NPG Roundup: Design and Development News from Around the Web

p>Amidst all the excitement of this week’s solar eclipse and the impending Game of Thrones season finale, the team at the New Possibilities Group has been staying hard at work. We’ve got a number of design and development projects in the pipes for our awesome clients, as well as some pretty exciting personal projects on the home front (i.e. babies!).

Of course, that doesn’t mean we’re not also keeping a finger on the pulse.

The web design and development industry never stops churning, and changes come so swiftly that it can be hard to keep up when you’re also trying to run a business, stay savvy within your own niche, and keep your head on straight.

That’s why we’re going to try something a little different for you this week—a news roundup!

Here’s what we’ve been reading this week. It includes some interesting perspectives on CMS development and marketing, as well as some noteworthy happenings in the world of web security and ADA compliance.

Enjoy!

Web Security

Google Chrome Gives HTTP Websites a Security Deadline via CMSWire

Chances are, you got an email about this over the weekend and either deleted it or skimmed it without thinking much about how it might apply to your website.

It’s been a Google standard for some time to favor HTTPS sites over HTTP sites, at least as far as SEO goes. And hopefully, if you run an ecommerce website or some other kind of property through which transactions are made, you snagged that SSL certificate a long time ago.

But there are still a lot of HTTP sites out there, and a lot of them are full of forms and login pages that are not secure. According this article from CMSWire (and that email you “accidentally” ignored), Google is going to start cracking down on HTTP sites this October by flagging them as “not secure”—something that can and will scare users off your site.

ADA Compliance

New York Federal Courts Allow ADA Website Accessibility Claims to Continue via JD Supra

One of the things we’ve been discussing a lot internally lately is the issue of accessibility as it applies to public websites. In fact, we just hosted a webinar about this very topic!

The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) contains guidelines for website accessibility, although they’re not the most black-and-white standards and leave a lot open to interpretation. All the same, most people who run websites are completely unaware that these guidelines even exist—until they get slapped with a lawsuit for non-compliance.

This article from JD Supra illustrates that these lawyers aren’t messing around, and courts are beginning to rule against companies like Blick Art Materials, Five Guys, and Winn-Dixie for not having ADA-compliant websites. Let that be a lesson for the rest of us.

Marketing

We Need Genuine Customer Experience Metrics via CMSWire

What does ROI look like to you? For many companies, what they consider “success” is very often a vanity metric: traffic numbers, social media followers, clicks, leads, etc.

Yes, even leads can be a false metric by which to measure your success if it’s your only focus when you’re building out your website and marketing strategy. Naturally, you want to feed your sales pipeline—but while you’re busy desperately grabbing for a user’s email address to build your email list, are you actually stopping to figure out what they need from you?

In this article from CMSWire, Gerry McGovern delivers a perfect indictment of the modern marketer’s lack of concern over the customer experience, as well as what we really need to be focusing on to do our jobs the right way.

CMS Development

Thinking beyond the CMS feature checklist: validating requirements and considering change management via Medium

We obviously talk a lot about CMS development on this blog, probably enough for a lifetime, but sometimes it’s nice to throw in a little outside perspective.

This excellent article by Mugo Web on Medium touches on a very important point that must always be stressed for any business looking to build a platform: You must identify and examine your internal organizational structure and workflows before you develop your CMS.

While we’re big proponents of building your CMS custom to your workflows rather than change your workflows around your CMS, you may still have to compromise on a few things. Mugo Web brings up a number of important questions that need to be answered ahead of time so you can predict and manage how a change in your technology may affect your whole team.