Creating a website that looks stunning, functions seamlessly, and aligns perfectly with your brand can feel overwhelming. However, by prioritizing up-front organization and cultivating effective communication, you can streamline the process and achieve a successful custom website design with ease and efficiency. In this blog post, we’ll explore key strategies to ensure your custom website design not only meets but exceeds your expectations. We’ll also touch on the importance of incorporating user experience design and responsive web design to enhance your online presence and drive long-term success through usability tests and user testing.

The Importance of Having a Vision

A clear vision is the cornerstone of a successful professional website design. Even if you don’t have a specific design in mind, it is crucial to have a set of goals for your site. Your vision should encompass your brand’s mission, objectives, and the message you want to convey to your audience. This helps the web designer understand your preferences and the overall feel you’re aiming for, ensuring the final product resonates with your target audience and meets your business objectives.

The Role of Content

Content plays a crucial role in the overall design of your website but is often overlooked in the initial concept phase. It is typically the most time-consuming aspect of any project and requires significant participation from the client. The sooner you begin organizing your web page content, the easier it is to bring your new website to life. Well-structured content not only enhances the user experience but also ensures your message is clear and compelling. For guidance on what content to include on your homepage, check out these resources:

• 12 Critical Elements Every Homepage Must Have
• Homepage Content Tips

Providing Visual Design References

To effectively communicate your vision, provide design references to your website design team. Visual design plays a crucial role in creating these references, as it encompasses the aesthetics and overall look-and-feel of the website. Scour other websites, noting what you like and dislike about competitor sites or any other sites that catch your eye. Gather these samples and share them with your designer. Create a vision board with preferred color combinations, imagery, and visual elements that feel complementary to your brand. This visual guide helps the designer tailor the custom website design to your taste while keeping it unique to your brand.

Incorporating Your Branding

Your website is an extension of your brand, so incorporating your branding elements is vital. Share your logo, brand colors, typography, and any other distinctive visual elements that represent your brand identity. Prioritize brand guidelines and share any brand requirements or limitations. A skilled UI designer can seamlessly integrate these elements to create a cohesive and recognizable online presence, reinforcing your brand identity and enhancing brand loyalty.

Emphasizing User Centered Design Principles

User experience design (UX design) is critical in creating a website that not only looks good but also functions smoothly. UX design focuses on the overall experience of users as they navigate through your site, and the UX design process includes intuitive navigation, fast loading times, and a clear, logical layout.

Before diving into the aesthetics, take time to define the purpose of your site by conducting user research. Are you aiming to drive sales, generate leads, or enhance brand recognition? Understanding your site’s goals will inform the UX design and ensure it aligns with your business objectives.

By prioritizing UX design, you ensure that your visitors have a positive experience, which can lead to higher engagement rates and conversions. A website that is easy to use and provides valuable information will keep visitors coming back. Additionally, conducting usability testing can help identify any issues and improve the overall user experience.

Responsive Web and UI Design

In today’s digital age, it’s essential for your website to be accessible on all devices. Responsive web design ensures that your website looks and functions well on desktops, tablets, smartphones, and mobile apps. Incorporating responsive design not only enhances user engagement but also contributes to SEO success.

A responsive web design not only improves the user experience but also boosts your site’s SEO rankings. Search engines like Google prioritize mobile-friendly websites, making responsiveness a key factor in your site’s visibility and success.

Custom Website Design

Investing in custom website design is one of the best decisions you can make for your business. A professional designer brings expertise, creativity, and technical skills to the table, ensuring your website is not only beautiful but also functional and effective.

A professional website design can set you apart from competitors, giving you a polished and credible online presence. It reflects the quality and professionalism of your brand, instilling trust and confidence in your audience.

Conclusion

Remember, your website is often the first impression potential customers have of your business. Make it count by ensuring it is well-designed, user-friendly, and has an intuitive user interface. By focusing on user experience design, responsive web design, and investing in professional website design, you can create a site that effectively represents your brand and meets your business goals.

Are you ready to embark on a journey to a website you’ll love? Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to revamp an existing site, Contact Capitol Tech Solutions today for a professional website design consultation that will bring your vision to life!

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If you’re sitting at your computer poring over article after article about digital transformation, digital transformation strategy, etc., trying to figure out if it’s for your organization but not entirely understanding what it entails, believe me, you’re not the only one.

