 you again for having me today. I'm going to talk about ways to improve your website post-pandemic. Some of these are new-ish things. Some are just good practices. Our team, Green Mellon, we're a team of eight, just off of Marietta Square. We've been doing this stuff for about 12 and a half years and really this presentation is what we do. We help companies and non-profits improve their websites and just make the most out of them. So if you want to know more about us, feel free to reach out to me afterward or we can chat, but don't want to spend too much time there because we have a lot of stuff to cover. So we'll dig in. So really three areas we'll talk about today, ADA compliance and how that matters for your website and how that's changed a lot all the time. Upcoming and some existing privacy laws and what's going on with those and then just some user behavior shifts we've seen the last couple years. Again, nothing major changed there, but a lot more has come into focus and it's becoming more significant there. So digging into ADA compliance, which is a frankly a weird title for a slide because the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, has 0% to do with websites. It came out in 1990 and the first website was built less than a year prior. So there's 0% of that in the ADA compliance laws. However, there's still lawsuits and stuff that fly around regarding ADA compliance of the websites and making sure your website is accessible for all users. So ADA compliance isn't really a thing. A set of guidelines called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that sort of govern what you should do on your website, but even that's just guidelines. So between the laws with ADA and compliance with that, it's a mess and it is a mess. So we'll just come back to some of that. We won't get too deep because there's not any super clear guidance on where to go, but we can certainly help steer people in the right direction. And really the main thing I want to talk about is before we get into how to become more compliant is why you should in three bullets. Why should you care about accessibility? I did the little abbreviation they use at the top because that threw me off for a while. It's the shorthand for accessibility, the 11 being how many letters they omitted in the middle. You see that being used other places like internationalization is one you see sometimes I 18 N because so many letters they take out just to shrink it. So that's more just if you see a 11 Y just needs accessibility with the 11 letters out of there. But really the first bullet here is why it matter is be a good human. That's really all we should have to say about this. There's people that can't necessarily access all your stuff. They can't read what you have to say. They can't visit your website properly. So you should do what you can to help them. Generally speaking, there's two kinds of disabilities when it comes to the web. Certainly there's nuances beyond that, but there's visual disabilities, people that can't see well or can't see at all and how do they manage your website and your digital presence. And then those with mechanical difficulties where they can't use a mouse or maybe can use a keyboard and how do they navigate when they don't have those tools in hand. So we'll talk about some of that. Excuse me. Accessibility is great for search engine optimization SEO. Basically all the things you do to make your site more accessible are things that Google appreciates. You'll tend to rank a little bit better, not because you're more accessible, but because the things you do to become more accessible are just good things for Google to see and good for the site. And the last one I alluded to is you can get sued if you're not accessible. People, they want to come after you, they can. We'll get into more of that in a little bit. And again, it's a very gray area, but we'll touch on what we can. The next couple slides I'm going to get into are some quick tips to help become more compliant. And really I'm going to use the Pareto principle here, the 80-20 rule. You can spend, I've heard it said, if you want your website to be fully compliant to every tiny letter of the law, it's tens of thousands of dollars. But you can get 80% of the way there with just a fraction of the effort. And that's really what I'm going to focus on here. Some of the low hanging fruit you could take care of today or this week and just make your site a little more accessible, a little bit better for people to use. So a few of those things. I'll do them in a couple buckets here. This first one is images and links. You shouldn't use pictures of text. People that have a screen reader or whatever, if images are buried, or if text is buried in an image, their screen reader can't read it. They can't adjust the contrast. There's things that make it harder to read. So to the extent possible, you should have pictures of pictures and text of text. That could be in a picture with text next to it, or you could put text over an image with CSS with certain ways to build your website in a way where that text is still literally text that can be read. But for the most part, just keep them separate and you'll be better off there. The second one gets a little bit controversial at times, but don't necessarily have all your external links open in new tabs automatically. People love to do that because they want to keep them on your site, but that's not necessarily in the best interest of your users. Let them decide what they want to do. Two reasons for that I'll give. One is there's some users that are perfectly capable, but just are not that knowledgeable where if you open a new tab on them, they'll say, okay, that was great. I want to go back and now the back button is broken. You can't go back and say, forget it all. I'm just going to close it all down and go. But the other side is again, if you open a new tab for someone, a user with disabilities, they don't have a back button now either. And so how do they manage to get that tab closed but not close the other stuff? And frankly, I'm not sure. So why put them through that? Let them just hit the back button and come