The project entailed refreshing a website that Birch Studio built for a prior session back in 2018, modernizing the website aesthetics and back-end technology, making the website look good with varying and increasing amounts of information, and archiving the older session information while keeping it accessible.

For the Delegates page, there was a significant amount of data to enter which all needed to be formatted exactly the same. Rather than format each of the 26 entries individually, we opted to build out the site with custom data fields. That allowed us to input the data on the backend into a web-based form and have the data output standardized on the frontend. When we adjust the style, spacing or size of an element in the code, all of the elements with the same name update automatically.

As is the case with most diverse groups, the photos for each of the participants came in at varying sizes, resolutions and quality. Using photoshop, we touched up a handful of images to enhance the color and lighting, and in some cases, fill in missing backgrounds or remove extraneous details from the image. Finally, all of the images were cropped with the subject of similar size and position. These actions all helped the diverse group of people and settings come together with a unified look, ensuring the site also looked professional and complimented the caliber of the event.

The same images were also added to a carousel slider on the Home page, so as new Delegates were added to the media library, their images were usable in this additional location.

While new pages were in progress, we provided mockups on the live site, protected from the public view by password. This allowed us to work efficiently async between meetings and keep up the pace of the project.

After the summit, we created a new page called 2022 Outcomes to share the results of the event with the public. Soundcloud audio and YouTube video of the event were embedded in the site and dozens of photos were uploaded for display.

The final asset created for the outcomes was the Decarbonization Playbook – a 20-page PDF report with five essays that summarized the ideas generated from the Summit, the process that led to those ideas, and endnotes for additional reading and research.

Sponsors were UVA’s Batten Institute, Institute for Business in Society, Environmental Resilience Institute, and Miller Center. The event was funded by the Jefferson Trust.

The post Project: Jefferson Innovation Summit appeared first on Birch Studio.

Caveat emptor (buyer beware) is a phrase that most of us know. With ecommerce and accessible website development coming to our attention, we’ve arrived at a time where seller beware – caveat venditor – is even more important to online retailers. Selling online has become a necessity for many businesses. With popular ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Square, WooCommerce, etc. being so dominant, one might think that they’d take care of a big issue like complying with Federal laws. 

We recently had a client come to us with a legal issue about their website. The claim focuses on a website that runs afoul of a Federal statute – The Americans with Disabilities Act.  The ADA guarantees equal access to all members of society. To quote:

“The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects people with disabilities from discrimination... Disability rights are civil rights.”

While the website is still very usable to order a product, even with a screen reader, there were enough technical issues for someone to find fault and threaten a Federal lawsuit. According to most sources, first time fines can be in the neighborhood of $50K with repeat penalties going up 2-3 times that amount. That’s not a healthy risk for one’s balance sheet.

The Legal Landscape for Accessibility

Since the ADA was written prior to the advent of the modern Internet, it doesn’t address websites directly. However, it does broadly guarantee the right of access. In the US, Title III of the ADA specifies what types of businesses this applies to. Check the list to see if your business is covered by the code.

In the EU, there is a similar regulation coming into effect June 2025. Item 43 of the European Accessibility Act requires products for sale to comply. 

“This Directive contains exemptions for microenterprises providing services which is  “an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 persons and which has an annual turnover or annual balance sheet not exceeding 2 million Euro.””

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were developed for this purpose. Naturally, they have evolved over time so you need to be sure to reference the correct one. WCAG 2.2 is the latest version of the code. 

Life Without Point and Click Websites

For users with low vision, no vision, or limited physical dexterity, the Internet is a very different landscape. Most of us take for granted that we can look at a thing, move an object on the screen, then click on it. 

The inability to point and click affects many people, yet most websites are not adequately meeting their needs – nor the letter of the law. To understand the pervasiveness of the problem, WebAIM conducted a study on the top 1,000,000 home pages in the world. They released a 2023 report on accessibility which revealed that “96.3% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures.” There’s more detailed information directly from the users in WebAIM’s Screen Reader survey.

Behind the pictures and links that most users click on is a whole lot of machine-readable information. When screen readers are pointed at a website, they look for specific types of information to help their human users understand what is on the screen. 

