Time for Spring Cleaning

It is April and in lieu of spring cleaning, this is a great time to establish fresh goals for your website. Every year methods for building your web presence, reaching new audiences, and providing benefits to site visitors are being revamped and improved. To help keep your website relevant to your audience, we pulled together a few potential goals you can get started on this spring.

Usability Testing

An increasingly common and very successful method for determining how to meet your customers’ or organization members’ online needs is to perform usability testing. And there’s no time like the present to test your website with real website visitors. You can uncover valuable market validation from users to indicate whether the navigation, page layouts, design, and functionality are intuitive, effective, and usable—or where they may require revisions.

Test calls-to-action, content presentation, and site navigation to confirm that your website is user-friendly through sites such as TrymyUI.com let you do this for a nominal fee – or for more in-depth results, work with our Certified Usability Analysts. … »

DrupalCon is being held May 20th through 24th in Portland, Oregon. DrupalCon is the best opportunity for new Drupal users to understand the content management system and its benefits as well as gives current users the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from one another.  The conference contains nine different tracks to ensure that conference material caters to all attendees.

This year, Drupal community members submitted over 600 session submissions and less than half of these sessions will be selected for the conference.  New Target is pleased to announce that Danielle Sheffler, one of our Project Managers and our Usability Lead, submitted three sessions for the conference – two User Experience (UX) sessions and one Business and Strategy sessions – and we need your help in getting these sessions chosen for the conference.  So how can you help? … »

Recent statistics like those illustrated on mashable.com’s article “How Big Is the Web & How Fast Is It Growing?” which states that registered domains have gone from 15,000 (1995) to a staggering 350 million (2011), have our clients wondering how can they set their website a part from the millions of other sites.

In the past, when web creators and designers talked about the term ‘usability’, they were generally thinking about typography, font size, design, and layout. Other principles may have been included such as sentence line length and color contrast, but the list of items to consider when creating a site was often similar from site to site and limited to a few factors.

Books such as “Designing Web Usability” by Jakob Nielsen and “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” by Steve Krug (which is still a favorite of ours today), provided guidance on what to look for when creating and/or evaluating a site. … »

A few months ago, we discovered via groups.drupal.org that the Drupal Project Management group was starting up again. One of our Project Managers, Danielle, went to the first meeting, which contained members from across the world. The group discussed topics for future monthly meetings, networking opportunities, community related project support, putting together a knowledge wiki and what should be contained in it, as well as upcoming events and potential involvement. They will continue to meet monthly and we’re excited for the opportunity to meet other project managers and share knowledge with peers around the world.

Another opportunity for involvement with project managers in the broader community will happen later this month. On November 15th, project managers from around the world will attend the virtual International Project Management Day: Power of the Profession. … »

We frequently talk with people about usability and accessibility, or read articles about usability or accessibility, and they are addressed as separate subjects. But in reality, usability and accessibility go hand in hand.

Usability is defined as the ease of use and learnability of what a user is trying to interact with. Accessibility is the degree to which a product or service is available to as many people as possible. When we work to make a site user friendly, we focus on making sure we match up what is on the screen with a user’s mental model (what they expect to see and know how to interact with) and ensuring that we have created something which will earn their trust in the information that is being presented to them. When we make a site accessible, we design and code the site to work for users with a variety of disabilities.

Hearing and sight impairments are the most common disabilities affecting web accessibility. For those 15 years old and older, 6.8% of the population is affected by hearing or sight impairments; for those 65 and older, 21.3% of the population is affected by these impairments. … »