Lifeline Blog
Staebler Insurance Brokers, of Kitchener, Ontario has selected Lifeline for a web based project. We can’t say too much, other than it’s not a website, but it is web-based. We’re really excited to be working on this project, Stay tuned for more info!
Civilized Justice, a non-profit organization focused on driving change in Canada has selected Lifeline to develop their new website. We look forward to working with them in the coming weeks on their new site!
Today we’re going to talk about some accessibility specifics and what you can do when creating content to ensure your website remains accessible. In this post, we’ll be talking about one of the most important factors for accessibility that you’ll have to deal with as an end user adding content to a website through a CMS, with the intention of it remaining accessible. You’ll have to take this specific HTML code into account every time you add a picture to your website.
This important accessibility item is of course the ALT tag, and it is usually one of the first things you’ll learn about accessibility, solely due to how often it comes up . It’s essentially an additional piece of HTML you can use to attach text to an image. This is very helpful for making a website accessible… at the most basic level, you can use alt tags to describe a picture placed within your content. A picture of a beautiful sunset would be labeled as “a picture of a beautiful sunset” in the alt tag. When an ALT tag is defined, if someone who had impaired vision was using a screen reader to view your website, the screen reader would inform them that there is a picture of a beautiful sunset under the cursor, thus helping them better understand the content of your website.
Things can get a bit more complicated than that in the real world though. ALT tags are often a favorite tool of Internet Marketers who are focusing on SEO (search engine optimization), as it gives them another avenue to insert keywords into a page for their search engine rankings. However, for accessibility’s sake, you must ensure that you are providing accurate descriptions of your images, and images that aren’t conveying content (i.e. they are purely decorative in nature) must have a null (empty) alt tag — otherwise an impaired visitor using a screen reader would be confused by the ALT tag descriptions. To address SEO concerns, you can ensure that images used relate to or contain images of your keywords while being relevant to the page content. Using this method, you can have proper descriptions in your ALT tags as well as the keywords that are part of an overall SEO campaign.
An acceptable alternative for images that aren’t conveying content is to have them implemented as a CSS background. This method uses CSS code to display the image without actually placing it in the HTML code. However, inserting images as a CSS background is not typically an option available when building content in a CMS system, whereas placing alt tags on images is.
This may seem a little overwhelming, but don’t worry… if you are using a modern CMS then it will most likely have a very easy method of inserting ALT tags for your images that you can manage without any specific technical knowledge, provided you understand what the ALT tag is and what information is supposed to be entered for it.
We’re going to be rolling out some exciting new features on the Lifeline website over the next few weeks:
1. Online Domain and Hosting Orders
You can now check availability of domains and register them right from our homepage and also the hosting page.
2. Live Chat
Shortly you will be able to chat with a Lifeline representative (read: either Dave or James) directly from the website to answer any questions you might have.
3. New Ticketing System
We’re about to implement a new support ticket system to help track and manage support requests. This will result in an even more reliable response from us when you have a support query.
Today I’m going to give you some tips that relate to Conditional Comments, such as how can you use them and a nice little trick you can do with them. Without further ado, let us begin.
Conditional Comments are a proprietary function created by Microsoft for Internet Explorer browsers, so developers can tag XHTML/HTML code specially for an Internet Explorer browser. In other words, everything inside a Conditional Comment will be skipped by all browsers except IE if the Conditional Comment follows certain conditions.
These conditions are: lte (lower than or equal to), lt (lower than), gt (greater than), gte ( greater than or equal to)
<!--[IF lte IE 6]> Only stuff that will be read by browsers lower than Internet Explorer 6 or by Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 and above will not read this code <![endif]--> <!--[IF lt IE 6]> Only browsers lowers than IE6 will read this paragraph <![endif]--> <!--[IF gt IE 6]> Only browsers higher than IE6 will read this paragraph, such as IE7/IE8 and above. <![endif]--> <!--[IF gte IE 6]> Only browsers higher than IE6 or IE6 will read this paragraph <![endif]-->
And an extremely nice thing you can do is that when you wish to eliminate a browser from your website, as in you do not wish to serve CSS and JS files for it, you can do this easily using XHTML code; you don’t need to do server side verification or js verification.
<!--[IF IE]>--> THIS PARAGRAPH WILL NOT BE READ BY ANY IE version <!--<![endif]--> <!--[IF gte IE 7]> ONLY IE7+ will read this following paragraph <![endif]-->
Effectively you have removed your server from serving CSS/JS to IE6 browsers. This is done because IE6 is a very old browser and modern web applications may not work on IE6… and if they’re dumbed down for IE6, the application may lack lots of features. You can also use this technique to send any sort of CSS, such as a basic style or a basic JS, so you provide only the basic features. The possibilities are endless.