While researching digital transformation, I had several head-scratching moments myself. There’s a lot of information about what digital transformation is and how you can implement digital transformation strategies into your business models.

With the help of the User Experience Team at Capitol Tech Solutions, we’ve pinned down how we help implement digital transformation initiatives that fit your business or organization.

We’ve also highlighted our picks for the Top 5 Benefits of Digital Transformation.

What Is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all business processes. It changes how you operate and deliver your customer experience.

It’s also an organizational culture change requiring leaders to continually rethink old operating models, experiment more, and develop the agility to respond to their customers quickly.

Enterprise-wide digital transformation will enhance your organization’s ability to improve customer relationships by embracing emerging technologies.

Our Top 5 Benefits Of Digital Transformation

1. Improved Efficiency

When you embrace digital technologies, your efforts will be rewarded with improved operational efficiency.

When you streamline processes and increase automation of menial tasks with digital technologies, your employees will be able to contribute to larger-scale projects. With data analytics and automated workflows, you’ll be able to track your customer’s lifecycle to ensure you’re meeting their needs at every stage.

2. Cost Savings

When you embrace digital transformation, you can reduce costs by retiring legacy systems and products and launching new technologies. You will see additional savings from the improved processes and problem-solving capabilities.

As mentioned above, when you automate information-intensive or menial processes, you free up your employees’ time. You’ll see a greater return on investment as your staff are able to accomplish high-level projects with the time saved by automation.

We’ve helped our clients automate lead generation to the point where sales teams are notified when a potential customer is the most receptive to becoming a customer, allowing them to close more deals and generate more revenue for their companies.

3. Data-Driven Decisions

You can better understand your customer and create a more customer-centric business strategy using data. By combining personal customer information (structured data) and website or social media engagement (unstructured data), you can make more informed business decisions.

Data visualizations can help you see key performance indicators in real-time, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of your digital transformation efforts and user experience strategy.

At Capitol Tech Solutions, we deploy PowerBI dashboards for our clients that allow stakeholders to see changes in project management as they happen. We’re able to pull data from various sources into one easy-to-view metric tracking dashboard.

4. A Better Customer Experience

A byproduct of digital transformation and the increased efficiency of your team is creating a more seamless and intuitive customer experience.

Digital technologies allow customers to get what they want precisely when they need it. By combining customer expectations with digital trends, business leaders can innovate new products and services.

Offering digital tools to your customers makes your business more attractive and keeps you relevant. Firms with a clunky, outdated user experience will have difficulty competing with those that stay up to date with technology in the digital age.

5. Encourages Innovation & Use of Technology To Problem Solve

Digital transformation helps business leaders solve business pain points while improving the customer experience.

When you deploy new technologies, your company will be able to identify and resolve internal and external issues before they become problems. This is partly due to the increased collaboration between different teams within your organization and your customer data.

Digital product managers can notice if a campaign or product is not engaging customers and adapt business operations as needed to meet customer demands.

As digital technology constantly evolves, so too must your digital strategy. A part of embracing digital transformation is being open to innovation. Informed by your data, your organization will be able to adapt to create new business models to meet your goals.

Capitol Tech Solutions Specializes In Digital Transformation Projects

Our team will help you deploy digitalization efforts that turn interactions, communications, business functions, and business models into an omnichannel for customer service.

We’re accredited experts in automation software solutions, like HubSpot, and we leverage our fluency in off-the-shelf and custom-built software services to enhance your digital transformation initiative.

Decrease your costs while increasing your revenue with automated ticketing systems, custom workflows for repetitive tasks, and a database of contacts and customers.

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User Experience Team Obtains HubSpot Certifications To Provide Top-Tier Service To Clients Seeking Certified HubSpot Partner

To become the leading HubSpot partner in Sacramento, Capitol Tech Solutions tasked its User Experience Team with becoming fluent in the customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

CTS staff possess five HubSpot Academy certifications, allowing our team to leverage that knowledge to create lead-generation funnels for clients like eFundraising Connections, a political and nonprofit credit card processing solution, and CREtelligent, a real estate technology company. 

“There are three main hubs that you work within HubSpot,” said Kevin Olson, the user experience specialist leading HubSpot initiatives for clients. “You have the service hub, the marketing hub, and the sales hub. At the center of it all is the CRM system. They all work collaboratively to really achieve an organization’s goals.”

