The Detroit Zoo has 125 acres of naturalistic habitats for more than 2,000 animals from anteaters to zebras and features award-winning attractions. At Real Big Marketing, we admire the stance taken by the Detroit Zoo; leading the way in wildlife conservation and animal welfare.
Problems to solve
The Zoo website was generally difficult to navigate and also lacked accessibility requirements for people with disabilities. It lacked structure and information, was built in Joomla, a system that was not working effectively for content generation, maintenance, or marketing.
With Detroit Zoo marketing team leadership and ideas already available we had the opportunity to provide quick impact. Instead of working through traditional brand and marketing strategy development, we approached this project with our more focused Enhance eXperience (EX) project management program and a full Accessibility Audit.
Our rigorous EX Audit quickly illustrates the gap between initial aspirations and what is actually required for an awesome user experience. The information included; competitive analysis, advantage analysis, information architecture research, workflow & wireframes, and styling adjustment requirements.
Accessibility Audits are also robust providing a full breakdown of UX, UI, and programmatic adjustments necessary to meet and exceed the needs of people with disabilities
Work Performed
Research from both projects resulted in modifications to site architecture, user experience (UX) streamlining, user interface (UI) styling adjustments, enhancements to the content creation process, and integration with third party platforms.
We launched the site in roughly three months meeting the clients brand expectations yet exceeding their architectural, UX, and UI requirements. Additionally, RBM meticulously implemented hundreds of accessibility requirements to ensure the website is easy to use for people with disabilities.
We successfully migrated all information from Joomla to WordPress, enhanced staff workflows for building content, and implemented several third-party systems to improve marketing and sales.
Since launch, our relationship has deepened. For 8 years RBM has provided reliable consistent support, updates, consulting, and programming. We work closely with the both the DZS marketing and IT departments to ensure all requests are met on-time and on-budget.
We’re looking for a full-time junior developer to join our team to create effective solutions for issues our customers face. We’ll build engaging websites, help our customers improve workflows, join their systems together, and apply your creative coding skills to build plugins that fulfill specific needs for e-commerce, learning, and project management. Your goal will be to provide customers with tools they love, support our community, and have an amazing work-life experience.
You will love this job if:
You are a developer that enjoys creating meaningful solutions
You enjoy working remotely, whether from home or your local hangout.
You have an inclusive outlook and value your peers
You value free time and freedom away from work for family, friends, and personal life.
You work well with others in collaborative environments.
You are self-driven, motivated, and love making life easier for people through your work
Job perks and benefits:
We promote personal and professional growth. We arecommittedto our team’s future, freedom, and time.
As a junior developer and an employee of Real Big Marketing, you will be guaranteed the following benefits:
Aminimumstarting salary of $43,000 USD plus all benefits below
401K with a 3% employer match
Access to learning material, includingbooksandeducation sitesfor professional improvement.
Free licensesto all of our products.
An equipment and technology allowance to ensure you have the tools you need to do well at your job.
A dedicated mentor and training to help you learn and grow at Real Big Marketing.
Unlimited and fully paidsickandbereavementleave.
Unplugged bonusof $250 for taking a week off of work and fully disconnecting.
Flexible vacation with fully paid and required time-off minimums.
Annual travel budget for conferences, co-working, and other work trips.
Our values and commitments
We are a small team and a 100% bootstrapped company that has grown carefully and gradually over the last ten years. We have done that by being committed to our values and our people.
We are committed to equal pay and we value transparency. We value the time of our people and we believe in setting realistic expectations. We know that familiesalwayscome first, and we prioritize diversity and inclusion.
What you will do:
You will work alongside our existing development, product, and support teams with a dedicated mentor. Your primary responsibility will be to coordinate support requests and to work as a member of our development team to build features and tackle bug reports for our products, including:
Work with clients to troubleshoot issues
Handle and resolve bug reports on GitHub
Develop features and enhancements for products
Create templates and themes and workflows
Test Pull Requests and Alpha/Beta versions of software via GitHub from team members and 3rd party developers
Work in PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and potentially other languages
Communicate with the team on challenges, bugs, and features to help fulfill customer expectations
A code portfolio. Link us to your GitHub account, upload a .zip, or both.