back. And if your stuff was good enough, they'll come back. And then lastly, when it comes to images, behind every image on the web is alt text. And basically it's text describing what the image is for people that can't see it. Someone has a screen reader reading the site to them is going to say, here's a picture and this picture is, and it's going to read that alt text. So some examples of that, what good alt text would be on it is this, what would good alt text be for this image here? You might say pancakes. And that's really not bad. That's not a bad one. But again, if someone can't see this image gone, it's just pancakes. It's a little vague. And maybe the blueberries and stuff matter. You could say, we say picture of pancakes, but that's repetitive. If someone has a screen reader is going to say there's an image and it is a picture of pancakes, we know it's a picture. So pancakes will have some sites that will say this alt text is pancake pancakes, hotcakes, pancake breakfast, food, best breakfast, top pancakes, recipe, pancakes, just trying to keyword stuff to make Google like it better, which is awful. I can't imagine being someone on the screen reader reading that. So really something for this might be good to say like stack of blueberry pancakes with powdered sugar, just describe the image or something they can't see it, succinctly, but accurately. Again, you'll get some search engine benefits out of this, but I encourage you not to focus on that. I see too many people focus on the search engine benefits of this and make it where it's not that helpful for people that actually need the alt text to navigate. Hi, can I ask you a question? So I'm sure everybody on this call already knows this, but I'm going to ask. This is something that you type in your, if you use WordPress or Wix or something like that, you actually type this in. And you should type this in. Yes. When you add image in WordPress or anything on the WordPress and specifically on the right hand side, it'll have the description on that. And one is alt. It'll have a spot for the alt text and you can type that in. It'll sometimes default it. And that's actually where I was going to go next here is there's a lot of images on the web that the alt text is things like IMG5867.jpg because it just copied the file name in, which is again, awful alt text. But yeah, you should do that. But I will encourage you not to overthink it because if you look at any of your websites, you have hundreds and hundreds of images on the site, you could spend days doing this. So yeah, you don't want to spend that long doing it. Just make it better. Carol asked if we could see an example of how that would look. I could maybe pull that up afterward. I don't have that handy now. But again, when you're adding an image in any content management system, usually there's options for the image. How do you want to align it? How big do you want it? And there's almost always an alt box, right? That should get it. Carol or anyone else, reach out afterward if you have a specific issue where you can't find it and that can help you track it down in years. But encourage you again, just to go through and fix as many as you can to the extent possible. Just again, not over thinking of not spending hours on it, but just instead of this being IMG 5867 or pancakes, just stack of blueberry pancakes with powdered sugar and people that can't see it will have a good feel for what's going on. A few other places to look to help with accessibility. Adding labels to form, generally speaking, and this is way over simplifying, the uglier your form is, the better. We have forms a lot of times these days that have the box and then in faded gray behind it says like first name, which is really cool looking, but someone that has contrast issues can't read first name, a screen reader probably can't read that. It's awful for accessibility. Generally speaking, if you have a label next to it says first name and then a box that has the box for first name, it'll work better. There are ways to make it where the subtle stuff behind is accessible just takes a little more work, but it's worth looking at just to see how that works. There's tools that can look at the forms on your site to see how accessible they really are. Use headings on your site. Most websites frankly do this pretty well already. If you write decent content, it should be broken down with headers throughout the page just so all of us can skim through and see what sections we want, but using those headers is good for all users. Add an accessibility statement. I put a link, a short link to ours there if you type in gmm.to slash a11y. That's the green metal accessibility statement. I do that because then encourage you to go steal it if you need it. So feel free to take ours, use it as your own. It's not necessarily legally sound, but it should be pretty solid. The reason for this is interesting though, because I don't feel like most users with disabilities are going looking at accessibility statements to see what they say before they look at the site. I see it more to frankly, a lot of lawyers that handle disability things are shady and certainly there's legit ones that are legit reasons, they're legit concerns, but a lot are saying, hey, we can make some money because pretty much every site has some kind of accessibility issue. We can sue them for it. And so the thought is, hey, if they call it five sites they might go after and yours has an accessibility statement, they'll say, hey, these people are at least thinking about what's going on. They're trying their best. I'm going to have to do these other folks that aren't even trying to be easier, easier to get some money out of them. So it's more just to protect you a little bit there and there's laws coming that'll help both sides of that hopefully in the next few years, but we'll see. Always use camel case hashtags, camel cases where you have capital letters in the middle to designate each word. This is such a huge problem on social media because again, a screen reader is going to read them as a single word if there's not camel case. And so that word on the right, this says this can be so