Capitol Tech Solutions expanded its commitment to customer satisfaction when the digital transformation agency enrolled in the HubSpot Solutions Partner Program in May 2021. The program allows partners to differentiate themselves based on their expertise and credentials.

The User Experience Team’s HubSpot credentials include Solutions Partner, email marketing, social media marketing, Service Hub Software, and Marketing Software.

“Whether you’re new to user experience or have been doing it for a while, these courses will teach you something that you didn’t know before,” Olson said. “HubSpot does a great job at providing resources that you can utilize for future clients.”

How CTS Helps Clients Optimize Their HubSpot Accounts

HubSpot offers a full suite of software for marketing, sales, and customer relationship management, each supported with a “hub.” The three hubs Olson consults clients on how to operate and automate include:

• Marketing Hub
  • To attract and engage new customers by creating relevant personal marketing
• Sales Hub
  • Build efficient processes to engage prospects and turn them into customers
• Service Hub
  • To connect with customers, exceed their expectations, and ultimately have them become promoters of the organization

“These three hubs work together to achieve that common goal of turning a user from an anonymous person to eventually a promoter of your organization,” Olson said. “It works best when all the tools are being utilized. To have one hub going and not the others, it works, but it would be best to have all teams involved.”

The automation that HubSpot offers streamlines business processes, tracking everything from identifying a lead to when a company salesperson closes the deal. HubSpot houses it all, including email correspondence, documentation, and support ticket tracking.

The User Experience Team creates custom workflows within the CRM platform and trains organization leadership, marketing staff, and salespeople on how to use these workflows to be more efficient.

“Our job is to set up your hub or hubs, get them ready and running smoothly, and train your team in person, virtually, and with video tutorials to the point where you can manage your HubSpot account, and we’re there to support if needed,” Olson said.

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Where do you start when you’re looking to optimize your business’ workflows and processes? You want to generate more leads, but the old-fashioned way bogs you down to just a few wins.

As the leading HubSpot Solutions Partners in the Sacramento area, we might be a bit biased in saying that the customer relationship management experience offered by HubSpot is your best option.

Several HubSpot Academy-certified staff at Capitol Tech Solutions can vouch for the HubSpot CRM. We’ve highlighted our favorite features that we’ve seen significantly help clients and that clients love.

What is HubSpot, Again?

First, a bit of background – HubSpot offers a full suite of software, called hubs, including the marketing hub, sales hub, and service hub. At the center of these three hubs is the CRM.

According to data collected by HubSpot, businesses average three service providers, which adds unnecessary complexity. With a CRM system, a HubSpot partner or service provider, like CTS, can help your marketing and sales teams focus on customers with a single suite of specialized apps at their disposal.

Our Top Five HubSpot Features

1. Lead Generation Optimization

The HubSpot platform can identify your Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads to build your database of contacts and customers with the HubSpot CRM.

You can identify leads and categorize them based on their level of interaction with your ads campaign, website forms, and web content so you can concentrate on the most valuable leads.

HubSpot marketing automation scores potential leads based on their interaction with your site’s content. For instance, if a potential customer watches a product overview video, the system adds 7 points to their engagement value.

Once a user interacts enough with your website, email marketing campaigns, or social media posts to become Marketing Qualified Lead, the system automatically moves that potential customer to the Sales Hub for your sales teams to evaluate, make contact, and close the deal.

It’s a data-backed way of connecting with your consumers and then selling them your solution to their needs.

2. Automated Ads & Ad Tracking

With HubSpot, you can create segmented audiences and personalized ads through features like ads optimization events, campaign management, and lookalike audiences.

HubSpot smart marketing and analytics then provides deeper insights into the ad campaigns that increase conversion.

You simply toggle on the auto ad tracking, allowing HubSpot to attribute contacts to specific tracking parameters added to the end of your ad URLs. After you link your Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, or LinkedIn Ads accounts, HubSpot will track ads that are currently active or pending review.

HubSpot allows you to see which ad campaigns work and how well they turn prospects into customers. You can use the data housed within the CRM to build custom lists to target visitors at different stages.

As HubSpot puts it: “Better targeting means more relevant content, more helpful customer experiences, and better return on ad spend.”

3. Email Marketing Automation & Analytics

Using contact insights stored in HubSpot generates more of your emails opened and links clicked because they’re unique to each subscriber.