Examples of accessibility related code include:

• alt tags – describe the content of images
• tab order – allows users to move through a form with the keyboard
• label – defines a label for several elements, like input, select and textarea
• aria label – covers all fields not defined by label above
• file names – screen readers commonly state the filename
• file descriptions – longer statements about image contents
• button labels – displays the action of a button, eg. order, unsubscribe, etc.

The solution available to help many of these users is called a screen reader. Screen readers are an assistive technology – an application installed on a user’s desktop computer or mobile device – that converts website text and labels into audible words or digital Braille. That allows a non-seeing or non-hearing person to navigate the website with the outputs provided by the software.

A list of top screen readers according to WebAIM’s survey can be found here for desktop computer screen readers and here for mobile device screen readers.

Ecommerce Platforms and Compliance

Zooming back out to solutions for website owners… 

Shopify

You might be thinking as I originally did that by using an ecommerce platform like Shopify a site owner would be in the clear. However, Shopify doesn’t provide this level of compliance with WCAG. Their Terms don’t mention ADA anywhere. So it defaults to being covered by Your Responsibility. They leave it up to the store owner:

3. You are solely responsible for the goods or services that you may sell through the Services (including description, price, fees, tax that you calculate, defects, required legal disclosures, regulatory compliance, offers or promotional content), including compliance with any applicable laws or regulations.

Square

“Square is unable to ensure that websites built with our platform meet any accessibility compliance standards.”

OpenCart

Opencart has no mention of WCAG compliance on their website, but judging by the number of add-ons and extensions, it’s not reliable for compliance out of the box.

WooCommerce

I couldn’t find a mention of WCAG disclaimers on woocommerce.com but judging from this very helpful blog post, they don’t guarantee compliance either. 

WCAG Accessibility Compliance Scanners

There are a handful of tools that can review a website for you. Some are free and some paid. The free ones typically will do one page at a time which can be used for sites with few pages or those that rely heavily on a few page templates.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) maintains a list of web accessibility evaluation tools.

For this client, I ran tests with several tools on a few pages to make sure we had the broadest possible understanding of the issue. 

One scanner said that the store is compliant. Another said that there were two critical issues, so the site was not compliant. A third showed two errors which were different from those that the second reported.

This is somewhat frustrating for a site owner trying to be compliant because it seems to suggest that there is subjectivity in the rating system. I have no legal training, so please check with your counsel on this: but I think generally if you satisfy the requirements of the most stringent of these systems, it seems that you should be able to avoid trouble. An academic paper from the computer science department of Taibah University addresses this disparity, with limited recommendations.

Solutions for Ecommerce Accessibility

There are tools out there that require a subscription. They say they’ll fix your site with a sort of dynamic, on-the-fly overlay for a low monthly fee. For stand-alone websites, there are add-ons and plugins that help with these things somewhat. Even with these installed, there are a few remaining problems. 

1. One is that automatic software cannot reach deep enough to offer full compliance on all of the accessibility related code mentioned above.
2. Subscription-based solutions represent an ongoing, never ending fee for what is essentially a band-aid. It doesn’t change your core website code and stops working as soon as you stop paying for the subscription.

Summary

While we aren’t experts in ADA and EU laws, we readily understand the reports generated by WCAG compliance testing software, and can take the steps necessary to implement their recommendations. Between adjusting the code on your site and giving website managers a small bit of training, we can provide a permanent solution to a permanent concern, and help you minimize the risk of crippling fines. “$50K with repeat penalties going up 2-3 times” is not a healthy risk for one’s balance sheet.

The post Caveat Venditor: Ecommerce Shakedowns appeared first on Birch Studio.

We help people build websites every day. A foundational yet often misunderstood part of websites is the hosting environment. Many people just go with a big company and take the services that are recommended by them at whatever price they charge. Yet most people don’t know that they are being sold services that they don’t need. They also often pay for years in advance, making it harder to stop using them when you have decided to switch providers or no longer need their service.

When we start working with clients that are hosting with the most well-known firms with big advertising budgets, I find that most clients are paying for services they don’t need. Usually they don’t have enough knowledge to manage their accounts properly and don’t get impartial advice on what is needed.