tricky to read. Try to read that as one word. Like how would a screen reader read that? It would be this can be strict, like I don't know how I would try to say it, but if you capitalize just the first letter of each word, it doesn't look maybe as cool as a hashtag, but it's so much better for all of us to read because that can be difficult to read anyhow, but also someone has a screen reader. Most screen readers will read it properly if you capitalize them for each word. So I encourage you to do that on Instagram, on Facebook, wherever you have hashtags and just put capital letters throughout there to make it easier for everyone to read. And then the last one is limit PD. This is something that's coming right now. I think the law only really applies to governments in the EU. It's a very small subset, but in their case, any PDF they publish on their websites, they have to publish a separate plain text version of that for people to be able to read because PDFs often are very difficult for people to digest. Yeah, that's an important thing. It's probably coming this way. We'll talk about that in a minute too, that most of the laws we hear about that are just in this one little area. They're probably coming this way. So that's one to keep in mind. And really with PDFs, I've always said PDFs are for printing. If you need people to print something perfectly, a PDF is fantastic for that because it's going to print the same for pretty much everyone. If it's just content though, it's usually not the best way, often the easiest way just to toss it up as a PDF versus a building page, but not usually the best way. And laws will probably catch up in the next, I don't know, five years where you're going to have to do more there. So just something to be aware of going forward. Now, another angle to consider that you'll see on more and more sites is the accessibility overlays, accessibility and user way and some of the little thing in the corner with the accessible symbol and people can click on that to make things more accessible. The one click solution to solve all this and I encourage you not to do. There's a site you can go to called should I use an accessibility overlay dot com. And this is actually the top of their website has that it says no, it's funny at the top, but it's actually a huge long page that gets into legal cases and theoretical cases and, you know, users, how they interact with sites and how those overlays generally don't help things. They help you feel better, perhaps, but going and actually adding proper alt text and making sure you have good contrast is building the sites the right way is far better than sticking one of these tools on there to try to help. I do encourage you, it's a funny site, but should I use an accessibility overlay dot com is really very insightful has a lot of information on it can really help you make your site more accessible for everyone. And then lastly in this section, I'm going to issue you all a challenge. If you're serious about accessibility, I'm serious about this. Try using put your mouse in a drawer and just use your keyboard for I say for a day, but if you can do for an hour, which I try to do once an hour is brutal. It is so difficult to not use your mouse to navigate through everything you need to do. So if you want to try this, I would say first go you can Google like keyboard shortcuts for Mac and print that out and keyboard shortcuts for Chrome and print that out and keyboard shortcuts for Outlook or whatever platforms you have those papers ready and then try it just for an hour to try to get from email to email to send an email to tab back over and check your calendar. It's shockingly difficult and there's I mean, maybe eight to 10% of your users that have to do that on your website. So what is it like for you to do it? And the one thing I'll challenge you for on this is it's easy to say I'm going to do this for an hour, but I need my mouse just for a second because I don't know how to get to that thing. That's the whole rub is that one little thing that's so hard to get to fight through it and see what it's like. It's it'll open your eyes a lot. We made a lot of changes to how we build sites and just more empathy for those people that have to do that and how difficult some sites and some programs make that. So we have an hour, hopefully an hour mostly devoted to writing or something. We don't have to click around too much, but at least to get around enough, you'll see what a challenge it is and give it a shot. Encourage you to try that. That's accessibility there. The next step, we'll get into privacy laws of it, which is related, but a different angle. So we're going to start really with the GDPR, the one most people have heard about the general data protection regulation they brought out in the EU about four years ago. It doesn't really apply to most of us on the call, but I think it's worth looking at for a minute because like with the ADA stuff, this is starting to roll out wider and wider and GDPR gives a great framework that a lot of other countries and states in the US are going to follow really on six pieces that they the six principles they talked about. We'll run through those quickly here. The lawfulness, fairness and transparency basically just saying you must tell people what processing you're going to be doing. Like here's how I'm going to use your data and then actually be transparent and use it the way you said you would. Purpose limitations, meaning only use the data for what you requested it for. This is one I think a lot of companies are bad about where someone buys a product. And so I have their emails on the toss them on my email list now. Like that's not what they requested there. And still legal in the US, but yeah legal and ethical get into different areas, but in Europe that is not legal. Data minimization meaning only collect data you need nothing beyond that. If you need data for a transaction, certain collect that but don't collect excess stuff just because you can. Accuracy just means keeping your data accurate as much as you can. Storage limitations mean not keeping data longer than you need it. If it's a two-year return