Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Hello anyone? Does anyone track time? My new project manager requires our team to track time and this is the first time this is happening to us. We are about to use TMetric app. Can you share your experience?
Creating a user experience that is accessible and inclusive to all visitors, including those who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, is a priority for any modern website. This article provides an outline on adapting UX design for screen readers, an important step in shaping an inclusive digital ecosystem.
Screen readers interpret digital content for visually impaired users by converting visual information into speech or Braille. A tailored UX design for screen readers requires understanding this linear, sequential content interpretation and its influence on web navigation.
The following approaches offer a basis for creating a more accessible UX design for screen readers. They call for deliberate implementation, meticulous attention to detail, and ongoing refinement:
Visually impaired users appreciate predictability and consistency. Consistent layouts across your website allow users to predict element locations, facilitating smoother navigation.
Links and buttons should offer insight into their function upon activation. For example, a button labeled “Download Accessibility Guide” provides clearer information than a simple “Click Here.”
Detailed alt text for images helps screen readers convey the content and context of the image, enhancing users’ understanding of the overall content.
Screen readers should be able to interpret form controls accurately. Adequate labeling of each form field can significantly improve the user interaction experience.
Content should be sequenced logically, given that screen readers interpret information top-to-bottom. The narrative should be coherent when read in this manner, with key messages strategically placed.
A study by the Nielsen Norman Group provides valuable insights into the unique challenges of using screen readers on mobile devices. It underlines the importance of thoughtful, native accessibility improvements as opposed to reliance on third-party solutions.
The outlined strategies serve as an introduction to the ongoing pursuit of accessible UX design for screen readers. This journey entails consistent fine-tuning of your design based on user feedback and changing accessibility standards.
Building a genuinely inclusive digital platform requires understanding and empathizing with your users’ experiences. By making your website more accessible, you don’t just contribute to a more inclusive digital world—you potentially expand your user base and increase your business growth.
Remember, inclusivity is more than a best practice; it’s an ethical responsibility and a potential competitive advantage. It’s a process of striving towards a digitally accessible future, recognizing the challenges, and continuing to learn and improve.
Your website’s command center, the WordPress dashboard, arrives with several widgets that enhance functionality. However, not all of these may be beneficial for every user. As plugins introduce more widgets over time, your dashboard may start to feel crowded and less straightforward to navigate. WordPress offers the ability to remove these unnecessary widgets, either manually or programmatically. We’ll guide you through both of these methods, aiding in decluttering your dashboard and promoting better website management.
Widgets are elements you can include in your WordPress site’s sidebars or other widget-ready areas. WordPress includes default widgets, and plugins may introduce more. All these widgets can be managed through the Appearance » Widgets screen in your WordPress dashboard. However, an excess of unused widgets can lead to a messy widget screen. To make your dashboard more navigable, consider disabling those you don’t need. For an in-depth look at managing widgets, you can explore the WordPress official documentation.
For the quick and temporary cleanup of your dashboard, WordPress allows you to hide widgets that you don’t frequently use. Follow these steps to hide widgets:
While this method doesn’t eliminate the widgets entirely, it does make them invisible from your view. Other users can still enable these widgets from the Screen Options panel.
For a more lasting cleanup, WordPress provides a way to get rid of dashboard widgets completely, preventing other users from turning them back on. This involves adding a code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file or to the site-specific plugin you’re using. Here’s the code snippet:
function clear_dashboard_widgets() {
global $wp_meta_boxes;
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_quick_press']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_right_now']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_plugins']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_drafts']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_recent_comments']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_primary']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_secondary']);
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'clear_dashboard_widgets' );
}
The function above targets and removes the widgets listed. If there are certain widgets you wish to retain, simply remove the corresponding line from the code.
To customize this further, you can add the following function to the functions.php file to restrict the dashboard widget removal to only non-admin users:
if (!current_user_can('manage_options')) {
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'clear_dashboard_widgets' );
}
Having a neat and organized dashboard is a significant step towards more efficient WordPress management. Discarding unnecessary widgets tailors your dashboard to your exact needs, fostering a more effective and enjoyable user experience.
Aside from decluttering your dashboard, there are other optimization steps you can take to bolster your website’s performance and security. For instance, hiding your WordPress version can contribute to creating a more secure WordPress environment.
We hope these tweaks will help you maintain a clean and efficient dashboard, helping you focus on what truly matters: creating outstanding content.