Poor Technical Support

[my site] has imploded sometime in the last few days since GoDaddy tried to put SSL on it and my recollection is we didn’t have it on there because that caused the last blow up. Just a heads up I will probably be back on your doorstep. 

[5 hours later…]

Do what you can to fix it. It has been six hours down and they have done nothing. I am going to have to find time to get away from them. This is the last straw. But for now we need to get the site back up.

In cases like this, the usual customer service reply is that they are not web developers, so they can’t help with the site. Mind you, the site had been working previously and what they did is what stopped it from working.

Integration with Third Parties

To gain market share they integrate with other services and end up selling products that even they are not very familiar with. For example, GoDaddy used to have their own email service. Sometime in 2022 they discontinued that and now only sell email services for Office 365. If you have an issue with Office 365 that goes beyond the usual, it’s a difficult slog – You’re GoDaddy’s customer, but using Microsoft’s product, which doesn’t have a relationship with you.

In the case of an e-commerce site, the WordPress site was broken but the hosting company wrongly assumed that the issue was with WooCommerce.

Hello, I’m looking for help getting my site back up and running. I would love to get this site back up today before tonight’s class. The [hosting] folks had me going through woo-commerce trying to set passwords.

In this case, the site was completely broken, not just WooCommerce, and there was no need to reset any passwords. This client lost valuable time of his own and sales through his website.

Another client had built a website in Squarespace,purchased the domain through them, and purchased email from another company. It turned out that Squarespace actually purchased the domain through a third company, so when the email company tried to connect with it, they couldn’t provide the client proper instructions because of the convoluted chain of custody. It took a concerted effort with several distinct steps to clean up and consolidate the accounts to the point where the client could understand and control the services he was paying for. 

Entry Level Support

In pretty much every case, when we call one of these companies, we never talk with the same person twice. So when there’s an issue to resolve, we start from the beginning again to get the new person up to speed. As with many things, there may be more than one way to solve a problem. And when you have multiple people involved in solving multi-step problems, they typically fail from conflicting directions. The people in charge of customer interface are not experts in solving technical problems — they just work from a limited set of standard instructions. If you’re able to convince them that you have a technical problem beyond their instructions, they’ll forward your information to someone that might have the skills to solve it, but in my experience, critical information is usually lost in translation between departments and the problem will persist.

The Most Common Unnecessary Charges  

Renewal Protection. For example, all major service providers require payment by credit card, and for the most part renew services automatically. However, some of these services have an additional fee they charge for “renewal protection”. As if they wouldn’t remind you repeatedly that your credit card has failed?

Domain Privacy. This is a feature that hides the fact that you own your domain. Since most websites have contact info on them already, this is a non-service. Privacy always sounds like a good thing but in this case, is it really necessary to pay for it? Some domain registrars (including the one we use) provide this service for free. But either way, there’s really no need for most people.

Additional Services. There are any number of services that a company can recommend, but that doesn’t need that you actually need them.

Good Example or a Horrible Warning?

If any of this sounds familiar to you, we’d be more than happy to review your accounts and see if we can help host and manage your services in a more efficient manner. 

The post You’re Paying your Hosting Company for What?! appeared first on Birch Studio.

Websites grow tired. They want to be updated to continue looking as good as the day they were built. A common problem for successful companies ready to update their website is that nobody has the time to divert to such a big undertaking.

It sometimes feels like replacing the wings on an airplane while in mid-flight.

If you find yourself in these shoes, know that it can be easier than you think. With some proper planning, websites can be overhauled incrementally. Just like anything complex, it’s made up of lots of pieces which aren’t complex. Working on the website pieces instead of the whole at once is often much more manageable, just as effective, and a whole lot less stressful.

The most common components found in virtually every website can be summed up like this:

• header
• footer
• navigation menu (desktop, mobile)
• colors
• fonts (heads, subheads, body, etc)
• page blocks and columns
• margins and spacing
• special text (bullet lists, pull quotes, etc)
• contact forms

Each of these structural and content pieces can be added to or edited separate from the others. It still is beneficial to think about the peripheral things while you’re on one component, but don’t forget that one of the biggest advantage of the web is that everything is editable in the future.