policy or whatever you can delete from your e-commerce store, you should. And then integrity and confidentiality I think is pretty clear. The main piece here is just to work hard to prevent accidental loss and report breaches properly and that kind of stuff. So for most of you this wouldn't apply to what's going on based on one thing. And I'm curious in the chat if anyone knows what this signal means in football. Last time I did this it was a hard fail so we'll give it a shot again. Yeah I won't wait too long here but yeah it's targeting. So in football this is targeting. You hear it in college yeah it is a type of personal file but yeah targeting is the word and in football it's awful. It means someone made a very hard hit and they're probably kicked out of the game. When it comes to the GDPR though it's how are you targeting your users. Because a lot of companies a lot of companies a lot of businesses say hey I have people from Europe that visit my site therefore I need to follow these laws. You don't necessarily have to unless you're specifically targeting people in the UK. So what are targeting mean what would that mean specifically for you. This is the language they use which is why it reads a little funny with member state here but if you use the language of a member state so if you say hey here's a German section of our site well you're clearly targeting people from Germany so it probably would apply to you. If you use the currency of a member state you accept money in currency from the EU. If you use a top level domain if you're cob collaborative FR for your French version like clearly you're targeting people in France and that would apply. If you mention customers based in those areas or if you actually buy targeted ads in those areas which I don't think any of these apply to probably most of you on here. You're not specifically targeting people in the EU so it doesn't the GDPR doesn't apply to you for now. I wouldn't worry about that. However this next slide maybe will worry you a bit more in that this is legislation that's you know currently in various states across the country. California has the CCPA the California Consumer Privacy Act they launched a couple years ago which is similar to GDPR it's different but then it's the same kind of basic stuff and you can see all the other states have different levels of stuff in legislation so it's coming and that's why I said the GDPR stuff is a good example to follow because well every state's going to do it different. This could be a huge headache unless we get something national. If you follow the basic guidelines you really just do the right thing you'll do pretty well yeah this document yeah it was actually just from a couple weeks ago so it's pretty up to date on what's going on and you can see there's a whole lot of color on that map the red ones are the only states that actually have things in law and I don't know a whole lot other than the one in California but again this will be if we do the same talk in two or three years there's gonna be a lot of red on that map of privacy laws in different states you have to follow and what applies in different states it's gonna be a lot to keep up with so just following those general guidelines is a great thing to do and then the last section I want to get into is about user behavior so these aren't all new things as I mentioned at the top a lot of this is things we've had before but they've become much more important in the last few years and some are new but again mostly it's just how people are seeing things is so much different coming out of this pandemic people see the world a whole different. The big one that I tend to push a lot is less automation. Automation is a great thing and frankly if you have email automations there's great uses for that I'm not saying not to do any but like I would say B2B we tend to be a B2B organization but that's not really a thing like it's still person to person we work with the Cobb Collaborative on their web stuff but it's not Green Mellon working with Cobb Collaborative it's Nikki working with Irene and Kelly working with Ashley it's still people at the end of the day so this proof example here was when about a year ago I tried to trade my car and ended up in a very bad automated system with this dealership where I submitted my inquiry and they sent an automatic thing back which the first automatic one back is okay saying they got it and so they sent me another one a few hours later saying hey we're interested and that's a great here's my situation never heard anything they sent one the next day automated hey here's other things I said that's great too let's talk about this never heard anything they sent another one the next day I wrote back so what's going on here um and Delvin was the guy's name that was quote sending these he said I'm sorry things go out without my knowledge I don't really know what's going on here in long story short 23 emails later I got this poof you signed up and then you disappeared without ever talking to us and it was just a very frustrating experience because they were I'm sure super proud and paid a lot of money for the great automation system whereas if Delvin would have just emailed me we could have had a five minute conversation and maybe sold a car or maybe not but been done with it and instead it was just a disaster because they tried so hard to automate so we'll get into a little bit more automation certainly it can be a good thing but just be careful related to that are things that depersonalize like the no reply I detest getting an email from any organization that's from no reply that basically says I'm going to send you this email but don't write back I don't have time to hear back from you you just listen to what I have to say and do your thing which just puts a bad taste for you out so the past few years I actually switched banks I was with SunTrust where they sent no replies all the time and they send you an email so you need to do this thing but to do it go call and wait and so now I can reach out to Ed if I have a problem I talk to Ed and it's my bank and he takes care of it and same with insurance I moved from