Proficiency with Git and GitHub.
Ability to set up a local environment for testing PHP code.
Excellent communication skills with written English.
Ability to work remotely with all the necessary tools (internet connection, etc).
An average day at Real Big Marketing:
It doesn’t have to be crazy at work. We strive to embrace a core ethos of calmness. To set the stage, here’s what an average day at Real Big Marketing can look like:
Start your workday at a consistent time.
Say hi to your colleagues in Slack when you start your workday.
Review tickets that may need your attention.
Share your playlist at The WaterCooler
Dive into your favorite IDE and a local instance of WordPress to make progress on some assigned GitHub issues.
Join a colleague or two online for a brainstorming or mentoring session.
Share your ideas on GitHub issue threads.
Share a picture of your pet in Slack whenever you feel like it.
Take breaks for meals, exercise, reading, etc.
If you would like to work at Real Big Marketing and wish to apply for this position, submit an application
HTML Header Tags , or heading tags, as their name suggests, differentiate the types of headings and subheadings in a blog post. Some people call them head tags or SEO header tags.
H1 through h6 tags designate a top down hierarchy of importance in html.
The h1 tag is the most important tag. Every page should have a single h1 tag reserved for the title of the article, page or product. H2 through h6 are then used for decreasingly significant titles. We do not break the chain or skip levels of the hierarchy as we write to maintain on-page SEO. For example, if your page title is an h1 tag and you immediately follow that with an h4 tag, the hierarchy is broken. It makes the heading structure harder for the search engine to crawl and categorize.
Advantages of Using Heading Tags
Structure your heading tags for search
Prepare and segregate content for end users
Improve site accessibility for people with disabilities
Header tags and SEO:
Search engines succeed when they provide more recent, relevant content than their competitors. To establish relevancy, they compare the words in the header tags with the content in respective sections. Google, Bing and other search engines use a program called a spider to crawl your posts, pages and products. It sends your content back for their servers and algorithms to measure the content. One of the most important measurements is keyword consistency.
The h1 is the most important tag and should never be skipped
The comparison starts with the H1 Tag. This tag provides a basic description which all successive content is compared. Search spiders pay special attention to the words used in the h1 tag. Because of this, it should contain a basic description of the page content, In WordPress, your page title is automatically made into your h1 tag.
Search engines don’t just measure everything against the h1 tag. H2 through h6 tags are measured as well. Each successive SEO header tag should be supported with a paragraph or more of relevant content. There is no magic number of words, use what is required to support your content.
The primary use of heading tags is for SEO, not to gain the larger, more prominent fonts. However, well thought out styling, applied via CSS enhances and standardizes the presentation of a web page. It provides a cleaner look.
Head Tags to Enhance UX:
Heading tags give the user a clear idea of what the page content is about. The human eye scans content easily with head tags in place. By reading the different heading tags, users can scan a page and read only the section they are interested in.
You’ll improve readability, time on site and click through rates by properly implementing head tags. As a side benefit, search engines give a great deal of importance to user-experience on a site, meaning the presence of heading tags becomes an important component of SEO.
Header Tags and Accessibility:
Poorly structured content makes it difficult for users of screen readers to navigate and harder to understand what they are being presented with. by taking the time to identify your titles when you write, you save end users with screen readers countless hours of frustration.
It’s each bloggers responsibility to properly structured headings on a page.
There are accessibility standards we should all strive to achieve. We begin to address many of these standards, such as providing navigable, readable, predictable & compatible content, through the proper use of heading tags. These tags enhance content readability and make your web pages appear and operate in predictable ways. Heading Tags also maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies. They provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are.
Things you should not be doing with heading tags
Do not stuff your heading tags with keywords – Use what’s necessary to provide a short, sensible description.
