‘Accessibility’ Category

Concert Accessibility Enhancements

In order to make sure we are reaching all of our audiences, we’ve added a new accessibility plugin to Concert. When editing a page, you can access the plugin from the editor toolbar by clicking on the icon of a person with their arms out. From there it will search for any accessibility issues and […]

Website Template Changes

Today we’re launching some noticeable changes to the Gustavus website template. These updates were made to alleviate some issues that we noticed last year following the implementation of the new design. Primarily, these changes alter the look and functionality of the header and footer, so we’ll provide a brief explanation of each change below. Audience […]

Web Changes for Fall 2016

Last September we launched our new website. Since then, we’ve made numerous minor updates to improve the site’s performance, and to increase accessibility and usability. Larger issues were monitored throughout the academic year, and we’re now at a point where we can confidently address them. We’re primarily basing these changes on our analytics–aggregate data that […]

Accessibility and other improvements in Concert

We had quite a few people asking about accessibility during the new website preview event. I’m happy to inform you that Concert is now helping to create more accessible pages by requiring editors to add descriptions for images (alt tags). If you are adding or editing an image without a description, you will see an alert asking […]

The Fold is a Myth

When designing your website, it is easy to get distracted by the unimportant details. One that keeps popping up is the idea of "the fold" and that content must appear above this imaginary line. Why is the fold an unimportant detail? Because it doesn't exist. At least not how you think it might.

Review: Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski

There's a pretty good chance that you will fill out a form today... and tomorrow... and the next day. Forms are everywhere you look--we rely on them for nearly everything from searching for information to ordering some goods to balancing your checkbook.

Cool new “Give feedback” and “Send this page” forms

Thanks to all of the hard work of Jeremy Carlson and the wonderful moo.fx, we recently upgraded the “Give feedback” and “Send this page” forms (linked at the tops of every page) from popups to be nicer in-page forms. No More Popups We have never liked popups and are glad to be rid of them. […]

Gustavus Homepage Concept

Our homepage was one of the final pieces of the Gustavus Website that needed to be updated to the look-and-feel we introduced in December. We have been hard at work to create a concept that incorporates global trends, reflects our new design paradigms, addresses known information architecture issues, improves the accessibility and usability of the […]

Visitor Snapshot

Thanks to Shaun Inman’s Mint, we are able to see an extremely current and accurate snapshot of who is visiting our website. I checked out some of the user agent statistics that we collect and was pleasantly surprised with some of the figures. Firefox is In While Firefox is a relatively new browser compared to […]

“Click here” is bad

One of the most often overlooked details when authoring documents for the web is link text. Link text is the “clickable portion of text displayed for a link”. As with most things, there are good and bad practices when it comes to crafting link text. It seems that, it is common to author a web […]