The website I chose to analyze is website for the company I work for called University Tees. We are a printing and design shop out of Cleveland, Ohio. University Tees has what they call “campus managers” on over 250 school campuses across the country and work with hundreds of Greek organizations on those campuses.
It is important that this website work correctly because hundreds of people visit it every single day in order to get ideas for new designs, place an order request, or receive product information. If this website weren’t working correctly, University Tees could potentially lose a lot of their customers to other companies.
When I ran it through WAVE reporter, I was initially scared because there were so many red flags that seemed to show up. Once I took a closer look at what these red flags were, it made me feel better about the website and how it works. There were red flags because there were “buttons” that did not lead to anywhere. For example, there is a button that looks like a bird (the University Tees logo), but the button doesn’t take you anywhere. This may be confusing for customers, but it does not make their experience on the site any worse.
The errors are something that IT could work on to improve the overall accessibility of the site, but they are nothing that would effect the customers or anything the customer would probably even notice.
“For example, there is a button that looks like a bird (the University Tees logo), but the button doesn’t take you anywhere. This may be confusing for customers, but it does not make their experience on the site any worse.” — I don’t know, I think it could potentially be very confusing. These small issues can add up over time. Some issues not as easy a fix as you might think, though. It would really take some digging into the code for a website to see if those empty buttons are really necessary to make the design work as intended.