Our HubSpot email experts can create custom email campaigns based on subscribers’ lifecycle stage, list membership, and any information in your contact records to populate the most relevant content for each audience.

HubSpot offers a user-friendly email feature that allows you to drag and drop designs, CTAs, images, and links into ready-to-use templates to create personalized individual emails or mass newsletters to your audience quickly and efficiently.

Combine the ease of design with smart rules and personalization tokens, and HubSpot will adjust your email marketing campaign to the email recipient based on data stored in the CRM — from the subject line to the content of the email and its CTAs.

After your emails are sent, HubSpot provides you with reports and dashboards to track your audience’s engagement with your emails, allowing you to understand which topics are of most interest to your potential customers and the times and days that get the most successful engagement.

4. Social Media Integration & Management

HubSpot integrates with a range of social media platforms, which will allow you to connect your multiple accounts and simply draft, schedule, publish, and track post engagement with one tool. Like email, you also have insight into the best times to schedule posts.

The platform empowers you to create keyword monitoring streams so your team can review key interactions, going so far as to automatically send your sales team an email alert when a prospective client mentions a specific keyword.

Social interactions in HubSpot are linked to the people in your database to provide you with a greater context when determining a Marketing Qualified Lead from a Sales Qualified Lead. You’re able to associate your social media posts with various marketing campaigns for you to measure the entirety of your marketing efforts and which facet of your inbound marketing is generating the most revenue.

As is the theme of HubSpot, you’re also able to compare the performance of a campaign against your different social platforms and publishing time, allowing you to see the visits, leads, and customers your social media marketing is bringing to your business.

5. Automated Workflows

Our top four choices all branch from this primary function, which showcases how versatile and time-saving HubSpot automated workflows can be.

Our experts can help you create workflows to automate your marketing, sales, and service processes based on your parameters to improve your teams’ efficiency. We can create workflows for quotes, ticketing, conversation, and custom object at more advanced levels, such as professional and enterprise.

HubSpot allows users to build both internal and external workflows, with an external example being tailored content for readers based on “if/then” branches. Depending on the content that the user engages with, they can be given specific content that provides them with more information about what service of yours interests them.

Once a lead nurturing funnel is created from triggers, conditions, and actions, HubSpot can reel in customers to your sales team.

Additionally, HubSpot’s workflows integrate with multiple business apps, allowing you and your team to work as efficiently and productively as possible.

CTS: Leading HubSpot Partners In Sacramento

You don’t have to search the HubSpot Partner Directory of HubSpot Agency Partners to find marketing services in Sacramento.

Capitol Tech Solutions is a digital transformation firm that offers content marketing, marketing strategies, web design, and more. We’ve been a part of the partner program for nearly a year, so we have experience growing businesses with the HubSpot CRM platform.

It’s time you moved to one platform that will bolster your sales and marketing teams by choosing the right agency to help you convert leads and pin down potential clients with a customized strategy. Don’t settle for other user experience agencies.

We do more than just set up your HubSpot account. Our team of experts is here for continued maintenance and training. We offer training to help your sales teams identify and evaluate leads generated by your custom parameters while maintaining and optimizing your current HubSpot workflows and improving processes.

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The Sacramento-based digital transformation firm added six awards to its award-winning track record in Q4

Independent organizations recognizing digital excellence honored Capitol Tech Solutions in 2021- 2022 for the digital transformation firm’s work in government web design, nonprofit web design, and social media videography.

Capitol Tech Solutions (CTS) received a Best of Industry MobileWebAward, two gold MarCom Awards, a silver Davey Award, a silver w3 Award, and a Viddy Awards honorable mention in the company’s final business quarter.

MobileWebAwards

Founded by the Web Marketing Association in 1997, the MobileWebAwards is a standards-defining competition that sets industry benchmarks for the best mobile websites based on seven criteria:

• Creativity
• Impact
• Design
• Content
• Interactivity
• Ease of Use
• Use of the medium

“The goal of the MobileWebAwards is to provide a forum to recognize the people and organizations responsible for developing some of the most effective websites on the Internet today,” the Web Marketing Association website states.

Judges for the Web Marketing Association deemed CTS’s redesign of the California Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission as the Best Government Mobile Website, a Best of Industry MobileWebAward.