This article is a step-by-step guide aimed at demonstrating an interface-based approach to using Spring's type conversion system.
Spring 3 introduced a
core.convertpackage that provides a general type conversion system. The system defines an SPI to implement type conversion logic and an API to perform type conversions at runtime.
In this article, we will explain how using the new Generative AI Models (LLM) can improve the experience of business users on our analytical platform. Let's say we provide our retail merchandising managers with a web application or a mobile application where they can analyze sales and stock behavior in real-time using natural language.
These applications usually have a series of restrictions that mainly show a generic type of analysis, which users can filter or segment based on some filters and provide information such as:
I have a form where the form elements are grouped in several divs.
Depending on user choices certain divs will display and others will have display:none.
I want some fields to be required but only when the surrounding div has the value display: block.
Is there a way to do this?
Google’s Material Design guidelines introduced the ripple effect, a subtle animation that indicates user action. The ripple effect rapidly gained popularity in web design as a sophisticated visual feedback form that refines user interaction, particularly on buttons. Today, we’ll show you how to create a ripple button effect using nothing but pure CSS.
The basic structure of our button is quite simple. It’s a single line of HTML:
<button class="btn-ripple">CLICK ME</button>
This is a standard button element with a class btn-ripple attached to it, which will be our reference when we define the ripple effect in CSS.
/* Styling for the ripple button */
.btn-ripple {
border: none; /* Removing the default button border */
border-radius: 6px; /* Giving our button rounded corners */
padding: 12px 16px; /* Providing some padding around the button text */
font-size: 1.2em; /* Increasing the font size of the button text */
cursor: pointer; /* Changing the cursor to a hand icon when hovering over the button */
color: white; /* Making the button text color white */
background-color: #fa6e83; /* Setting the initial button background color */
outline: none; /* Removing the outline from the button */
background-position: center; /* Setting the position of the background image to center */
transition: background 1s; /* Adding a transition to the background color */
}
/* Defining the hover state */
.btn-ripple:hover {
background: #f94b71 radial-gradient(circle, transparent 1%, #f94b71 1%)
center/15000%; /* Creating a radial gradient background on hover */
}
/* Defining the active (clicked) state */
.btn-ripple:active {
background-color: #f97c85; /* Changing the button color when active */
background-size: 100%; /* Increasing the size of the background image */
transition: background 0s; /* Removing the transition from the background color */
}
Let’s break down the CSS setup:
.btn-ripple class sets up the basic appearance of the button. The background-color is initially set to #FA6E83, a light color, and the background-position is centered to ensure our ripple effect starts from the middle of the button.:hover pseudo-class is activated. It changes the background to a radial gradient that’s centered where the pointer is located, simulating the ripple effect. The gradient starts as transparent (transparent 1%) and transitions to the button color (#F94B71 1%), creating a soft ripple effect.:active pseudo-class takes effect. It changes the background-color to a darker shade (#F97C85) and expands the background-size to 100%, reinforcing the ripple effect. The transition for the background is also set to 0s, making the effect appear instantaneously when the button is clicked.
See the Pen
Pure CSS Ripple Button Effect by 1stWebDesigner (@firstwebdesigner)
on CodePen.0
We demonstrated a classic example of how simple CSS can be used to create appealing interactivity in a user interface. But as you strive to refine your UI, it’s critical to remember that each interface element might require different tweaks.
Consider the context in which your buttons are used. A button for submitting form data might benefit from a more subdued ripple effect, while a call-to-action button could be more prominent with a stronger one.
For more intricate animations or synchronizing with other UI events, JavaScript could be leveraged for more granular control. CSS provides a solid base for styling and basic animations, but JavaScript opens up more advanced possibilities.
And of course, customization is key. While we used specific colors for our ripple button here, feel free to experiment with colors, shapes, and transitions that align with your brand and design aesthetic.
OutSystems is a low-code development platform that allows you to build web and mobile applications rapidly. In this example, we'll create a simple employee management CRUD system. It took me around eight hours to get started with the platform and build my first CRUD app.
Let's get started!
In this version (version 1), we will explore the concept of IDP federation and its uses in the large enterprise for smooth access management where there is a need to handle heterogeneous sets of users. In version 2, we will give a step-by-step approach to implementing IDP federation using IBM Verify.
Multiple sets of employees, vendors, and customers from multiple organizations are typical in today's environment, where the merging and collaboration of various businesses and organizations is a fundamental and ongoing process.