Do not use more than one h1 tag on a page – One h1 heading per page lets everyone know what one thing to expect in the content.
Do not use heading tags as hidden text – Hidden text has long been decried by search engines and users. It never helps and always causes penalties for your site ranking.
Do not repeat heading tags on different pages of your site. It’s confusing to search engines and users. Maintain unique heading tags sitewide.
Do not use identical content for both your page’s h1 tag and meta title tag – Differentiating the two enhances SEO and enhances usability.
Do not use heading tags for styling text – Use CSS to accomplish styling and use header tags to organize and structure content.
Thank you for requesting an analysis of www.michigantheatre.org. We appreciate many of the design and User Experience (UX) choices made to date. Placing the Upcoming Events in the home screen is a smart choice. Well done. But this evaluation goes beyond telling you that you did a good job and need to focus on SEO, or that your favicon is missing.
No, this information dives into some important usability opportunities and enhancement. Such as, where should a user go after seeing the events on the home page. We would like to share these problems, issues and opportunities with you.
Technical analysis was completed with several tools including those available through pingdom.com, yslow.org, builtwith.com and sucuri.net. Interpretation of that data along with a comparison of the current site design to commonly accepted best practices was completed by Steve Bennett, Kyle Maurer and Joel Worsham.
Site Performance
Speed
A fast loading site is extremely important. Site visitors and search engines expect sites to load quickly and to be able to navigate to subsequent pages without unnecessary wait times. It has been proven that visitors to sites will visit more pages, interact with more features and even purchase more products on faster sites. In addition, many search engines including Google tend to rank faster loading sites higher in their search results.
The michigantheatre.org website is not experiencing debilitating load time issues but there is significant room for improvement. After all, a site can’t possibly be too fast.
We tested the site for speed. Your website’s load time was between 4.23 seconds and its performance grade was 88/100. In English, these numbers tell us that your pages load slowly, sometimes very slow, even though your requests are low.
To facilitate better load times, we would recommend reviewing your choice in hosting provider, implementing multiple levels of caching, reducing the number of images and replacing them with sprites and css elements, using a content delivery network or CDN to transmit images, along with minifying and concatenating scripts and stylesheets to compress data transmission across the web.
We reviewed the site for security issues. There were no reports for malware or blacklisting. However there is an important security consideration.
WordPress out of date
The michigantheatre.org website is powered by WordPress but is currently two major releases behind the latest version of WordPress. Keeping the software that powers your website up to date is the number one way to keep your site secure. We recommend you update immediately all of your plugins, your theme and WordPress and also assign a reminder or a responsible person to periodically ensure that all such software is kept up to date.
Though the events are listed on the home screen, using the function, “Buy Tickets” leads the end user to the contact us page. This is unexpected behavior and could be remedied with either a built in ticket sales platform or connection to a third party application. Either of which is completely workable from the WordPress platform. Within the past 6 months, software has been developed which allows for scalable ticket sales, will call, and for end users to print their own tickets. Some theaters have seen ticket sales jump to 80% of total sales because customers could print their own tickets. This type of system can reduce Will Call to at or under 5 minutes.
We could also enhance the experience when dealing with events that do not require a ticket by simply removing the link.
Text embedded in images
Years ago we used tools like Photoshop to present artistically styled, aesthetically appealing text on web pages. It was standard practice to create and present images containing text on a site. Today, advancements in website creation tools and web browsers provide more effective options. Now text can be placed on web pages and then styled to present the same visual end product but without requiring the use of images.