MarCom Awards

MarCom Awards recognize outstanding achievement by creative professionals involved in the concept, direction, design, and production of marketing and communication materials and programs.

According to the organization’s website, judges evaluated more than 6,000 entries from around the world with winners selected from over 300 categories in print, web, video, and strategic communications.

The before and after difference and final version of the California Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission website won CTS two gold MarCom Awards in the Digital Media Website categories of redesign and government.

The MarCom Awards are sponsored and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals, a 25-year-old international organization with several thousand creative professionals.

Davey Awards

The Davey Awards is an international award focused on honoring outstanding creative work from the best small businesses worldwide.

The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA) oversees and judges the Davey Awards. Entries are judged on their merits based on a standard of excellence determined by the AIVA, considering the category entered to determine gold and silver winners. Gold winners receive a score of 90 or above, and silver winners receive a score between 79 and 89.

Capitol Tech Solutions received the silver award in the general self-promotion category for sites designed to promote a business.

w3 Awards

The w3 Awards celebrate digital excellence and honor outstanding websites, marketing, video, mobile sites and apps, social and podcasts created by interactive agencies, designers, and creators worldwide. The awards are also sanctioned and judged by the AIVA.

CTS’ work on the nonprofit Sweet Dreams Foundation website garnered the firm the silver award in the nonprofit category for the Best Use of Video Or Motion Graphics.

Viddy Awards

Founded as the Videographer Awards in Dallas, Texas, in 1995, the awards adapted to better reflect video’s constantly changing technology, platforms, and uses, becoming the Viddy Awards today.

The Viddy Awards are administered and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals.

CTS received an honorable mention in the 2021 Viddy Awards for its Social Media Videos submission.

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We’ve narrowed it down to a top-five list of website accessibility standards that are commonly missing on even the most ADA-compliant websites.

We based our list on ADA audits conducted by Capitol Tech Solutions and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that publishes webpage guidelines so the internet can better serve people with disabilities.

A recap on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines & ADA Compliance

Federal and California state law requires government websites to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA, but the U.S. Department of Justice gives business websites a bit more leeway. Most private-sector webpages use WCAG 2.0 AA for ADA compliance.

In a separate blog, we explain WCAG best practices and the success criteria of WCAG 2.1.

Ensuring your business website meets these web accessibility standards will allow users with disabilities to have equal access online while using assistive technology. And having an accessible website will save you from a costly lawsuit.

Remember, businesses fall under Title III of the ADA, guaranteeing places of public accommodation provide equitable services.

We break down the importance of website accessibility and the potential legal repercussions you could face here.

Our Top Five ADA Website Compliance Mistakes

1. Missing or poor alternative text on images

A common feature on webpages is an accompanying picture, just like on this blog post. Assistive technology cannot yet scan and describe images to users, so web developers (like those here at CTS) add alternative descriptions, also known as alt text.

When writing alt text, you have to keep in mind the context and character count. The optimal character count to ensure screen readers correctly relay an alt text should be fewer than 125 characters. Basically, as long as the previous sentence, which came in at 118 characters.

The context you fit into the restrictive character count is the most crucial aspect of this digital accessibility rule. To write a successful and inclusive alt text, you should:

• Be specific in your description. Start with the subject or setting.
• Add context based on the topic of the webpage. This blog is about ADA compliance, and our alt text reflects that.
• Don’t start a description with “picture of” or anything similar. Assistive technologies will be able to determine a picture based on the website’s HTML coding.

2. Insufficient Color Contrast

WCAG 2.0 Level AA requires a contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for standard text and 3 to 1 for large text (14 point font, bold or larger).

You might be wondering what precisely a contrast ratio is. Well, when used for ADA compliance, it means the brightness of a completely white image is 4.5 times brighter than a completely black image (or three times brighter for large, bold text).

Text included in your logo is one of the few exceptions to this rule.

3. Keyboard Access

A quick way to check if your website’s architecture supports keyboard-only use is to tap the tab key while on your website. If the content is surrounded by a visible outline, like the blue box on our website, then you’ve passed. The visual indication informs users of their location on the page.

Often, website creators disable the default indicator for design esthetics. You should avoid doing this or rectify this soon after discovery. Keyboard focus should be visible and follow a logical order through the webpage to comply with ADA standards.

4. Meaningful Link Text

Descriptive and meaningful links help users choose which links they want to follow easily. Pages with links should provide enough detail that allows for a cursory understanding of what content to expect while they search your site.