Next week we’re going to talk about CSS 3.0 features 
Best Regards
Welcome to the long anticipated final installment of our Types of Email Marketing series. Today we’re going to talk about Personal Relationship Emails, a powerful form of email marketing that isn’t used as often as it should be.
Personal Relationship Emails
These are a bit different than the other forms of email newsletters we’ve discussed, as they are created to send a personalized message to a specific recipient when a set of requirements are met. For example, let’s take a high end restaurant. Mr. Smith has taken his wife to dinner as part of an evening out, and they had a pleasant experience. While signing the bill, he notices there’s a field asking for his email address and he decides to fill it out. Mr. and Mrs. Smith go home and forget about the great experience they had and move on with their lives. However, 48 hours later an email lands in Mr. Smith’s inbox from the restaurant. To him, it reads as if someone has taken the time to send him an email personally:
Dear Mr. Smith,
We wanted to send you a quick note thanking you for having dinner at our fine establishment the other night. We trust your experience was enjoyable. If there were any concerns that were not met during your meal, please feel free to contact me directly (my contact information is below) and I will do my best to help you out.
As a token of our appreciation, please accept this 15% off coupon (alcoholic beverages excluded) for your next visit to our fine establishment, and we hope you will keep us in mind the next time you decide to go out for dinner.
Sincerely,
Jim Johnson
Manager
Consider the impression that this will have on the average consumer. Not only will Mr. Smith be impressed by the fact that the restaurant took the time to send him an email about his experience directly, but there is a good chance he will make plans to have dinner there again within the month to take advantage of the 15% discount he’s been offered. Now writing an email to every single patron may seem like a significant amount of time invested, but the beauty of this type of email marketing is it can be mostly automated. With the entry of a few pieces of information, the system can automatically generate this email and keep emailing Mr. Smith every 6 months with a new offer to make sure he doesn’t forget to go out for dinner at his favorite restaurant.
Hopefully our outline of some of the major types of email communication you can send from an email marketing campaign will be helpful for your business as you branch out into email marketing, and be sure you don’t miss our future posts on this topic that will help you grow your business through the power of the Internet!
Welcome back to our ongoing discussion about email marketing. Yesterday we talked about postcard and catalog emails and their business applications, and today we’re going to cover another important form of email marketing. So let’s get right into it.
Email Newsletters
This type of email is a bit more complicated and takes more time and effort to create and send than previous forms of email, but it can really help build a relationship with your customers. It also can help your establish you or your business as an expert in your field. Due to their size and complexity, you usually won’t send out a full email newsletter more than once a month, which makes it easier to assemble all the information required to put a good email newsletter together.
First and foremost, you’ll want to keep in mind that an e-newsletter is going to be mostly editorial content and very light on actually advertising (the lighter the better). You should be aiming for about 80% editorial content and 20% advertising, or even 90% – 10% if you can. Essentially the bulk of the newsletter will be made up of informative articles, case studies and tips that will be helpful to your prospects and customers. This will help establish you as a trusted and knowledgeable source in your field. Why is this beneficial? Think about it, who would you rather hire or purchase from: Someone who is a knowledgeable and respected expert on the product or service you require, or someone who you have never heard of and may or may not know anything about the product or service you’re purchasing?
You’ll want to send this email out regularly, quarterly at the very least… but as mentioned before you won’t want to send it out more than once a month. Email newsletters tend to be larger and require time to go through, and recipients on your list will not want to spend the time required to go through the newsletter more than once a month. This type of email can be great for businesses who have a subscription model; your regular newsletter can remind your customers of the value you provide to them and make them more likely to renew when their subscription is due. Businesses (like Lifeline) who typically have a larger value product and a longer sales process can benefit greatly from email newsletters too, because their regular emails can help reinforce the quality of the solution that your company is providing to prospects as well as keep your business name fresh in their minds.
Well, originally this was supposed to only be a two part series, but it turns out there is just far too much to say about the two other types of email marketing. So make sure you don’t miss tomorrow’s final post (for the real this time I promise) where we’ll be discussing a powerful form of email marketing called Personal Relationship Emails.
All marketing emails are not created equal! Different types of businesses will need different styles of email to engage their customers. Today we’re going to talk about the different kinds of marketing emails and try and help you identify what version might be best for your business.
Postcard Emails:
The idea behind a postcard email is to get your point across quickly. You’ll want the entire email to be visible without scrolling, and these will typically include more graphics than other email marketing types. The idea is for the email is to make one or maybe two offers to the recipient and make sure they can see and understand those offers as quickly as possible. It is important that the text you place into your postcard email is snappy and to the point. It’s also important that the offer(s) you are making will be enticing to your list. Otherwise you may end up with postcard emails that leave your recipients scratching their heads, like Montana’s did.