Allstate to Liberty Mutual I'm not sure how they are in general I think it depends on your agent but if I have a problem I now talk to Ashley I can send to Ashley Tech say hey I have an issue with this and it's taken care of I'm not just getting no reply emails from them again just being human is kind of my big thing I think we all should try to be more human I think frankly a lot of you on this call do a great job with that already but encourage you to push harder for that another example I got this not too long ago someone reaching out that could help I'm sure you all get the same spam emails from companies that can help you with your whatever marketing and all that kind of stuff but again email said we can help with telemarketing email blasts and automating your connections and messages on LinkedIn and you just could not have sent a worse email that just smells so bad telemarketing of course you know any interruption based marketing is just becoming such a bad idea these days if you're having to interrupt people to try to pitch your stuff to them it's not generally going to do too well automate or email blasts now again marketing is fine but if you call yours a blast I wonder what's behind that you just shooting out to everyone hoping for the best or are you targeting in good custom emails that people might actually respond to you still send them in bulk you can still do automations but just the idea of blasting which some people say blasts and don't really meet the wrong way but the idea you got to be careful with and then automating connections and message on LinkedIn is just awful I love LinkedIn I probably spend more time on there than any other but the automated connections the automated messages are just awful I'm a big believer in leave it better than you found it it's often used with hiking trails and stuff and it's fantastic there but I think the same is true of the internet like I can be on LinkedIn and I can contribute and connect with people and do things or I can spam people's messages like one is gonna make it a better place one's gonna make it you'll see this kind of thing in other places again just doing the right thing a little when I see a lot of companies that put designed by links in the footer of sites they build that's making the site worse this used to be a big thing in our industry it's fading out thankfully but this is a company that just forgot who they were serving this those designed by links make the site they're on ranked a little bit worse in Google for the benefit of the designer that's just not appropriate it's not a good thing to do again doing the right thing is is important that you've probably seen things like this in your industry things that you can quote probably get away with but just don't try to get away with it leave them better than you found them a big one here I'm seeing a lot on sites and actually we help Cal collaborative not too long ago to do some of this is Donna Miller's building a story brains a fantastic book I think probably all of you should read because it applies beyond just marketing there's just telling your story the right and his big thing is you shouldn't be the hero none of us should be the hero of the story should be the guide to let your customers your clients the people you serve be the hero they're thankful that you helped get the whole idea of story brain is just how you position yourselves his big thing is when people visit your site you should say hey here's the problem you have here's how we solve it and here's how great your life is after we solve it and people should say that is my problem that's me and therefore you know they can go through it then they can get to once they say okay this is fantastic they can solve all my needs then they go to your about us page and read about the history and how you reform and all that but too many companies I think lead with here's our history here's how we reform and that's not what people want right away they want to see how you can help them first and then understand how great you are afterwards on our site I think our about us page is like the 32nd most visited page that people arrive on but it's the second most popular page in a second once they read it and say okay these folks know what they're doing not who are they let's see if they're any good then they'll go read about us once they're once they're captivated a bit so I encourage you to check out Donald Miller's book again I'm guessing a good number of you probably have already over the years it's been wildly popular inspired a quote from Rory Vaden he also has a book Take the Stairs it's a good book and a podcast and stuff but I think this quote probably applies to a lot of you says your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were if you had a problem at some point in your past and a lot of people have built their companies to solve that problem is if you can share with them hey here's the problem I used to have that I know you have now but I've solved it and here's how we solved it you know that's a lot of you again I've seen this problem in our community and here's how we're solving it so people in the kind of sites say oh that is the problem we're facing and they've helped solve it so let's go through that so you're in a powerful position because you can help serve just who you were 10 years ago in the place that where you think about the issues you had then and that you can help those same people today another section on the website I'd like to talk about is just having a goal for every page literally every page of your website should have a goal it's a fun practice fun for some of us to list every page in your site and think about what the goal is for the users on that page the goal may be just for them to click and visit another page the goal may be to donate ten thousand dollars the goal may be to sign up for the email list there should be some goal at the end of every page this is a local lawyer love the guy he's fantastic I'm not going to call him out by name but he has a section for all his practice areas you click on practice areas he has like the 20 different practice areas he serves which is great I