You can design ambiguous links like “Click here” or “Read more” to include a summary of the pages they lead to.

Also, speech recognition users can click links with a voice command like “click” followed by the link text. So, it’s helpful to keep link text short and easy to say.

5. Landmark Roles

But for users with disabilities, who primarily use keyboards, screen readers, and other assistive technologies, developers need to use landmarks representing a block of content.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) allow rich, interactive user interfaces to be more accessible.

There are eight of these roles, each representing a block of content commonly on webpages. To use them, add a relevant role attribute to an appropriate container within your HTML. Then, users with assistive technologies can quickly jump to that section of the page.

The eight ARIA landmark roles are:

• role=”banner”
• role=”navigation” (such as a menu)
• role=”main” (the main content of the page)
• role=”complementary” (such as a sidebar)
• role=”contentinfo” (meta data about the page like a copyright statement)
• role=”search”
• role=”form”
• role=”application” (a web application with its own keyboard interface)

CTS Celebrates 31st Anniversary of Americans with Disabilities Act

Leading up to the July 26 anniversary date, we published comprehensive reports on the importance of equitable web browsing for the business and government communities.

“Digital accessibility has become increasingly important as technology continues to advance,” said Capitol Tech Solutions’ CEO Bobby Reed. “I’m proud of the work we’ve done to make the websites of our government and business clients more inclusive for everyone.”

Signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination based on disabilities and guarantees equitable treatment in public accommodation, employment, transportation, and community living.

The U.S. Department of Justice, federal and state court cases have expanded the meaning of public accommodation to include government and business websites.

People with disabilities interact with websites through assistive technologies, such as screen readers, alternative keyboards or switches, braille and refreshable braille, screen magnifiers, sound notification, scanning software, voice recognition, and more.

The User Experience Team at Capitol Tech Solutions ensures the company’s web clients meet ADA website compliance standards.

Through the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the federal government requires all national electronic information to be accessible to people with disabilities. This mandate extends to existing or new government websites and uses WCAG as the standard.

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In broad terms, WCAG is the standard published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of the group’s Web Accessibility Initiative, more on that in a moment.

There are different versions of WCAG, each with varying levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. To make your website digitally accessible, developers (like ours here at Capitol Tech Solutions) will help you comply with WCAG 2.0 AA and WCAG 2.1 AA. Worldwide, WCAG 2.0 AA is the most-used standard.

What’s the difference between version 2.0 and version 2.1? WCAG 2.0 AA has 38 success criteria, and WCAG 2.1 AA has 50 success criteria. The requirements are essentially to-do lists that will make your website easier to use for people with disabilities and save you from a compliance lawsuit.

In another blog post, we explain why your business website should be ADA compliant.

What About Overlay Widgets? Will that solve my ADA Compliance Issue?

Whether you’re getting started with a new business website or you’ve received a letter threatening an ADA compliance lawsuit, an ad promising an overlay widget that will solve your problem sounds like a godsend, but it’s merely snake oil.

These widgets don’t change your website’s code or content to be accessible and conform to WCAG. Instead, you’ll get a JavaScript menu that lays over your website when it’s activated.

When a person with a disability activates the overlay widget, it forces them to have a different experience than normal users would.

And a separate and unequal experience is an explicit violation of the ADA.

ADA Maintenance of Your Business Website

It’s a good idea to schedule periodic accessibility checks to ensure your content stays digitally accessible, either through automated or manual testing. As developers deploy updates to browsers, devices, and assistive technologies, it will change how users interact with your website.

Launching new webpages and products, or updating site navigation or functionality, is also an optimal time to test for website accessibility and ADA compliance.

The Full Breakdown of WCAG 2.0 & WCAG 2.1

W3C initially released WCAG 2.0 in 2008, with the WCAG 2.1 update arriving in 2018. The W3C is in the final stages of publishing WCAG 2.2 this year. The group continually refines its guidelines and success criteria to ensure websites are more inclusive for users with disabilities.

WCAG Website Compliance Standards

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust

Under these four principles are a group of guidelines, which directly inform WCAG success criteria.

