks About Valentine's Day

photo credit: Made In Hollywood - You thought your kids had a lot of friends? Ashton Kutcher has 478 billion twitter followers... your kids just got Punk'd

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

The following is part 1 of 5 in our series about social media mistakes:

As people grow increasingly comfortable with social media and as entrepreneurs begin to realize the potential marketing power behind them related to their business, it’s quite common to get all worked up into a frenzy and start diving head first into the deep end before realizing they don’t know how to swim. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

Getting With the Times

January 6th, 2010

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

Back in the day – which in technology terms can stand for as little as 5 years ago – Content Management Systems (CMS) were virtually unheard of for the average small business. In order to update your website you needed a web developer in house or on call who knew how to code web pages and edit HTML code without blowing your website to pieces. Only the major corporations had the funds for the 5- and 6-figure price tags to develop their own systems that allowed the average employee to edit the site with absolutely no background in web development. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

You Down with CPC?

December 9th, 2009

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

Most businesses owners would agree that advertising budgets can be a pain to manage. “How much should I be spending on advertising? Where should I be advertising? What mediums? What campaigns?” The list goes on. What a lot of people don’t realize is the research that needs to be performed before you ever think about putting your campaign together. Luckily Google has all the tools at your disposal to operate and manage your own web-based advertising campaigns, and allow you to pay as much or as little as you want.

Did he just say what I think he did?

I sure did. Google Adwords is a web-based revenue generating and revenue sharing advertising tool used to drive traffic to your website. You’ve likely seen them around, possibly without even knowing it. Adwords allows its users to specifically target their demographics and maintain all aspects of their advertising campaigns. This is great for not only helping to identify your market, but the Cost-Per-Click method employed by Google Adwords means you can set a minimum or maximum budget and operate anywhere in between. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

Have you gone viral?

December 2nd, 2009

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

chaos study [mentos fountain]

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

There’s no doubt that YouTube has quickly become an internet phenomenon. It’s caught on quicker than the H1N1 virus. The ability to watch videos from all over the world allows people to keep up to date, reminisce, or just simply rot their brain with every category of video imaginable. But YouTube isn’t just a place to waste away the work week. It also offers great potential to businesses that are looking to market themselves with online video. What we’re looking at this week is how to turn your videos into potential leads and sales by using YouTube.

Let’s start with your account. YouTube has a nice feature that allows you to sign up with a variety of different account types, be it a musician, director, guru and more. This allows you to effectively highlight the content of your videos as coming from a reliable source and not just some schmuck with a webcam spouting off about the latest political propaganda or Lindsay Lohan’s latest brush with the law.

If your content is good, people will always come back for more. There’s also the viral factor. Whether it’s college students shooting off Coke and Mentos choreographed to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or some guy busting off every dance move since the Caveman Shuffle in a 5-minute montage, there’s always the ‘next big thing’ waiting to show up in your inbox every week. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Web Tools

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