think that's fantastic and you can go to this area and you can read about how he can help with your worker's compensation the problem is the end of it is previous or next to go read more of his practice areas like who is that for yeah I came here because he can help with this problem he has a page about the problem and the goal should be great now that you know how we help with worker compensation make you better give us a call fill out the form give them your proper call to action I'm guessing in his case the template just said oh yeah we'll do previous and next button so someone can go through and read all of his practice areas which just seems insane to me like I don't see people doing that because he hasn't thought about it's overall a pretty good site I don't want to rag it on too much but he didn't think about what is the goal for this page if someone gets to our site goes to the practice areas and clicks on workers comp what then is the goal what do we want to happen with them maybe it's just for them to get on our newsletter so we can they can be more connected or maybe it's something other than go view all of our other practice areas I'd be pretty sure of that another area this one is not new at all but still is troublesome for some folks is mobile first people are on their phones more and more google is looking at the mobile version of your site more than the desktop one how does that look to them and mobile is interesting because 15 years ago everyone had the mobile version of the site in the big version over time sites became mobile responsive with a bend in flex to fit which is exactly what you need to be because this screenshot here is actually from the cobs collaborative analytics in the number of different screen resolutions that visited the site last year if you would ask me how many different size screens visited I would have thought okay there's people with windows computers probably 10 different sizes of monitors and you have a couple different iPhones and maybe 15 different androids and a couple max so 40 30 or 40 that's a lot that's 449 different screen sizes visit the collaborative budget you can't possibly address all those so just making sure your site works and again we'll adjust and bend to fit anything is is super important I won't spend too long here because I think most sites do a pretty good job of that these days it's not something to worry about too much but the 449 is just a shocking number to me because the collaborative gets a healthy amount of traffic but not a ton it's a 449 different screen sizes just on that site can you imagine you've got a big popular site in musk ministries or something I can't fathom they probably got 1200 different screens that visit and they got to make sure the site is functional and works for all of them and it's a challenge but again most themes most you know content platforms handle that pretty well but interesting Nikki can I ask you a question and again everybody I'm sure knows this but how does one read this is a high number a good number like that 83% is that horrible is something awry on that page gotcha yeah I'm not sure what that last column is off hand I should probably check that but this yeah there's nothing good or bad with this page this is just showing you here's all the screen resolutions that visit your site and how many people were at each so you know 800 by 600 then the other one so there's not a good or bad or anything here this is just more of a wow kind of thing you know I see yeah it's a T not yeah it's by that tiny number in the corner that 449 this is just the quantity for the wow factor yeah lots of things in analytics there are good there are bad things you need to address here that's not the case this is just an interesting one and you can see this on your own sites just out of curiosity but again if it's more than three you should probably be mobile responsive I think everyone's in the hundreds I'm sure so great question the last main point I'll leave you with is animations because this is something that's growing a lot people getting more and more animation on the site and I think in a lot of cases they're there to be cool just because we can which is not a good reason to have animations animations can be fantastic again like emailing and automations there's great ways to do it and there's poor ways to do it so for animations I see three main reasons you should animate something on your site is impact focus and interaction so impact is like an animation you want when someone comes your site they say whoa this would be like a big background video or something where they get there and just wow this is amazing you want to draw that impact the other kind of animation you can have is focus and this is the one I see that seems just tossed around where you have an animation is trying to catch someone's eye because you want them to see something on the site because you'll see a lot of sites where when things load in everything animating like it's just animating because it can whereas if you settle that down and only animate what matters you can say when this piece comes up it's going to animate they're going to look at it for a second that's what we want we want them to look there so have something in mind for them to focus on and then interaction animations are really when people hover over something to see it's clickable they hover over the blue button and it turns orange or you know something like that just so they realize it's clickable that can be a good thing I would warn not to hide text behind them and not again not many sites do this anymore but when you hover and then like things appear that's cool but again if you're on a mobile you can't hover and who knows if someone's on a keyboard they certainly can't hover like hiding information behind hover effects behind the animations is not a good idea but an interaction event is certainly great if someone's throwing on the page and their mouse hits something and it turns a different color because they know they can click there great that's a good use in animation but again have a purpose for them animations can be fantastic and we've done all three of these