Andy Proctor (www.andyproctor.co.uk) and Angie Vale (www.purplebabyhippo.co.uk) were our speakers for January's SIMS. Andy and Angie are two of many small business owners who operate their businesses using Wordpress but luckily our speakers are able to provide possible areas of focus in your website with a few tips and tricks to use to your advantage.
Two speakers for January's SIMS!
Andy gave us a live demo of a Wordpress website to demonstrate what Wordpress can do, such as creating pages and ordering navigation which Wordpress beginners within the SIMS audience found very useful. A quick run-through, some notes and reminders from Andy's talk:
- Do you have analytics? (Every business website should have this)
- Do you have ownership of your analytics and data? Ask your developer.
- Install (reasonable) widgets that help your website's design and functionality. (Don't use too many)
- Editor access can be used to see how powerful Wordpress is.
- Speak to your developer and make sure you have right amount of data you need to improve your web presence.
Angie's presentation on Web Accessibility asks the question, "How accessible is your website?". Angie's talk gives light to assistive technology and how they are commonly used (assistive technology includes things like your glasses! How well does your website work if you take your glasses off.) and many more. Here are few notes on Angie's presentation:
- Check the accessibility of your website. Can everyone use it?
- Try using your website without a mouse!
- Google is blind and deaf! It's not always about design.
- Use semantic markup (Page Headings).
- Make links stand out. Show what's clickable and don't confuse your visitors.
- Use good colour contrast in your website. Tell them the difference instead of making them look for it.
All tools recommended by our speakers can be found in their slides available in the presentations blog post on the SIMS website (www.simsdigitalskills.co.uk) along with news and updates about SIMS.
Finally, don't forget about SIMS "Be Brilliant in 2016" Competition. All details of the competition are available in the SIMS competition page. We're eager to expand SIMS and reach out to more businesses so please share the competition to family, friends, and other businesses.
We'd like to thank everyone for attending January's SIMS. We love to see how SIMS is reaching its potential to build a community of small businesses that will thrive together. We want everyone to be a part of this community and we greatly appreciate it.
Here are some photos from January's SIMS. We almost filled the whole room!
We hope to see you all at the next one.