Here are a few reasons why it is NEVER a good idea to embed text inside images:
Text inside images cannot be read by search engines and as a result, no SEO value is added to the page
Images slow down the loading of your site
People with disabilities using devices such as screen readers will not be able to read the text
Visitors on slow connections may be unable to load the images or may simply not see them due to their slower loading times
Text inside images cannot be translated for visitors wishing to view the page in another language
Text inside images cannot be scaled and re-sized appropriately based on a user’s screen size which means many visitors will struggle to read the text
Updating the text in images requires editing the original image file, uploading it to the site and replacing an existing one which is considerably more maintenance work than just changing the text on the page
Users who increase or decrease the zoom on their browser will see a reduction in quality and readability of the text inside images
Maintaining aesthetic continuity across the site is more difficult when using images where the colors and fonts cannot be easily modified or inherit the styling of the rest of the site
Users cannot select, copy and paste text that is embedded in images
On the michigantheatre.org site, text can be found embedded in several images under Get Involved. This is an important issue and should be corrected.
Your site does feature a responsive design. Good job! This means that the site adapts to the screen size it is being viewed on which is ideal and the standard best practice. However, simply making a site responsive is not enough. It is important to ensure that all visitors to your site are presented with content that is readable and usable, regardless of their screen size.
The michigantheater.org website does get a lot of factors right but there are still a number of usability issues present. Here are just a few worth noting:
As mentioned in above, text used inside of images is problematic. Visitors to this site on small screens will see all the images reduced greatly in size so that any text within them becomes very difficult to read. Were this text separated from an actual image, the size could be preserved and remain readable. This issue occurs in numerous places throughout the site, especially in the header and on the home page.
The home page includes great content but on small screens the phone number and directions are hidden down in the footer. The phone number is not actionable. In other words, nothign happens if you touch it on a touch screen. This results in users being unable to call or get directions from you site.
This is an opinion, but if we could review the analytics, we could see if it should be a fact, the Events Hotline should be listed before the office line because that’s the one that makes you money.
The Logo runs over the menu at certain widths and could use a css adjustment.
Because the Theatre is a public facing organization we thought you might be interested to know how your site works for people with disabilities. We ran the site with a screen reader active. The results were intriguing. The reader caught the name of the site and began to work through the header and main navigation, but stopped working effectively in the navigation items with sub pages. It also read incorrect information for title items. In the body copy area on the home page, it skipped the description of the theater and began describing empty image names.
Accessibility has become a hot button and one that deserves attention. We recommend working working with an accessibility consultant to update the site for users with disabilities. Doing so would improve usability for those with impairments. This would be a strong tactical move with strategic results. You would separate the Michigan Theater from it’s competitors including the Potter Center, the Jackson Symphony and the local movie theaters. A strong PR move which would speak volumes about your support of the community.
Here are some supporting articles for further thought:
Your website is rich in content, has a responsive layout, is built on WordPress and is relatively easy to navigate. However, there are numerous opportunities to improve and a few issues that should be addressed in the short term.
We’d love to discuss the way these changes could enhance ticket sales and other topics relating to your site in greater detail. If you would like to have a conversation with us to clarify what we’ve outlined above and elaborate further so that you can take action, please don’t hesitate to call or email us:
Thank you for requesting an analysis of www.thedomesticengineer.org We’ve completed our hands on, thorough review and here are all the problems, issues and opportunities that we found:
1. Performance issues
A fast loading site is extremely important these days. Site visitors and search engines expect sites to load quickly and to be able to navigate to subsequent pages without unnecessary wait times. It has been proven that visitors to sites will; visit more pages, interact with more features and even purchase more products on faster sites. In addition, many search engines, including Google, tend to rank faster loading sites higher in their search results.
The theexponent.com website is experiencing serious load time issues. Our tests showed that the website’s load time is 3.1 seconds and its Pingdom score is 71. These numbers indicate that your site is significantly slower than most other websites to the point where users are being negatively affected. Improving this metric will certainly increase user engagement and positively impact both conversion rates and search engine rankings.
To facilitate better load times, we would recommend; reviewing your choice for a hosting solution, implementing multiple levels of caching, reducing the number of images, utilizing a CDN and minifying, and concatenating scripts and stylesheets. If you have questions about any of these, please let us know.
