Imagine visiting a website — your own website — if you couldn’t use your hands for keyboard & mouse. Or if you were blind. Or if you had a severe color blindness, and both green and orange buttons were perceived as brown. It might be hard. Potentially, really hard.

There are things that website owners can do to make their sites more accessible. You can make sure there are things like larger buttons and code included that makes it easy for voice activated controllers to be used to navigate around your site. You can add “alt text” descriptions on your images and charts for “screen readers” to describe images and visually represented information to people with visual impairments. You can make sure that the color contrasts make it easy to find the right buttons.

It’s estimated that some 20% of the general population has a disability that requires some sort of accommodation for website accessibility. Does your site prevent 20% of your potential users — potential customers, clients or donors —  from engaging your content? Wouldn’t it be great to get a wider audience pool for your website by making it more accessible to more people?

We are launching a series of blog posts about website accessibility. This is a big topic that gets complex quickly, but we are hoping to help make this more understandable to business owners and website managers. We welcome your questions in the comments!

You can start working on website accessibility by running your site through this online checker. This won’t be a complete website accessibility audit (it can’t check for keyboard navigation, for instance), but it should give you some ideas to get started. 

Some accessibility improvements will be things you might be able to do yourself, like creating “alt tags”. Other things might require some help depending on your site and your skill levels. Fortunately, there are growing numbers of website developers who have experience and training in accessibility. We would be glad to answer any questions, and if our agency isn’t the right fit for your needs, refer you to other resources. (Call us at 541-640-5136, or schedule a call here).

Website design is a little like fashion – trends come and go. The key is not to let your website wear a leisure suit.

You might not wear the cutting edge of fashion. I don’t. But I also don’t wear the sweater vests or scarves that I did in high school.

Website design trends change fairly rapidly. Over 10 years in business, most of our clients get 3-5 years out of a theme (that controls the design) before their site starts to look seriously dated.

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Do you change your own oil? I don’t. I could. I understand how to do it. But it’s totally worth the cost in the time & effort involved to pay someone else, so I can focus on other things– the things that only I can do, like grocery shopping for my family and paying the bills (although there are services for those tasks too!).

I don’t do my own vehicle repairs anymore either. I have — I replaced a carburetor once. But cars have changed, and with all the electronic systems, it makes more sense to hire a trusted professional. My “car guy” doesn’t just fix the thing I pointed out as the problem, he looks out for other issues that might be going on, and helps me get the best performance from my car.

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You need to redesign your site – or even build your very first site. Should you do it yourself? Hire a freelancer? Find an agency? There are so many options, and the right answer for you depends on a combination of your business needs, your technical skills, your time available, and your budget.

While there are lots of options in between, this post will consider three main options for building a site: do-it-yourself (DIY), freelancers, and web development agencies.

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