Tim Ferris wrote something that stuck with me ever since I first read it.
The blog became the laboratory I’d always wanted, and I encourage you to join us there.
The 4-Hour Workweek
That’s what this blog is for me.
A laboratory experiment.
I first started blogging with WordPress around 2008.
Table of Contents
Adjusting the experiment
Fifteen years is a long time to be blogging.
However, it took a long time to feel comfortable with blogging.
All the noise filtering in from social networking about blogging burned me out. It was not until the stars aligned for me that I became interested in blogging again.
During this time of alignment, I became a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA).
A CPWA is a professional designation awarded by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).
A comparable analogy would be someone who is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). A CPA is a professional designation awarded by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).
Getting the certification refocused my thoughts on what Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker.
With great power comes great responsibility.
As a result, I had to figure out a way to share all this information without cluttering my pages.
Redefining the objectives
- Less tabbing
- More relevant links
Improve your user experience with less tabbing
The first rule of web accessibility is ensure all parts of the web page is accessible via the keyboard. One way to do this is to press the tab key over and over until you achieve your goal. Pressing the tab key allows you to navigate from one user interface (UI) element to the next.
An UI element might be a button or a link or a form field. An example of a tabbing experience would be tabbing from your browser’s address bar into the web page. Go ahead and refresh this page then press the tab key. The expected behavior is that you would be starting from the address bar.
If your experience does not match this behavior, let me know.
Identifying the first tabbing experience
My website which is built on the WordPress platform using the Genesis Framework. When you tab from the address bar into this web page, you should be landing on the first UI element which is a skip link. A skip link is an accessibility pattern that allows you to skip ahead to specific starting points such as the primary navigation menu or the main content area.
Tracking the tabbing count
The first law of success is tracking.
- 1st experiment – 7 tabs to get to the first blog post link
- 2nd experiment – 8 tabs to get to the first blog post link
- 3rd experiment – 9 tabs to get to the first blog post link plus 1 more to the “Continue reading” link.
What’s changing?
Post formats. While there’s a debate around whether WordPress should get rid of post formats, one thing is clear. Post formats is a way to keep posts simple.
Linking to recommendations
By doing three things, I can give you what you want quickly and easily.
There’s a way to change the post title as a link to external web pages.
For example, linking to a restaurant on Google Maps is a great way to share a recommendation that you can save to your own Google Maps. Doing so allows me to categorize all restaurant recommendations under the category, Places to eat.
Post titles versus meta information
The second experiment includes a post grid with the a link to the post category. Is it necessary? That’s a good question because there are other ways for search engine spiders to crawl categories without going through this particular meta on the archive pages.
Removing the link for each post categories would allow for an increase from three to six posts per archive page.