quite a lot on different sites but we have a reason for doing each of them not just because the theme has it built in to do something it's not a great reason to do that so yeah to wrap up and really there's just two lessons in the end of that is just be human don't hide behind fake walls don't blast people just do the right thing and be purposeful every page should have a goal every animation should have a reason just if you can be human and be purposeful of what you do that's really where things are having more and more and the harder you lean into that the better yeah that's all I have you know we're at greenmelonmedia.com I'm at mcmel.com mickey melin there's that so yeah and certainly happy answer questions and I can maybe screen share something live if someone has more questions there what are you on me wonderful thank you so much mickey I always learn something when you speak so it's great thank you very welcome and everyone you are welcome to drop a question in the chat mickey I know you had already seen Carol's question about an example of how that would work and I think that was the alt text question yeah there's something you can share in the meantime we got started but my co-host with TechSoup Georgia Matt joined us and so I invite Matt if you want to introduce yourself or come off mute whatever if you're in a position to do that Matt maybe not now he's in the chat he has to stay muted for now oh oh okay I'm sorry Jeffy I'm so glad that you were able to join us and the entire session is being recorded so that will go out to everybody who registered so you can pick up on the parts that you missed so mickey monitor the chat as you continue to if you are able to find an example for Carol I actually dropped in the chat yes Carol I will send the slide deck and and the recording out to everybody mickey I I know that I have been the queen of having all of our things open in a new page and I didn't understand why that was so important not to do should I go should we go back and try to address some of those maybe for our most frequently visited pages or just do better going forward you're on mute mickey that's a relatively minor thing I think in the grand scheme of thing I think it's worth doing but not worth worrying about too much I think there's bigger fish to fry in most cases so yeah okay thank you worth keeping in mind yeah so here I am building a page I want to select an image to add this is in WordPress for those of you that are in WordPress and when I go in here to my media library and click an image on the right here it says alt text and I can just type in whatever the alt text is it'll leave it blank in here by default but yeah choose my alt text and select it and put it in and that's all there is to it you can edit I have a train rolling by here too now of course hang on that's perfect I love being right on the square here but you can do the same with existing images too like actually I'll go ahead and put in a very poor alt text there you can always click on it later and go edit it and change it back out and I think yet in the newer WordPress editor when you click it even shows up on the side here you can change that alternative text to be whatever you want again it talks about describing the purpose of the image there are cases leave it empty if it's purely decorative like for little icons and stuff but generally put some kind of text in there just so people can see it and again it's a it's an added bonus to help with your search engine optimization excellent Nikki Carroll's asking so does it show up when you hover over the image oh good question so that's actually the title text that's another box back there called title text that is often the same same text that people use for alt and for title the title text is less important at least in terms of accessibility and search engine stuff it can be useful every now and then to have good title text if you want something to pop up when they hover over it but it's a technically a separate box for that I know there's a question from Jeffy but I want to ask the question so how does the person receive the information about the image is that a stupid question now it's generally because they have a screen reader it's generally for people that are heavily vision impaired so it's reading it's going to read the header of the page and kind of just start reading through it's going to say there's an image here that the text is this because they can't see it so usually it's voiced to them from machine so yeah okay all right and then Nikki do you see the question from Jeffy if you repeat okay so you're talking about so I assume Jeffy's talking about an image with text on it which we said not to do but if you repeat that text in there I think that's okay yeah I think that makes sense as long as people can get that information I would shy away from it a little bit from one perspective of if someone is visually impaired not blind they can see it they may not realize what's there they may be struggling trying to blow up that image not knowing they've seen it below but that is probably getting in an edge case I think generally if you provide a second batch of that text below it I think that's probably acceptable and again this is the problem with all this is I bet there's not a right answer anyone can provide there's other laws coming that I think one just died last year in Congress somewhere but I should address this specific websites need to do this and people need to get this much warning and if they don't do that and you can select because right now you can sue people for whatever and hopefully they can at least clarify things need to do this but for now just do the best we can and again I always think about what's the perspective if someone that's vision impaired where it comes to that what would be the best answer for them because the laws aren't going to really tell me so what would be the best to serve the people that we're trying to serve and that's I think the right perspective so yeah yeah I see yeah I prefer not to put text in images my staff love to do yeah that's always a tricky part yes understood for sure good conversation in the chat we