• Perceivable
  • Provide text alternatives for non-text content
  • Provide captions and other alternatives for multimedia
  • Create content that can be presented in different ways, including assistive technologies, without losing meaning
  • Make it easier for users to see and hear content
• Operable
  • Make all functionality available from a keyboard
  • Give users enough time to read and use content
  • Do not use content that causes seizures or physical reactions
  • Help users navigate and find content
  • Make it easier to use inputs other than a keyboard
• Understandable
  • Make text readable and understandable
  • Make content appear and operate in predictable ways
  • Help users avoid and correct mistakes
• Robust
  • Maximize compatibility with current and future user tools

Think of the guidelines as goals. The WCAG success criteria are the tools to meet these goals.

What Are WCAG Success Criteria? How Do I Meet These Standards?

As mentioned earlier, there are three degrees of WCAG compliance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Each is progressively harder than the last. This blog post will highlight WCAG 2.1 AA, as its the standard required under federal and California state law for government websites.

Requirements to meet WCAG are very technical, even when your User Experience team specializes in bringing clients into compliance with the ADA.

If the summary of principles and guidelines didn’t answer your questions, our comprehensive, expandable list below provides a more thorough explanation based on W3C published reports outlining all 50 WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria.

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A quick history lesson first: the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination based on disabilities. It imposes accessibility standards on places of public accommodation, which websites fall under, to guarantee equal access for people with disabilities.

If you manage a federal or state agency website, your website must be ADA compliant. But it’s a slightly different story for business websites.

Not all business websites fall under ADA guidelines mandating accessibility. However, it’s still the best practice to have an ADA-compliant website. Ensuring your website and web content are digitally accessible will save you the headache of receiving an ADA Website Compliance demand letter or lawsuit.

What websites are mandated to be ADA compliant?

• An inn, hotel, motel, or other places of lodging.
• A restaurant, bar, or other establishment serving food or drink.
• A motion picture house, theater, concert hall, stadium, or other places of exhibition entertainment.
• An auditorium, convention center, lecture hall, or other places of public gathering.
• A bakery, grocery store, clothing store, hardware store, shopping center, or other sales or rental establishment.
• A laundromat, dry-cleaner, bank, barbershop, beauty shop, travel service, shoe repair service, funeral parlor, gas station, office of an accountant or lawyer, pharmacy, insurance office, professional office of a healthcare provider, hospital, or other service establishments.
• A terminal, depot, or other station used for specified public transportation.
• A museum, library, gallery, or other places of public display or collection.
• A park, zoo, amusement park, or other places of recreation.
• A nurse, elementary, secondary, undergraduate, or postgraduate private school, or other educational places.
• A daycare center, senior citizen center, homeless shelter, food bank, adoption agency, or other social service center establishment.
• A gymnasium, health spa, bowling alley, golf course, or other places of exercise or recreation.

However, as your goal is to avoid a long, drawn-out, and technical legal battle, it’s best to make your website accessible from the very beginning.

The more commercial your website is, the more likely you are to be sued.

The exact phrasing used in Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act states: “the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of any place of public accommodation.”

Why focus on website accessibility?

Attorneys representing plaintiffs seeking equal web accessibility may target your website because it’s simply on the web. These law firms specifically seek a business page that does not conform to the ADA standards known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 or 2.1 Level AA success criteria.

Common tactics used by law firms:

• Pick a consumer-facing industry
• Pull a list of all the companies within that industry
• Run a web crawler on the homepage of each company
• Send out a form demand letter with a summary of the web crawler findings
• File a batch of lawsuits

Legal precedents used by plaintiffs:

• The ADA is a liability law, meaning there is no room for excuses/defenses for violations.
• The Unruh Civil Rights Act, a California law similar to the ADA, is often cited in attorney demand letters as it offers more damages to plaintiffs.
• Legal groups use the Fair Housing Act and other anti-discrimination laws to sue website owners and target specific industries.
• Employing fewer than 15 people does not exempt you from ADA compliance as a place of public accommodation.

How does the Department of Justice define accessibility?

The law does not mandate WCAG compliance for business websites (although California AB 434 requires all state departments to provide equal access). WCAG is a list of guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) under their Web Accessibility Initiative.

The W3C publishes best practices to make the internet more uniform and run better, including the standardization of accessibility.

There are two versions of WCAG: WCAG 2.0 AA and WCAG 2.1 AA. The difference comes down to the number of success criteria, amounting to 38 for the former and 50 for the latter.

