Category: Updates

Web Accessibility Update

Web accessibility is in the spotlight once again. On March 18th, the Department of Justice (DOJ) published new guidance, spurring discussions around legal requirements for web accessibility.

Here are a few takeaways and what they mean for businesses in the United States.

  1. Web accessibility is clearly a requirement under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title III of the ADA requires any business that’s “open to the public” to make their online content and services accessible to people who rely on assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to navigate the internet.
  2. While the statement doesn’t provide a new legal standard, it points to WCAG and Section 508 Standards for technical guidance.
  3. Web accessibility is a priority. Recent settlements listed in the guidance show the DOJ’s commitment to ensuring businesses make their web content accessible to people with disabilities.

More than anything, the DOJ guidance reminds us that under the law, in our increasingly digital world, access to online content and properties is no different from access to a physical location.

If you haven’t taken any action on your site’s accessibility, or feel unsure whether your efforts are enough, please contact Dream Warrior at dreambig@dreamwarrior.com and we’d be happy to discuss.

(Update from our partner Audioeye)

Mobile First…and Primary

DWG has been building and spreading the word on mobile first for a long time…remember “.mobi?”  Times have changed since then and at some point the emphasis flipped from a mobile site as an accessory to your desktop version to mobile primary. This concept is so important that we thought a refresher may be helpful. The idea is simple – the site needs to respond to the visitor and visitors are on their devices.

A few reasons:

  • It is now often your first impression.  Where do you open your emails and click links?  So do your visitors
  • Google – This isn’t a surprise or a secret especially if  you keep up on Google various email channels. If your site does not have mobile friendly interface, you will be downgraded.  Google considers mobile primary — they are not wrong.
  • Why not?  At the end of the day, all of your versions should be well-designed and fully functional.

Your visitors use your mobile first, so it should be primary to your design.

 

Communities: Ukraine

We all are part of various communities — clubs, family, neighborhoods and work.   Sometimes communities are social, purposeful, or just because there is a commonality — sometimes we help – sometimes we ask for help.

Right now one of our communities, technology experts from Ukraine, is in circumstances I can’t fully fathom but I know we should do what we can to help.  I think of all the developers and IT specialists who are unable to work right now as they are protecting their lives — but I also imagine they are wondering what will happen to their job.  The other side of this equation is the challenge this must be causing for those companies that are struggling to maintain their work, create new projects and serve their customers.

Here’s how we will help with the goal of helping Ukrainian developers be able to return to their work.

When we agree to take on a job from those in a war torn region, we ask that they return the work back to original techs once they are able to do so.  We also be proactive with the technologists pass back the work the moment they are ready.  In this way we act as a project caretaker and not a project taker.

If you need assistance whether technologist or client, let us know how  we can help during this distressing time. Let me know how we can help: dreambig@dreamwarrior.com

To  my technology friends and competitors:  please think about jumping in to do the same.  Not so that we can gain work but so that we can help our communities displaced by war.

~LaMae

WebP and the Impact on Site Speed

With the permanent introduction of the latest site speed parameters into google’s Search Algorithm (Nov 2021), it is more important than ever to speed up your website.

If you want high quality images while speeding up your website, then you should then care about WebP image format. WebP is a hybrid of the PNG and JPEG features and makes websites lighter and faster.

The advantages of WebP over JPEG and PNG are many. For example, WebP includes a more aggressive and better optimized compression algorithm than JPG and PNG with the goal of minimizing file sizes while still providing acceptable quality. As a result, websites that use WebP will load faster and require less bandwidth. In terms of size, WebP lossless photos are 26% smaller than comparable PNGs.

Lossless WebP supports transparency. Transparency is supported by lossy RGB compression, which often results in 3x smaller file sizes than PNG. Lossless WebP compression utilizes visible image augments in order to exactly reconstruct new pixels. It can also use a local palette, if no interesting match is found.

Lossy (2) WebP compression, like the VP8 video codec’s keyframe compression, encodes an image using predictive coding. The values in adjacent blocks of pixels are used to predict the values in a block, and only the difference is encoded.

The WebP image format is supported by Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and many other tools and software libraries. You may modify WebP files using graphics applications like GIMP, ImageMagick, or Microsoft Paint that natively support the WebP format. There are several online tools we can use to convert our JPGs, PNGs, and other file formats to WebP.  There are undoubtedly more to come.

Squoosh – Online image compression and conversion
Online-Convert.com – Online image conversion

WebP offers improved lossless and reduced-quality compression for online images. Web developers and webmasters may use WebP to create smaller, richer pictures that improve the performance of their websites. WebP is good for your site load time and thus good for SEO. You can use WebP to make images that are identical in quality to their JPEG and PNG counterparts, but without the size limitations – resulting in faster loading times for your visitors while maintaining comparable visual quality.

1) Please read our article from January 6th, 2021 regarding Semantic Web (https://thedwgblog.com/what-is-semantic-search-and-what-is-the-context-in-todays-seo/)

2) Lossy vs lossless image compression: Lossy compression permanently removes some of the image data due to compression while lossless doesn’t distort image quality by compressing it, instead it removes non-essential information.

TB We haven’t changed and that is OK

During my annual computer ‘refresh’, I ran across some old content.  I smiled when I saw the below – happy to still put customers first. — LaMae
(ok – so our writing style has changed a bit – that’s ok too)

As a leading Los Angeles based web design company with global web development offices, we are committed to maintaining a one on one relationship with you and providing a team you can count on right here at home. We are dedicated to creating an environment of trust that will keep your project moving, on time and on budget.

We understand that along with being one of LA’s top web design companies, comes our responsibility to assure that our design is inextricably balanced with functionality. Whether we are designing an eCommerce site or the latest app, we will make sure our creative team delivers your message with style and ease of use.

Whether we are designing and launching a new website or app, our Los Angeles team of web developers, marketing hot shots, and analytic gurus will arm you with an integrated marketing strategy that will achieve your goals.

Whether we are designing an app to interpret whole-genome sequence data and identify disease-related mutations, programming an image recognition platform, or connect a plethora of social media platforms in a single application, our team of technology mavericks is working 24-7 to bring innovation and functionality to everything we do.

While the “rules” keep on changing, you don’t need to worry about that, we will stay on top of them for you, making sure your website is found by people who are relevant to your business and likely to use your services.

If there is not a software out there that can meet the needs of our client, we create it. We have programmed and customized software specifically for the unique requirements of many of our customers.

            Long before World Wide Web, software development has been an integral part of our business. We created software for devices ranging from etching equipment, to movie data management. Please take a look at one our best wares – ARTdynamix for a glimpse of what is possible.