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Month: March 2021

Your web tech wrapped up

Your web tech wrapped up

It’s geeky time again! Let’s talk web tech… If you have a website, you probably know there’s a lot more to the site itself. My clients won’t notice most of these extra things to think about when setting up a site. 

And I’ve got a lot of little helpers that make the web process smooth sailing. Here’s a quick roundup of some of my faves. 

Some are available as plugins especially for WordPress, which has so many little nifty tools. These here are all available as web services though so use whatever system you’re into.

Adobe Color

Looking for the perfect colour palette for your website? Many designers spend countless hours trying to come up with the right palettes. Fortunately, there’s an excellent tool that can help you — and it’s free. Adobe recently launched a new site called adobe color (http://color.adobe.com) which takes advantage of Adobe Kuler’s (another free tool) colour wheel to provide you with a series of beautiful colour combinations.

You have the choice to use the colour wheel to define complimenting colours with different pre-sets:

  • Analogous
  • Monochromatic
  • Triad
  • Complementary
  • Split complementary
  • Double split complementary
  • Square
  • Compount
  • Shades
  • Custom

The one I love the most is Extract Theme where you upload a photo or graphic to pick the colours from – again with handy presets. You can opt for the colourful, bright, muted, deep, dark or your own.

Once you have a colour, it’s also really handy to see it in action as a gradient. Again, something you can do with Adobe Color. And if you are catering for higher accessibility, voila! Check out the colour blind simulator.

Adobe Color

Colorable

The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors. But we’re not able to spot every nuance out there. That’s where contrast comes in. Contrast is the difference in luminance or color that makes an object distinguishable from another. Contrast is important because it determines whether an object stands out from the background, or if it blends in.

Colorable helps you test different colours ‘on top of each other’, looking how a font colour will appear on different background colours.

Colorable

XML Site map generator

XML sitemaps are a good idea no matter what, but they’re particularly important for sites with large numbers of pages. If you’re running a large site, you might have hundreds of thousands of pages, and manually submitting each one by hand to search engines would be a time-consuming and potentially error-prone task. XML sitemaps can simplify the process.

Plugins such as Yoast for WordPress or OSMap for Joomla run websites can be used ‘on site’ as well, but if you don’t want plugins, this site map generator is quick and effective.

A whole other section worth mentioning – Google Search. Here you can use your XML Sitemap. When you submit your site in the console, it will also alert you to any issues with pages, links, breadcrumbs etc. It’s a rabbits hole but in its basic functions it’s very useful for helping with SEO.

XML Site Map Generator

Meta Tags

Meta tags are invisible text that helps search engines understand what your webpage is about. For example, meta description tags are the short, 150-character snippets that appear next to a search result. These help users decide whether or not to click through to your page. This website shows you how you can edit and experiment with your content and previews how your webpage will look on various social media channels.

Again, plugins such as Yoast for WordPress solve this issue neatly, but some parts are limited to the premium version. Meta tags is free to use.

Metatags

Let’s Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority that provides free TLS certificates to millions of individuals and organizations operating in nearly every country around the world. They’re a nonprofit with a mission to encrypt the entire Internet. They help their users set up HTTPS websites so that everyone can benefit from encryption, from users browsing the web to admins managing servers.

Most good web hosts will integrate let’s encrypt so you shouldn’t have to worry about a thing. Just check that your hosting package comes with a free SSL certificate and that you have the padlock on your url starting with https.

Let’s encrypt

Do you know what will happen to your business if your website is down? Up to 30% of all visitors will abandon your website if they can’t access it. This makes the reliability of your website extremely important to your overall success as an online entrepreneur.

No system is perfect, and websites will go down at some point for some reason or another. What’s important is that you find out and are able to react quickly. We monitor the websites we host for clients for exactly that reason. This site monitor is free for up to 50 sites, making it great for SMEs to ensure their online presence is being watched out for.

UptimeRobot

There are lots more tools out there, of course. And I already have a list in mind of some services that make SEO and the finer details of your website so much easier.

Let us know if you want to talk more about your website design, development or hosting, we will be happy to help.

International Womens' Day

International Women’s Day

Today is international women’s day. It’s a day we always observed and celebrated back in the former East when I was a child. Our pen pals from Russia would send these amazing cards for it, and we would giggle cause they were our age, yet sent them as if we already were ‘women’. I never thought twice about it where the day came from.

For me, it was meant to be a day to remind ourselves that women should be treated equal to men. A day to remember those women who had suffered in history purely due to their gender. And to remind ourselves that females are just as pioneering, scientific, artistic, intellectual and caring as men.

But where did International Women’s Day come from?

We-are-all-equal

A short history of IWD

In 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

In 1910, at a second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, Clara Zetkin (Leader of the ‘Women’s Office’ for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) asked women from all around the world to take the day and press for their demands. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day – a Women’s Day – to raise awareness of women’s issues. She wanted them to tell their stories, which would help people understand their struggles as women, and what they go through to be able to succeed. She wanted to change the way we viewed women and the way we would treat them as equals to men.

When the day was first proposed, Zetkin said in her proposal that women should “receive an equal hearing in the political, industrial and educational fields. We should unite and not separate”. International women’s day was established to give women the “opportunity to participate equally in all public and political activities, and in all social, industrial and economic enterprises”.

International Women’s Day is about celebrating all women, in whatever country, and giving people a chance to speak out and stand up for equal rights and equal pay, for sexual and reproductive rights and for women’s health.

Why March the 8th?

“International Women’s Day was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March 1911. (…) On the eve of World War I campaigning for peace, Russian women observed their first International Women’s Day on February 23, the last Sunday in February. Following discussions, International Women’s Day was agreed to be marked annually on March 8 that translated in the widely adopted Gregorian calendar from February 23 – and this day has remained the global date for International Women’s Day ever since. ” (History of IWD)

In East Germany, we had the 1st of March to celebrate the national army, the 3rd to celebrate my dad’s birthday and the 8th was International Women’s Day. That’s just the way it was. Reading more about the origins of International Women’s Day, I realise there are some quirky correlations with other celebrations.

The Greeks have their Festival for their Goddess Artemis on the 8th of March. Artemis is honoured for protecting animals and crops.

It also marks Welsh Witch Day when women who were of magic walked among ordinary folk being able to do so without finding themselves recognised or prosecuted.

Womens-rights

What it means for us

I love the notion that after all these years, and thanks to some great social media campaigns, International Women’s Day is celebrated much more in the media than when I first came to the UK.

Of course, the commercial focus is more on Mother’s Day, but to see and hear so much about the 8th of March as a date to address women’s rights and those amazing female leaders across various sections of politics, science, arts and culture, education and health that continue to make a difference.