Recipients often prefer postcard emails over other forms of marketing email because they are short and don’t take a lot of time to read. From your perspective they are also easier to produce and send, but you’re only able to promote one or two products or services in a postcard email, so depending on your goals it may not be the best bet. One of the best uses of this type of email is for retail / consumer driven businesses who can offer promotions to get customers in the door.
Email Catalogs:
The name of this type of email is pretty indicative of what it is: essentially it’s a product or service catalog sent via email. These are almost always longer than the postcard type of email. Email catalogs are usually used by businesses who have an online store. If you have ecommerce, you can link the products in your email catalog right to your website where the user can make a purchase if they are interested.
You need to be careful about how much is included via your catalog emails — if there is too much to download you may run into users giving up on the email before it downloads completely. For an ecommerce application, you’ll want to highlight a handful of products that are either very popular or on sale. If the products are popular AND on sale you’ll do even better as you are giving recipients more reasons to buy. If your goal is to have recipients click through to your website and purchase a product, then it’s obviously very important that each product is linked to the product page.
An alternate use for email catalogs is for businesses who have a large product catalog that they send out via print quarterly or twice a year. If you have customers who will agree to receive this catalog via email, you can send an email catalog when your print catalog updates and link the recipient to a PDF download of your full catalog. This will save significant amounts of print costs.
Hopefully you enjoyed part one of this email marketing type overview. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post where we’ll go over email newsletters and personal relationship emails.
Beginner Level
Hello, my name is Alexandru Dinulescu (aka Alex D) and I am the XHTML/CSS coder for Lifeline Design. I have been invited to share some of my knowledge on this blog, so without further ado, this is the first lesson: how to insert CSS code into your XHTML pages.
Before I begin, a short explanation on what CSS is and what it does. Basically, there are 3 layers on your website: the first one is the content of the website which includes all the text, links, images, and so on. This is the content layer or the XHTML layer. On this, another layer is added which is the CSS layer – it governs how the site looks, what colors you use, the site’s position (left, center or right), widths and heights. The 3rd layer is the behavioral layer and it involves interactions between the first and the second layers based on user input. This 3rd layer is also known as the javascript layer.
Now involving CSS, this means that we are using the 2nd layer to style the content layer and there are a few ways to do it.
The Old Way
Back in the good ol’ days of the late 90’s the web was a mess, as every page was table-tag based and the CSS was added inline. What does that mean? Well it’s simple, every tag had its CSS added individually instead of using a specialized option, and when you had to modify something, let’s just say that it could take hours or even days for a huge website.
An example looks like this:
<p style="color: #fff; line-height: 30px; font-weight: bold"> Individual Styled Paragraph</p>
Now the downsides of this method as previously stated are huge. Every time you wish to change something you have to go over all the pages and modify every individual element, which can turn a 2 minute job into a full-week job, which is good for us, the coders, but bad for business.
Another old way insert CSS code in XHTML was by using the <style> tag. This tag can either be added in the <head> section or anywhere in the XHTML code.
<style type="text/css"> /* css code goes here */ </style>
The New Way
After browser support got a bit better, another easier way of inserting CSS came to light: using the <link> tag inside the <head> tag. This means that you had an individual file that coordinated the CSS, and finally the 2 layers of content (XHTML) and presentation (CSS) got separated, thus making life easier whenever it was time to modify some things:
<html> <head> <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/file.css" media="screen, handheld" type="text/css" /> </head> <body></body> </html>
This method proved to be highly adequate and self-sufficient, but some developers thought of an even better way of organizing the CSS files, and they did that using the @inport feature. Basically, instead of having 1 master CSS file that contained EVERYTHING, you had a CSS file for every section of the page (or every page-module if the website was built with a modular approach in mind) and then you had a MASTER CSS that contained only a few lines such as this:
/* Master CSS FILE: */
@import: url("./head.css");
@import: url("./body.css");
@import: url("./footer.css");
/* and now you can just link the master.css file instead of all 3 */
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./css/masterCss.css" type="screen, handheld" />
That’s about it for this week. Catch you all next week when I’ll talk about Conditional Comments, and how can Conditional Comments help you fix problems for Internet Explorer 6 and occasionally Internet Explorer 7 browsers.
Stay Tuned!
I’m happy to announce a new regular feature on the Lifeline blog! Our resident CSS expert Alex will be posting CSS tutorials on a regular basis. These tutorials will follow a cycle of basic, advanced and intermediate. The top of each post will indicate the level of complexity of the tutorial.
We may also throw in some answers to user posted questions, so if you have any CSS queries, please contact us and we may just be able to answer them for you!