Web Standards, Accessibility & More

So I recently created a dental blog site for my brother’s business, General & Cosmetic Dentistry (I used WordPress, which is awesome). It’s part of a marketing effort to gain more patients, and in response to the poor economy and people just flat out leaving Michigan, where his dental practice is located. Using Web 2.0 in today’s economy is surely a sign of the times!

Anyway, my brother was very smart by initiating a web-based marketing plan. He asked me for help, so this was a perfect opportunity to exercise some of my Search Engine optimization (SEO) skills! Besides setting up a professional blog, I also suggested these things in order to help traffic to his dental office web site:

• Tweak keywords in Meta data, page titles, etc.
• Create a dental blog entry (consistently) once a week, and on the same day.
• Publish press releases once in a while.
• Submit his site to search engines once every 6 months.
• Change his Twitter account name from personal to professional, and balance tweets about both sides of life.
• Create LinkedIn and Yelp profiles (actually his great idea!).
• Put Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Blog links on his office web site.
• And of course, ensure accessible, semantic HTML markup with web standards!

So far in only a couple weeks, his position on Google search has risen considerably!

Digg this article!

My personal project this year, TimeTracker, is now complete and available for purchase. It’s a a web application to track one’s time with clients. I developed it for a friend’s employer, Music to Grow On, in order for music therapists to track hours with their clients. Of course, other professionals such as psychologists, teachers, and consultants, could make good use of the application.

Manage session time with clients with the TimeTracker. Manage session time with clients; track and report hours.

In TimeTracker, the professional may enter session information, run reports on his sessions, and view his client information. An administrator may edit user and client information, assign clients, modify all session data, and run detailed reports. In addition to tracking session dates and times, the scope of the project expanded to record driving miles, and to mark sessions as an assessment or a quarterly evaluation. You can read the list of features here.

Addendum, March 2009

TimeTracker has been rebranded as My Client Time.

If AT&T wants me to switch my cable services, AT&T’s web site should support my browser (Firefox 3)! They want me to use crappy IE. Last I checked browser usage, IE is down to around 55%, so that’s a lot of non-IE users they’re deterring. Please AT&T, implement web accessibility practices and use web standards! The customer must be able to use whatever web browser he chooses.

My family shops at Target, you know, the huge American retail store. I really like that store (especially when there’s a Taco Bell or Starbucks inside). But I think their corporate image, at least for me, is in a serious decline. This is mostly due to a couple of lawsuits going on against the company.

In the world wide web industry, we should all be familiar with the NFB vs. Target lawsuit—the biggest case regarding web accessibility in the United States, thus far. Target is actually fighting to keep its web site away from users with disabilities, and technology limitations. This is like a store closing its doors to anyone with a visual, hearing, or motor impairment. How naive and shameful!

In the second lawsuit, the American tennis great (retired) Andre Agassi is seeking an injunction against Target for using his name without permission. Apparently Target is putting Agassi’s name on sandals without permission when they’ve already been asked to stop. How silly.

Every once in a while, one comes across an establishment that is unique and one soon comes to love. I recently discovered one of these places, Barefoot Coffee Roasters.

This coffee shop is unlike all others. First of all, they take pride in great coffee. In their words, Barefoot Coffee is great coffee, coffee as a culinary art and sustainability. The coffee is roasted right on the spot, and the coffee shop has won many awards. And besides coffee, you can purchase something to eat such as an oatmeal & raisin cookie (my favorite).

Just as good as the coffee is the atmosphere. There are always many “interesting” and “creative” individuals hanging out. Local art decorates the walls, and even some of the furniture is art. Even the walls of the bathroom are blackboards with chalk writings and drawings. The music is unique, hip, and no matter how diverse, always seems to mesh well with the atmosphere. In the outdoor seating, enjoy a smoke and/or listen to the guy with the acoustic guitar. Free Wifi is provided, which is essential, and the prices are reasonable.

If you’re in the South Bay area, make a visit to the Barefoot Coffee Roasters.

If you’re a front-end expert like me, and you work with Java programmers, then you’ll know how much typing the following web page will save you. Common HTML Validation Problems from the Web Design Group is a handy resource for reminding poorly HTML-skilled co-workers of what they need to write valid code. Well, as least it’s a start!

Some common errors include:

• Ampersands in URLs
• Incorrect Nesting of Elements
• Using a NAME attribute with IMG or FORM
• Uppercase letters in XHTML tags

Although, I must say, the real problem is in the process of going from mockups to development. The back-end guys never do it right. There should be a universal law that back-end programmers cannot change the front-end code; the outputted code should match clean semantic XHTML that you (and me) worked so hard to create.

Why is this so difficult? I blame two things–time constraints and lack of desire to learn. Marketing and management continue to push IT staff into creating web projects too quickly; haste makes waste. And, unfortunately many programmers are afraid of change; they program the same way over and over, for years. Uh, excuse me but web technology changes kinda fast, so keep up please!

Here are some great tips for doing a presentation. This is a summary from an excellent WSG Meeting Podcast from last year , Presentation Mind Control by Paul Fenwick (29-June-2006).

• Use pictures.
• Better yet, use multimedia–audio, video, animation, etc.
• Make it emotional.
• Use anticipation–provide a challenge, a few proposals, then lastly a solution.
• Move around; don’t stand still.
• Perform live examples–beware of technical mishaps.
• Practice your presentation.
• Time your presentation (to stay within your limit).
• Do a Q & A–admit it if you don’t know answer–ask the audience.