Your business website is the hub for everything you have to offer.
An all-in-one center of sorts—it’s where visitors find out about your services or products as well as an opportunity to contact you. Besides its aesthetics, you want to make sure your site is easy to find, simple to navigate, and accessible to all.
Web designers use their favorite tools of the trade to make sure all of that happens.
Here are some of our “favs” to use with WordPress sites.
Broken link checker
Broken links on your website will seriously hurt rankings and user experience. There are billions of sites out there, which makes the web extremely competitive in terms of SEO success. Google is known for punishing websites with broken links. If left unchecked broken links could potentially decrease visibility over time. The last thing you want your visitor to see is the dreaded 404 code (Page Not Found page) or any other unsuccessful HTTP response. As your site continues to grow, it can be tough to keep on top of all the links and pages.
The tool: Check out this Broken Link Checker. It’s a Chrome plugin and easy to use.
Google Site Kit
Google offers a variety of tools to help you optimize your site. These are all independent pieces and offer different features for various purposes. From Google Analytics to PageSpeed Insights, their all-in-one kit saves you time and money by providing performance and technical information in one location.
The tool: Here is the Google Site Kit. Easy setup for this complete package.
Contrast Checker
Just because you can read the text on your website, doesn’t mean all of your visitors can. Your color contrast ratio needs to make the page accessible for visitors with low vision, vision impairments, and different types of color blindness.
There are guidelines spelled out that designate success criteria for level AA, level AAA, and fail ratings. These are called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and unfortunately, you can’t check the ratio just by looking at your colors.
That’s where a color contrast analyzer tool comes in.
The tool: WebAIM contrast checker. A great resource for all things involving web accessibility from services and training to evaluation tools.
Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Approximately 15% of people have a disability that could affect how they use your site.
Is your site accessible to everyone? When your website is designed with accessibility guidelines, it helps those who are disabled, the elderly, people with limited visibility, color blindness (as described above in color contrast), or people who are completely blind to use your website.
The tool: WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. Another stellar product from WebAIM.
All in One SEO
No doubt you are aware of how important SEO is for your website.
If not, we need to talk. (Link to my calendar here)
Following good SEO practices is a great way to increase the quality of your website by making it user-friendly, faster, and easier to navigate.
The tool: AIOSEO WordPress SEO Plugin and Toolkit. Helps you easily improve your SEO rankings and increase traffic. Helps you control how Google and Bing display your website in their search results.
Need some help navigating this all?
There’s a good chance you aren’t a web designer, and trying to keep your site running as it should be a little daunting.
That’s where we come in.
At Waterfront Graphic Design, we provide seamless web support while you grow your business. From start to finish, and all the maintenance in between, we handle it all. We outperform in the background as your website partner while you enjoy the spotlight.