Users with disabilities view websites differently by using devices such as screen readers. Unfortunately your site is poorly equipped to support such devices and as a result, visitors using several alternative viewing methods will be unable to access and engage with your content. We strongly recommend taking steps to address accessibility. Contact us if you would like to learn more about this.
3. Navigation confusion
Clear, consistent, intuitive navigation is critical for any website. Theexponent.com demonstrated a number of issues relating to navigation and general confusion about where to find relevant information. The screenshot below demonstrates a call to action that confused us and is certainly confusing other visitors. We would recommend an audit of your content and your site’s analytics which would generate a report on the content visitors are actively seeking on your site as well as the ways they are engaging with the content. This information would be used to determine the optimal navigational structure for improving end user experience.
4. Text embedded in images
Years ago we used tools like Photoshop to present artistically styled, aesthetically appealing text on web pages. It was standard practice to create and present images containing text on a site. Today, advancements in website creation tools and web browsers provide more effective options. Now text can be placed on web pages and then styled to present the same visual end product but without requiring the use of images.
Throughout the theexponent.com website, there are numerous instances where text is embedded within an image (for example, the main menu navigation links). Here are a few reasons why it is NEVER a good idea to embed text inside images:
Text inside images cannot be read by search engines and as a result, no SEO value is added to the page
Images slow down the loading of your site
People with disabilities using devices such as screen readers will not be able to read the text
Visitors on slow connections may be unable to load the images or may simply not see them due to their slower loading times
Text inside images cannot be auto-translated for visitors wishing to view the page in another language
Text inside images cannot be scaled and re-sized appropriately based on a user’s screen size which means many visitors will struggle to read the text
Updating the text in images requires editing the original image file, uploading it to the site and replacing an existing one which is considerably more maintenance work than just changing the text on the page
Users who increase or decrease the zoom on their browser will see a reduction in quality and readability of the text inside images
Maintaining aesthetic continuity across the site is more difficult when using images where the colors and fonts cannot be easily modified or inherit the styling of the rest of the site
Users cannot select, copy and paste text that is embedded in images
One area we found intriguing was a minimal effort exerted to make the site useful to End Users on handheld devices. It was intriguing because we see a trend indicating that over 50% of users are on hand held devices.
Making the theexponent.com domain adapt to different screen sizes is referred to as responsive design. Responsive design has become the standard for providing one website on multiple plaftorms or devices instead of using a separate mobile site. Making sizes and shapes adjust to fit a device is powerful, but it’s not enough to simply change the way things look. It’s also prudent to understand what choices, data, and/or information are made available to each type of device. Successfully pairing these two sets of changes will provide the End User with a more valuable interaction.
This is a critical change which should be addressed to improve satisfaction levels for both internal and external customers of the college.
We strongly recommend taking action as soon as possible in order to improve the experience for all visitors on non-desktop interfaces.
Conclusion
While your website does feature some useful and compelling content, there are numerous opportunities to improve and a few issues that should be addressed in the short term.
We’d love to discuss these and other topics relating to your site in greater detail with you. If you would like to have a conversation with us to clarify what we’ve outlined above and elaborate further so that you can take action, please don’t hesitate to call or email us:
The h1 tag is the most important tag. Every page should have a single h1 tag reserved for the title of the article, page or product. H2 through h6 are then used for decreasingly significant titles. We do not break the chain or skip levels of the hierarchy as we write to maintain on-page SEO. For example, if your page title is an h1 tag and you immediately follow that with an h4 tag, the hierarchy is broken. It makes the heading structure harder for the search engine to crawl and categorize.
Though the events are listed on the home screen, using the function, “Buy Tickets” leads the end user to the contact us page. This is unexpected behavior and could be remedied with either a built in ticket sales platform or connection to a third party application. Either of which is completely workable from the WordPress platform. Within the past 6 months, software has been developed which allows for scalable ticket sales, will call, and for end users to print their own tickets. Some theaters have seen ticket sales jump to 80% of total sales because customers could print their own tickets. This type of system can reduce Will Call to at or under 5 minutes.