Want to just get started? Click here to sign up for SEMrush and increase SEO traffic today.
We used to laugh at SEO.
Dead serious.
Back when we were running the KISSmetrics blog, which grew to over 1 million visitors per month, people asked us all the time what we did for SEO.
We shrugged and said “not much.”
Then we’d chuckle at how absurd that was.
In the 2008 to 2015 period, we got away with not worrying about it.
We pushed really hard on quality and volume. Tons of quality content posted as fast as possible over a long period of time. That was our whole strategy. And it worked really, really well.
We never did keyword research. We didn’t worry about on-page SEO. We didn’t have a subscription to a single SEO tool.
Here’s the honest truth though: we were lucky.
Content marketing, SEO, and blogs were pretty new back then. We were ahead of the curve.
And when you’re ahead of the curve with a marketing channel, you can get away with being a bit sloppy. We were sloppy.
These days, the SEO game has changed.
Most of us have become jaded with content marketing, SEO, and blogs. And for good reason.
We write and write and write. Endless nights and weekends. Fast forward a year and how much has our traffic grown? Not much. It plateaus.
We talk to so many business owners and marketers that hit this same wall. We’ve hit it plenty of times ourselves.
In the last few years, we’ve completely rethought our search program. Tore it all down and rebuilt it from the ground up.
Our entire SEO program is now built around one core philosophy: go after guaranteed streams of traffic. Then stack those streams of traffic one at a time.
It’s absolutely guaranteed to grow anyone’s traffic.
So where do we find these guaranteed traffic streams? Let’s find out.
If you want to increase SEO traffic, you’ll need SEO tools pros really use. Here’s the best options.
You can read our full reviews of each SEO tool here.
Below, we’ve outlined the 6 steps that we use to get traffic ourselves. We find the core topics that we should focus on, discover our main competitors, get our competitors to do all the work for us, and link guaranteed traffic streams for our site.
First, we grab a list of keywords that we’ll consider to be our “Dream Keywords.”
In SEO-speak, these are short-tail keywords. Usually they’re 1–3 words long.
The reason that we call these “Dream Keywords” is that competition can be pretty stiff.
Let’s face it, SEO is not a new marketing strategy. Google’s now 20 years old after all.
That said, you could get lucky. We still stumble across niches that aren’t that competitive. If you’re in one of those, count your lucky stars because all the standard SEO stuff is going to work really well for you.
Most of us have to get a bit more creative in order to find guaranteed streams of traffic — that’s what the rest of the steps are for.
Even if there’s competition on our Dream Keywords, we still want to go after them. As we get wins elsewhere, our site will get stronger. As we get stronger, content targeted at our Dream Keywords will start to rank.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Right now, find the top 5 Dream Keywords in your category.
This is a bit of a judgement call, but here are some rules of thumb:
As an example, here are the top 5 Dream Keywords that we picked for Quick Sprout:
These don’t have to be perfect. Once you feel like they describe your category well, move on to the next step.
We could spend countless hours trying to brainstorm every keyword out there.
Or… we can get our competitors to give us all the answers.
This is how we find those guaranteed streams of traffic.
SEMrush has a nifty tool called the Keyword Gap Tool.
First, let’s identify all our competitors.
SEMrush happens to have a competitor report that tells us exactly who our biggest competitors are in search. In the sidebar, go to Organic Research and then Competitors. Plug in your domain at the top and you’ll get a report like this:
Very cool. In the case of Quick Sprout, the graphic shows us that neilpatel.com, wordstream.com, and moz.com are our main competitors. We also get a table of the competitors ranked:
The table includes dozens and hundreds of competitors, tons of other sites that you can exploit later. We’ll focus on the top 5 for now.
Now that we know who to focus on, it’s time to get them to do our work for us.
We’re going to go use a tool called the Keyword Gap Tool from SEMrush. It’s right in the sidebar under “Keyword Gap” if you have an account.
There’s a few things we have to configure in this report.
Once we’re done, SEMrush will tell us all the good keywords that competitors rank for and that we’re NOT ranking for yet. It’s a goldmine of traffic that we can go after.
There are a few steps to set up the report.
First, put in your competitor’s domain name into the search box at the top. This is critical. Don’t use your domain yet. You’ll get something like this:
We’ve gone ahead and entered our biggest competitor, neilpatel.com.
In the first “Enter Domain” box, enter in your domain now. Click the GO button.
At this point, the report shows us all the keywords across both domains.