In another blog, we explain in-depth what the digital accessibility requirements entail.

How Do People with Disabilities Use a Website?

People with disabilities use assistive technologies to browse the internet, which pages should be coded to interact with seamlessly.

Some assistive technologies rely on the output of graphical desktop browsers, text browsers, voice browsers, multimedia players, and plug-ins to relay a website’s information to users.

A well-known assistive technology is screen reader software, which interprets what is displayed on screen to a speech synthesizer.

Other assistive technology includes:

• Alternative keyboards or switches
• Braille & Refreshable Braille
• Screen magnifiers
• Sound notification
• Scanning software
• Voice recognition

CTS Web Developers Pursue Certification in Section 508

If you choose to partner with CTS, Che will use industry-leading techniques from his Section 508 accessibility courses to bring your website into compliance, either in the private or public sectors.

Section 508 is the federal law requiring government agencies to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities.

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By leveraging an all-in-one CRM ecosystem, CTS furthers its commitment to user experience and customer satisfaction.

Capitol Tech Solutions expanded its commitment to customer satisfaction when the web design, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and digital transformation firm enrolled in the HubSpot Solutions Partner Program.

HubSpot, a leading growth platform, specializes in customer relationship management (CRM) software. The Solutions Partner Program offers a one-stop-shop with its CRM application system, which will directly benefit Capitol Tech Solutions’ customers and help them grow.

“Capitol Tech Solutions is dedicated to helping our clients succeed in a digital world. We provide innovative and cutting-edge solutions to our clients,” said Capitol Tech Solutions’ CEO Bobby Reed. “Becoming a HubSpot Solutions Partner broadens our knowledge and provides another tool to deliver success for our customers.”

What is a Solutions Partner?

A Solutions Partner is a subscriber of the Hubspot CRM ecosystem, which includes marketing, sales, web design, CRM implementation services, and more.

The program allows partners to differentiate themselves based on their expertise and credentials. Potential customers can search the HubSpot Solutions Directory based on credentials, ensuring they find the right match for their specific needs.

The Solutions Partner Program is designed for customer-centric businesses and organizations that want to “learn, grow their business, and use the best technology,” according to HubSpot’s website.

Current Capitol Tech Solutions’ customers will enjoy the added knowledge base HubSpot provides company-wide, and clients will be able to take advantage of a wider array of user experience tools, Reed said.

What exactly does HubSpot do?

HubSpot is a CRM platform, which is a technology for managing the entirety of a business’ relationships and interactions with customers and potential clients. The company’s message is that people and businesses do not want to be badgered into choosing a solution, they want to be helped.

According to data collected by HubSpot, businesses average three service providers, which adds unnecessary complexity, its website states. With a CRM system, a Solutions Partner can focus on their customers with a single suite of specialized apps at their disposal.

How does this enhance Capitol Tech Solutions’ products and services?

Capitol Tech Solutions will immediately deploy the HubSpot Solutions Partner Program across its software development, web development, user experience, and data science teams.

Reed said the partnership furthers the goal of Capitol Tech Solutions in meeting and exceeding customer needs in both the public and private sectors.

“What we want to reflect in our content is our expertise, our attention to detail, and our process,” Reed said. “Our attention to meeting the customers’ request and what the customer is looking for. We succeed when the customer succeeds.”

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SEOblog has once again awarded Capitol Tech Solutions with a prestigious SEOblog Agency Award. These awards are bestowed annually to recognize some of the best SEO agencies in California. This is the second time that Capitol Tech Solutions user experience team has been recognized for their SEO expertise by SEOblog.

“This award is another sign that our user experience and SEO team continues to deliver amazing and quantifiable results for our clients,” said Capitol Tech Solutions CEO Bobby Reed. “Our team of SEO experts have strived to stay ahead of industry search trends that allow us to implement effective and innovative SEO strategies for our clients.”

CTS Continues SEO Success

The user experience team at Capitol Tech Solutions pride themselves on continually working to improve their SEO expertise and knowledge, learning to implement successful new strategies that really help their clients’ businesses succeed online.

SEOblog was launched in 2013 and has long been a destination spot for anyone wanting to learn more about the ever-changing world of search engine optimization. SEOblog quickly established itself as a go-to platform for SEO resources, tools and content. They annually recognize digital agencies like Capitol Tech Solutions with their SEO awards.

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