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Often times, when building or updating websites for clients, we run into an issue with vernacular versus technical term when it comes to identifying where or how things should be changed or placed. We wanted to make a quick guide that can help developers as well as tech-minded people interact more clearly communication-wise when it comes to creating a website. Let’s get to the anatomy of a website!

In 2019, you may recall if you’re a reader of the hasOptimization blog or you follow us on social media, we completed an overhaul of the Tentsmiths website. There are plenty of times where we’ve told customers, in no uncertain terms, that their website is holding them back. In the case of Tentsmiths, new owners Alena and Stephen were well aware of how the ancient, inadequate website for Tentsmiths was holding back additional orders from new customers who did not want to jump through hoops to complete a purchase.

A problem with the internet, and with the world in general, is that we put preferential treatment into building things that work for people who are able and able-bodied. When we say able, we mean people who can walk (and walk easily), people who are sighted or can see well, or any other variety of person who can do a thing that another person might not be mentally or physically able to do. That means that we often build websites, apps, and even homes and businesses with the able person in mind while completely forgetting about people who may not…

A problem with the internet, and the world in general, is that we put preferential treatment into those without disabilities. We have countless apps and social media platforms that focus on visual aspects… But what about people who have limited vision or may be blind? How can we try to make the web — more specifically, social media — more available to them? In this blog post, we’ll cover some easy changes that you can make right now that will drastically help you improve accessibility on your social media. We also cover accessibility on websites and what you can do…

When it comes to web accessibility, we may have new features such as Google’s ability to discern animals, shapes, and otherwise from images themselves, but much of a search engine’s ability to “see” images isn’t rooted in deep dream technology. Crawlers use a lot of contextual items to discern what your image is about and where it fits, and the big part of this is a simple HTML tag called alternative text.

If you’ve spent any time developing or working on a website in the past few months, you may know that there has been a large push from Google, web hosting providers, and others to enable SSL (secure sockets layer). Why? Tl;dr: SSL (https) allows you to have the coveted “green padlock” next to your URL, announcing your site can be confirmed that it is, in fact, the website it claims to be, allowing for security and peace of mind.

Today, I started taking a course in Human-Computer Interaction. This is an area of great interest to me, and something I wish I had spent more time on in college, particularly given what I ended up doing after college. Hindsight is of course 20/20! I’m just now working through the introductory section of the course, so I’m sure I will have a lot more to say about the material in the future, but for now the most interesting thing about this course is that it is entirely online, in video format. It’s part of a new online course format developed…