This has a lot of noise though. We have keywords that we’re already winning plus a ton of junk keywords from our competitor. Too much noise to be useful.
Click on the little overlapping circles here:
Then select the “Unique to the first domain’s keywords” option. This will restrict your entire list to just the keywords your competitor ranks for that you don’t.
One more step.
To filter out the junk keywords, let’s add this filter to the report:
Set the filter to “include volume greater than 100.” This will restrict the keyword list to only keywords that get above 100 searches per month.
Here’s the final list that we get when looking at neilpatel.com:
GOLDMINE! So much traffic opportunity in this list. It’s full of topics that get consistent search volume and won’t be that competitive. Exactly what we need to grow our search traffic, guaranteed.
Here are a few gems that we could go after right away on Quick Sprout:
This report sets us up perfectly for the next step.
Dream Keywords are usually a stretch for all of us. They’re big volume keywords that also match to our business incredibly well. That means there’s volume and high quality traffic. But valuable traffic streams usually mean competition.
To get traffic growing right away, we’re also going to look for some “Gap Keywords.” They’re also known as long-tail keywords in the SEO community.
These are keywords with competition “gaps” that we can easily exploit. Yes, the volume will be lower; so is the competition. We can rank quickly and easily, then stack a bunch of these traffic flows on top of each other. It adds up fast.
Now that we have a nifty report in SEMrush that gives us tons of Gap Keywords, it’s time to build our Gap Keyword list.
Create a list of 20 Gap Keywords. A Gap Keyword should meet these criteria:
If you’re feeling super motivated and in the groove, feel free to build a Gap Keyword list of up to 100 keywords. That’ll give you a bank of keywords to refer to later.
Quick recap, you should have all of this by now:
Out of these, we’re now going to pick 10 keywords to focus on first.
As you narrow your list down to the 10 that you’ll start with, the most important thing to keep in mind is topic authority.
For both Dream Keywords and Gap Keywords, make sure they’re within the same topical areas in Google that you’re already ranking for. You’ll rank for those types of keywords with a lot less effort since Google already trusts you in that category. You can expand into new categories if you want to, but it will take more time.
Pick 3 Dream Keywords
Pick keywords that are an ideal fit for your business. Even if they’re pretty competitive, you’ll build these over time. The goal is to start seeding content into Google that will bring extremely valuable traffic to you.
Pick 7 Gap Keywords
For these keywords, you still want them to be a good fit for your business. But pay closer attention to competition here. If lots of strong domains with tons of authority are ranking for a keyword already, save that keyword for later. Focus your Gap Keywords on niche topics that aren’t competitive.
These Gap Keywords will get your traffic growing right away, giving you more time for your Dream Keywords to gain momentum.
If you’re not sure which keywords to pick and they all have similar search volume while also being close to the main topic authority of your site, pick the keywords that you’re most excited to write about. That’ll make the rest of this more fun.
Now you have 10 keywords to focus on, 7 of which will have a much easier time ranking.
Once we start shipping content, we want an easier way to be able to tell how well our site is doing.
The best way to do this is with a keyword report, we recommend the SEMrush Position Tracking tool.
Start by setting up a “Project” for your domain in SEMrush. You’ll be able to do this as soon as you log in. After that you’ll get to a dashboard that includes a button to set up your Position Tracking:
You’ll have to configure a few settings, most of them are standard stuff like your domain and location.
For the competitors, use the 5 competitors that you found earlier.
And for your keywords, use the 10 keywords that you just picked.
You’ll get a report that looks like this:
In a single glance, we can see instantly how we’re ranking for all our target keywords.
Remember that since we just picked a number of Gap Keywords that we don’t rank for yet, the table will have a bunch of blank data. After we publish new content and it begins to rank, we’ll see this table fill in.
Once you start publishing content, you’ll want to check this keyword report once a month to keep an eye on how you’re doing. It makes it really easy to track your progress.
Now that you have your 10 keywords, it’s time to write some content and publish it.
We recommend writing one piece of content for each of your 10 keywords.
Why 10 pieces of content?
Google can be a little finicky at times, nothing ranks with complete certainty. To compensate, we always ship content in batches. This guarantees that we’ll get some winners and increase our traffic, even if we have a few duds that Google refuses to rank for whatever reason. We need to play the odds a little bit.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to write all 10 pieces of content at once. Feel free to drip these out over time. A really good pace to set is 1 piece per week. That’s a very maintainable pace.
