Mugo Web's blog

Want to pick up some pro strategies on how to make your website accessible to people with disabilities?

On Tuesday, July 11, our in-house accessibility expert will share his knowledge and technical tips on web accessibility.

We’ve been writing a lot about accessible websites lately because it’s a topic we’re passionate about at Mugo Web. We believe that whether or not web accessibility is governed by law in your region, making your site accessible to people with disabilities is good business practice. And there are literally millions of reasons to do so.

If you landed here because you’re researching a content management system, then you already know there are literally thousands to choose from. Some you’re probably familiar with, but most you likely haven’t heard of. Narrowing down a shortlist can be overwhelming.

But if content is key to your business, you’ll want to choose a system that makes dealing with lots of content -- and leveraging it throughout your site and across other channels -- easy and intuitive.

Working with CSS preprocessors like Sass or Less is much more fun than working with pure CSS. Here's a simple shell script to integrate Sass into your eZ Publish project.

It’s the darling of today’s marketing mix: the marketing automation solution. Its very name can bring marketers palpable relief: imagine automating one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of your job -- lead nurturing -- so that lead conversion starts happening with minimal intervention. It’s every marketer’s dream!

You want to be able to track visitor analytics for websites that spread across multiple subdomains and domains in the same Google Analytics property, tracking users across sites in unified sessions. Let's suppose you have a general-purpose publication with a travel section spread across multiple subdomains and domains, as well as across different paths. You can create a view in Google Analytics so that the team in charge of the travel section can focus on the data they're interested in, with statistics and reports for the travel pages only.

Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “flow” to refer to the positive feeling that results from being engaged in a focused task. It’s an apt description for the “workflow” experience we try to create for our publishing clients.

The reasons for bringing your website in line with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 are well documented. Whatever your rationale for embarking on this worthy task, you will need to assess your current online presence for compliance.

Auditing and developing accessible websites will require you to become familiar with what is referred to as a “screen reader”.

In eZ Publish 5.x and eZ Platform, we use Assetic to manage a website's JavaScript and CSS. By default, if you make a change to your JS or CSS files, the resulting file name ends up the same. This has some undesirable cache implications that vary depending on whether you're using a reverse proxy or CDN, how you've set up browser caching rules, and more. Here's a simple way to version the file names, while still being able to cache the files as much as possible.

As developers of websites where content is key, one of the questions we are frequently asked by our clients is "how do we ensure our content ranks well in search?" It's a common concern for digital content creators, whether they're launching a new site or refreshing an existing one.

If you're publishing content online, one of your key considerations should be search engine optimization. In other words, you need to do what you can to make sure that people can find your content when they Google it.

Making your website accessible to people with disabilities - whether you’re launching a brand new site, or remediating an existing one - may seem complex when you consider all the components that require attention (in-page navigation, links, colour contrast, forms, and alt tags, among other things). But the right CMS can make the job a lot easier.

For one of our high-traffic clients, we switched the Content Delivery Network (CDN) from Akamai to Amazon CloudFront. This blog post looks at why we decided to change the CDN and describes the switching process. Plus we share some useful tips about how to configure CloudFront.

A key component of an accessible website, accessible in-page navigation provides a way for website visitors to jump straight into the main content on your site and access different sections of the page quickly, without having to tab through every link to get there.

In our case study FindaTopDoc Prescribes eZ Publish for Healthy Content Management, we briefly covered our integration of PlagScan into the editorial approval workflow. When writing about medical topics, content -- especially medical term definitions -- can end up being duplicated on other sites, even if it was not purposely copied. Therefore, it is important for SEO reasons to ensure that all content on the FindaTopDoc site is as unique as possible. Here we'll take a closer look at how the plagiarism scanner integration works.

Ensuring your website is accessible to all members of your target audience can add unique requirements that demand novel solutions from your development team.

I recently had a lucky moment and was saved by a happy combination of things, including Assembla, eep, and a couple bits of dev-ops.

Links are the pathways that bind the web and give it structure. For people with web accessibility challenges, perceiving and understanding the links on your website is of utmost importance.

Before you embark on a project to make your website accessible to people with disabilities, it’s critical to understand what such a large and varied audience really looks like -- and what they need from your site.

Insufficient contrasting text elements on your website will limit your audience by preventing users who have difficulty distinguishing colours from comfortably consuming your content. 

Last year, I switched from developing on a dual-boot Windows and Linux machine to working on a Mac. During the transition, I felt my productivity slump: not only was I missing keyboard shortcuts that I had become very accustomed to (such as Alt+←, for instance), but some native MacOS behaviour drove me crazy (like ⌘+Tab cycling through applications rather than cycling through windows of all applications). I also found the Mac terminal to be lacking, missing important utilities, and running some outdated binaries. So, vowing to prove decisively the superiority of humans over machines, I decided to make my Mac Just Work* ™  _{* Like my PC used to.}

Not all of the burden of testing website code lies with automated tests, a QA team, or the end client. There is a lot you can do as a developer to test your own website code and make sure it is as good as possible before passing it over to someone else or an automated system. At Mugo, we've developed a simple and general checklist to follow, in order to make "self-testing" a key step in the QA workflow.

Using a calendar to track events dates back to ancient times, long before the advent of digital media. But five thousand years after stone tablet calendars were the hottest trend, hosting a web calendar is still a popular practice, and a valuable way to engage users and keep them coming back to your site.

When you work with us at Mugo, you benefit from our re-usable solutions to common content management problems. Many of the tools, extensions, and products we’ve built over the years have been the result of seeing the same issues and challenges come up time and time again, sometimes across seemingly dissimilar clients.