have a few more minutes so please feel I also want to correct myself I think I misspoke at the very beginning our next session in March is I believe I said March 28th it's actually Tuesday March 29th we're sticking with that Tuesday and that's the the demonstration from Trello about event marketing strategies so hopefully you can join us for that again I will send the slide deck out to everyone and the recording will also be on the TechSoup Georgia webpage looks like Jeffy has another question about alt text to Mickey about yeah that's a good question I think being very concise is the answer because again someone's trying to get through your content and if one image takes a whole paragraph for them just to hear about the image that's probably not doing them a service but you also again don't want to say pancakes so you want to at least give a little more context behind it so it's a tough great area but I would say be as concise as you can but still like letting people at least have some visual in their head of what what you might be talking about I don't know there's a specific limit for characters like when it comes to the html you know format be a lot of website editors will limit it to yeah various amounts and I think that limit probably is wise so yeah concise and balanced yeah it's a good way to put it yes absolutely boy I know I've learned a lot how embarrassing is it that I didn't know that's what that alt text talks about if it's one you never see again the title text you do see if people hover and that one is more compared and again alt text generally is abused not generally but it's frequently been abused over the years by people trying to write better in google by just stuffing keywords in there and for years it worked but that's not the purpose of it and google's gotten beyond that so google's looking for reasonable things in there too and I suspect google's getting to the point now where they google knows images it can you know decrypt see what images look like if google photos it's really smart I wonder if he'll get to the point where they can see what an image is and read your alt text and know if you're trying to trick them or not and trying to trick google is generally not wise either so it's a win-win if you just yeah go for the people that need it mickey carols asked about the purpose for alt text for google search but I think jeffie answered that no yeah I think it's really to help those with who have visual impairment exactly that's what it's that's entirely what it's intended for is yeah for people with visual impairments that can't see the image that have the text being read to them saying this is an image of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup whatever on it and again google looks at that it does impact that but yeah the main purpose is helping people understand the content of your site if they can't see it so google's just a secondary benefit mickey I really liked what you said about take time to do an inventory of your website if you will and look at the goal of every page of your website I think that sage advice for all of us it's difficult because some pages it's hard to come up with a decent goal for you want it there but yeah it's worth at least thinking about and doing the best exactly because you don't know silly things like that lawyer like he'd be better off just taking the previous and next buttons out and let him at least get to the footer in contact or something you know he really didn't think about it so even if it's not a great answer just thinking make at least clear things up a bit jeffie what is your organization i'm curious or maybe you don't want us to go to your website the library okay thank libraries I have a saying that this isn't your I know our library in cob county I always say this isn't your grandmother's library this isn't your mother's library our libraries have so much information and they reach people in so many different ways other than just going to check out a hard copy book I don't know maybe you have to have so many pages yeah according to google there's around 2300 pages on that site say that's a lot to oh wow that is a lot and again a lot of I think yeah I'm looking at it briefly here a lot of them are like the branches and you know I think a lot of them have very clear goals on them if someone's going to a branch page because they want the address or phone number and it's probably they're already you're good to go yeah if you do a jeffie or anyone else if you do site colon in google do the word site colon and then your address google will spit out what they think all your pages are here I'll share real quick for those that want to see that okay yeah carol just ask that question yeah so mckay's going to help us find that yeah so I search for site colon right here um let's scroll back up it'll say google sees roughly 2350 results you can do that for any site obviously it's not just yours because I have no connection with them there yeah so it's just a quick way to see how many google sees which isn't how many pages you have in total because google may choose not to index them the google of course I don't want to get no huge SEO thing but google doesn't search the internet the google makes a copy of the internet to the extent possible on all their servers trillions of pages and so how many of your pages did they happen to save on their servers which should be most all of them if you have a decent site that isn't necessarily all of them so it's saying we have 2300 pages that we've decided to copy and maybe show up in search but you may have worn that but that's usually a pretty close guess yeah so that can be helpful just for that kind of thing and jeffy that is a lot of pages again um mickey thank you so much for sharing so much great information with us today yes carol I echoed that sorry my co-host matt it wasn't able to come off mute and extend his greetings but I know matt has a real passion for also serving the nonprofit community not only here in the metro Atlanta area but also across Georgia and probably beyond on behalf of matt and myself we want to thank mickey so much for sharing his time and expertise with us