Of course, feel free to push harder if you have the time.
The point is to not stress about the results until you’ve gotten through all 10 pieces of content.
As you begin writing, here’s the on-page SEO tips that you’ll want to use:
With a batch of content like this, we like to see 50% of our content get on the first page of Google by day 90. That shows us that we’re on track and that our strategy is working.
As things begin to work, keep building more content around addition keywords, expanding topic by topic. You will build traffic, guaranteed.
Hands down, we recommend SEMrush.
It’s our favorite SEO tool.
As you’ve seen, it tells you who your major competitors are in search, makes researching search volume a breeze, gives you tons of Gap Keywords for guaranteed traffic, and tracks how you’re doing on all your target keywords.
We only scratched the surface too. SEMrush automates and simplifies every SEO task out there. You get everything that you need to grow your traffic. We consider it a “must-have” tool for growing Quick Sprout.
The post How to Increase SEO Traffic in 6 Simple Steps appeared first on .
Efficient data conversion is crucial for businesses seeking seamless integration, improved productivity, and enhanced decision-making. With the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, data conversion tools are experiencing a transformation that promises to revolutionize the way data is processed, extracted, and translated. In this blog, we'll explore how AI complements these tools and the significant impact it can have on businesses.
Data conversion tools are software solutions designed to convert data from one format to another, ensuring compatibility and seamless integration between systems. Because data conversion plays a crucial role in various larger projects, such as data migration and system integration, many data integration software vendors offer data conversion capabilities as part of their solutions.
Today people rarely question the connection: bigger models mean better models. Every new release of GPT by Open AI generates tremendous interest in traditional media and social media alike. However, do we need more powerful language models (foundational models) to help us with daily tasks?
For this article, I have talked to Ivan Smetannikov, Data Science Team Lead at Serokell, Ph.D. Computer Science, Associate Professor, and Senior Researcher at ITMO. He explains why ChatGPT might often be a massive waste of time and resources. And talks about alternative approaches to building NLP models that could bring the same results.
With the adoption of microservices, cloud, and Kubernetes, the CI/CD processes proved to be very useful in deploying features and changes into production faster. The new normal is the faster time to market with software delivery (or CI/CD) pipelines.
What sets a company apart is releasing better, high-quality features that provide excellent consumer expectations or experience. However, the fear of delivering the wrong software change to the production haunts DevOps and SREs teams. That’s why canary deployment is becoming famous among architects and the DevOps team.
In this blog post, you will learn how to build a Serverless speech-to-text conversion solution using Amazon Transcribe, AWS Lambda, and the Go programming language. Audio files uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) will trigger a Lambda function which will submit an asynchronous job to Amazon Transcribe (using the AWS Go SDK) which will, in turn, store the result in another S3 bucket.
You will be using the Go programming language for the business logic (thanks to the aws-lambda-go library) as well as the infrastructure component (Go bindings for AWS CDK) to deploy the solution.
Random numbers (whether true or pseudo) have broad applications for various purposes, including security, monetary transactions, Machine Learning, gaming, statistics, cryptography, simulation, literature, music, and art.
Various approaches and algorithms exist for generating non-colliding random numbers, including the popular Fischer/Knuth Yates algorithm. Besides the popular Fischer/Knuth Yates algorithm, in this article, I’ll show you how you can generate non-colliding pseudo-random numbers using a binary tree with PID (Process IDentifier) without any APIs.
The open-source GraphQL query language has a ton to offer enterprises seeking a more scalable, flexible, developer-friendly, and modernized approach to API-driven development. That said, because I’m a security professional, I tend to focus on the new opportunities GraphQL also gives attackers. It’s been increasingly tempting for enterprises to dive headlong into GraphQL without fully assessing and addressing its security and operational requirements. However, doing so places intense pressure on security architects, DevOps and DevSecOps teams, and even developers themselves.
I’ve recently taken a deep dive into Inigo, a GraphQL security and management toolset. Here I’ll share a how-to guide for teams ready to introduce more secure GraphQL implementations based on what I’ve learned.
Recently, mirror sites providing access to ChatGPT have started to appear. However, using them is unsafe because such sites can collect and analyze all your correspondence. Especially those sites that provide such access completely free of charge. There is a demand for such sites because some countries block access to ChatGPT, and OpenAI blocks access to some countries. And for some users, 20 dollars for a ChatGPT subscription is expensive.
So today, we will write our own chatbot based on ChatGPT in the Telegram messenger.