Captain Coder

Captain Coder is a team of powerhouse women, and our right-hand .johnson helps keep everything moving.

Kalyn thrives on schedules and LOVES a good spreadsheet; organization is her jam. (Thank goodness for us!) At Captain Coder, she helps to keep everything in place, ensuring we have the details we need to keep things moving smoothly, and helps to manage incoming client communications.

When she isn’t working, she enjoys reading psychological thrillers, watching Survivor with her husband Jeremy, or playing taxi for her 5 kids.

If you're one of our amazing clients, you speak to Kalyn on a regular basis. Drop a hello below!

Be honest with me: you love using Canva to create social media graphics.

Hey, I get it. Marketing teams have to move fast, and Canva has made that easier and easier over the years.

But those designs you’re rapidly creating could be excluding up to 27% of your potential audience.

Want to reach everyone? You have to follow some basic accessibility best practices every time you create a design in Canva.

Step 1: Test your colors. You need to aim for a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 with your font and background colors.

Step 2: Choose the right fonts and sizes. Your text should be at least 16px (larger honestly on social), and serif fonts tend to be more readable.

Step 3: Add ALT text. Yes, right in your Canva designs! This works for presentations, PDFs, HTML, and design share links now.

Step 4: Download your PDFs correctly. Make sure you don't check the flatten or compress PDF options.

Step 5: Select safe video templates. Avoid videos with more than 3 flashes in a single second or super-rapid transitions.

There's not a ton of point in creating beautiful assets that exclude your best customers. These basic accessibility steps ensure that all of your designs are usable by everyone.

Are you losing students to competitors because you’re ignoring this key thing? Read on to find out.

Higher education is in a state of flux (that’s putting it mildly). More and more colleges and universities are struggling for enrollment and funding. But if your website is not accessible to everyone, you are actively excluding potential students.

Why are you making the first things people interact with difficult for them to use? Your website is often where a student first gets a sense of whether they want to attend your school. Worse news for you, 63% of adult learners will leave a school website that isn’t user-friendly.

Web accessibility is not only an ethical and legal requirement, but also how you demonstrate your inclusive values to your students. If you have been waiting for Title II Part H to kick in, you are actively losing students to competitors.

Stop letting your marketing funnels leak great students. In this week’s blog, we look at how web accessibility is a competitive advantage in higher education.

Read it now at http://captcoder.com/web-accessibility-best-student-recruitment-strategy/

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak for NXTUS , teaching their attendees the website basics that lead to conversions and sales.

Not only did they get worksheets to fill out as I talked (which one attendee called her best hour spent ever at an event! 💅 ) but some brave business owners let us take a look at their websites to see quick things they could improve.

There are a million ways to build a website, and technology changes rapidly. What hasn't changed? Those core basics that help your website actually connect with your customer.

Excited to see the changes these amazing entrepreneurs implement!

📸 by the amazing Manny De Los Santos Photography

Is your higher ed website just not doing its job and connecting with students? You need to focus on web accessibility.

When we fix accessibility errors, we're actually improving a website overall. The standards we follow for web accessibility positively impact a site's overall performance, SEO, and user experience, too. These basic best practices just make your website better all around, not just for the 27% of potential students who have a disability.

Don't believe me? These are real statistics from a university's website overhaul. We custom-built an accessible website, from the ground up, and:

They went from an average of 75 accessibility errors per page to 0.

Got a 33% increase in overall speed and performance.

And saw a 76% increase in engagement.

Reaching students in a digital space is an incredibly tough competition. Why are you neglecting one of the most important aspects of improving your website?

If you're ready to get your website accessible, let's talk! Our team can run audits and accessibility remediation so you can see these kinds of numbers, too.

Schedule a call now at captcoder.com/start/

Are you actively excluding a community with a spending power of up to $13 trillion?

You might be if your website isn’t accessible to people with visual impairments.

I get it; you may not really understand what it’s like for someone who is blind, has low vision, or even color blindness to surf the internet. But let me tell you - with only 4% of websites accessible, it’s not a great experience.

Want to make your website part of that 4%? In this week’s article, you can learn exactly what you need to do to make your website accessible for the visually impaired and get an understanding of what it’s like to use assistive tools to view your website.

Read it now at https://captcoder.com/make-website-accessible-visually-impaired/

Feel like every article you write is just adding to the noise? That doesn’t have to be your life.

All of us in marketing know that writing blog posts and articles can be overwhelming. (Let’s be real: that’s one reason a lot of people are turning to AI….) But what’s worse than writing the blog? Writing one that you feel like will never be seen, even though that’s all we want.

How do we ensure our blogs are found by search engines and real people? We have to follow some basic steps. The good news is that these tweaks are simple!

In this week’s blog, I’m walking you through 7 essential things you need to do every time you publish to your website.

Read it now at https://captcoder.com/7-seo-steps-every-post/

Are you in and want to know why your website just isn't doing anything for your business?

This event is for you! Join and I as I talk about the basics you need on your website to grow your business.

I'm not lecturing either. We'll be doing some hands-on activies and some hot seats to get actionable advice you can take home and start right away.

Join us on May 14th. Register at https://go.captcoder.com/NXTUS