When you’re ready to go for a deeper dive into the contents of the site, that can be triaged in a similar way, by looking at these items:

• pages with long-term / permanent content
• images
• posts about events and thoughts that occur over time
• downloadable docs

As part of your plan, it’s recommended to start with a comprehensive design and sitemap so you know that everything will work together properly. After that, building, editing and cleaning up can be done in phases.

Your customers, managers and your sanity will all thank you.

The post Replacing the Wings Mid-Flight appeared first on Birch Studio.

We are, without a doubt, on the finest planet in the solar system — and as far as we can tell – the entire galaxy. Every time I experience a sweet breeze, or a chilled out turtle, or a bird with a song, it lifts my spirits.

With extreme weather all over the planet become more frequent, my spirits need lifting a lot more than they used to. So I try to do something regularly to keep us moving in the right direction.

Along with about 300 other people, I’ve been working not just for Earth Day, but Earth Decade, where we try to set things right. The team we assembled and the product we built is the brainchild of best-selling author Seth Godin. It’s called The Carbon Almanac.

Drawing on over 1,000 data points, the book uses cartoons, quotes, illustrations, tables, histories, and articles to lay out carbon’s impact on our food system, ocean acidity, agriculture, energy, biodiversity, extreme weather events, the economy, human health, and best and worst-case scenarios.

It’s available worldwide on June 22. Available for pre-order now. See a video tour of the book at https://thecarbonalmanac.org/

The post Earth Day 2022 appeared first on Birch Studio.

What’s usually missing, however, is the ability to confirm that your service providers heard and understand your needs. As a service provider ourselves, we felt the downside of that lack, and struggled to manage the problems that came along it. Virtually everyone has had a conversation where they said something and the other person said they didn’t. It’s not just a bad feeling – the misunderstanding sets the relationship on the wrong foot and damages one’s ability to provide the best possible service.

Knowing that pain firsthand, we set out to find a solution. The practice we developed is likely the simplest solution that one can implement: we take our notes like everyone else does and then share those notes back to our clients. We ask them to confirm that we captured our conversation accurately. We do this while it’s still fresh in everyone’s mind – usually within 24 hours – for the best fidelity.

This serves multiple purposes for multiple parties:

• confirms that we heard what the client asked for
• serves as a checklist internally as we work through the current round of updates
• provides a shareable document for people that couldn’t attend the meeting but want to know what transpired
• represents what we knew at a given point in time – especially helpful as future knowledge usually overshadows past knowledge
• allows the client to mention anything else they forgot, or that wasn’t captured in the notes

It’s become so important to the success of our projects that we don’t move forward without the confirmation. With this one simple step, we’ve virtually eliminated all misunderstandings or missed cues to work on something; we’ve removed all uncertainty that comes a week or a month later about what we discussed; we’ve made people with that all of their other vendors – regardless of industry – used the same method.

The post Note Taking for the Win appeared first on Birch Studio.

Sitting on the other side of the table are the low-information service providers who are accustomed to handling things on their own without having to answer many questions. When they interact with a high-information consumer, there tends to be stress in the relationship – often on both sides.

If you’re catering to low-info people: stating your credentials, good reviews and time in business is generally good enough. If you’re catering to high-information people: the above is helpful, but also expect to address their questions with detailed responses, progress on check points, and a running list of concerns that you’ve addressed.

The post Two Types of Information Seekers appeared first on Birch Studio.

The post Real Estate Buyer Characteristics – 2022 appeared first on Birch Studio.

The post Real Estate Buyer Characteristics – 2021 appeared first on Birch Studio.

What isn’t subjective is clarity. Either someone gets the point or they don’t. They see the benefits or they don’t. It’s so easy to be frustrated and confounded at someone else’s lack of knowledge. It pays to put aside our own knowledge and embrace the customer’s lack of knowledge so we can meet them where they are, understand the gaps, and then bring them up to speed.

Whatever the “look and feel” are, be sure to nail down the problem your customer has, and how they will benefit from your solution. That’s how we solve for the problems. Adding good looks on top of that is icing on the cake.

The post Aesthetics Don’t Often Solve Problems appeared first on Birch Studio.