I’ve had the decorators in: new look to website plus accessibility improvements

Regular visitors to this blog — which is probably just me — might notice that things have changed a little bit. I’ve taken some time over the last week to update the look and feel of my site.

Outwardly, it’s not a very bold change. This website still consists of three pages, with the blog page as the main page that includes summaries of each post. I’ve ditched the ‘Read More’ links as each blog post title is also a link.

The most obvious visual change is that I have refreshed the look of the site and doubled down on red as an accent colour.

However, there are many more changes that have happened _behind_ the scenes, including many accessibility improvements.

Squarespace upgrade

The main reason I made any changes to the site is that this website has been running on Squarespace v7.0 for many years. The latest version of Squarespace is v7.1; while this might not sound very different, it’s quite a fundamental change.

Upgrading to 7.1 is a non-reversible action and after I made the change, it immediately changed how my site looked (for the worse). Squarespace 7.1 just does a lot of things differently and some of the things you could do in 7.0 just don’t exist any more.

I have spent many hours just making very small refinements to get the site broadly looking like it used to. Although this was a bit of a time sink, it made sense given that the charity site I manage (careif.org) and the site I built for my artist friend (meganyelets.com) are both running Squarespace, so it makes sense for all of these sites to be running on the same version.

Accessibility updates

One of the things I really wanted to do with this refresh is improve the accessibility of this site. This follows a lot of work I’ve been doing in my main job to help improve the accessibility of the RCPsych website.

This means that this website now includes:

• Improvements to hover states: you’ll see a yellow background when hovering over a link, the link text will darken and the underline will thicken.

• Improvements to focus states: keyboard users can tab through elements and see a black box border on links.

• Use of ‘active’ state: clicking on a link slightly darkens the yellow background colour to reinforce that a link has been clicked.

• Making use of visited link status: if you click on a link, then your browser will remember this and change the link colour to grey. This is not so much of an accessibility improvement, but could potentially help people with memory problems, providing a clearer indication of what they have previously clicked on.

Incidentally, removing all of the ‘Read More’ links on my blog landing page is another accessibility improvement. Link text should be unique on a page, as someone using a screen-reading device would otherwise struggle to distinguish between different link destinations if they all say the same thing.

These are the sorts of improvements that can take a bit of time to implement, but it’s a one-off investment that provides lasting benefits. You will never know which users of your website have disability requirements, so making it as accessible as possible removes barriers that prevent some users from benefiting from content.

Rekindling the joy of building a website

Art by Megan Yelets

Last Thursday I was waiting to see my 8-year old’s school play and was chatting to a parent friend who was standing in the line next to us.

She is a great artist who is currently showing her work at an exhibition in London, but she revealed that she didn’t have a website or own her own .com domain.

A couple of hours after the play ended I bought her domain name for her. I also offered - if she wanted - to build her a website for free.

I have quite a bit of experience using Squarespace to build websites (including this site) and I felt like this might be the sort of thing where a built-in template would probably meet most of her requirements without much need for tweaking.

We met the next day to discuss what options were available and less than a week later her website — meganyelets.com — is now live (built to her specifications)!

Building a site for an artist

This is a very different type of project compared to anything else I have done in my years of managing and building websites. After we had reviewed some other artist’s websites, Megan had requested that she wanted a big cover image on the home page that would lead into a gallery of some of her images.

It quickly became apparent to me that we needed the whole focus to be on the art itself. Consequently this led me to keep everything else relatively plain and unobtrusive.

I probably had the first draft of the site all complete with a couple of hours. I then spent many more hours doing lots of fine tweaking.

Frustratingly, I discovered that although Squarespace lets you add custom code and CSS while you are building the site (i.e. while you are effectively on a free plan) but as soon as the site goes live, your custom code will be removed if you are on their base level plan.

I only realised this after the site went live and so I then had to find a workaround as I didn’t think it was worth a £60 per year upgrade to the plan just to get this one extra feature.

Next steps

Megan is very happy with the results and I hope that she now has a platform to help showcase her lovely art to a wider audience.

As for me, there is still some work to be done and I hope to set her up with a newsletter service so she can more easily share updates with people interested in her work.

Why ‘dark social’ and AI traffic makes it harder than ever to make sense of website analytics

An increasing challenge for those of us working in the world of website analytics is the impact on traffic from Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini. The traffic – or as I will come on to discuss, the lack of traffic – from such platforms is a relatively new phenomenon. However, it adds to other relatively recent challenges such as a rise in what is known as ‘direct’ traffic as well as the mysterious sounding source of traffic known as ‘dark social’.

Putting things in buckets

Let me back up a bit. Website analytics platforms routinely try to categorise traffic to web pages into different ‘buckets’ based on what they know about how someone arrived on a website.

Analytics platforms can tell you that a page view on your website originated from someone who arrived using a search engine, or from a public post on LinkedIn, or that your site was linked to from another website such as Wikipedia.

These different buckets all have special names, but the one that is occupying more of my time lately is the bucket called ‘direct’ traffic.

Historically, this captured traffic from people who went ‘directly’ to your website by typing an address in your browser or by clicking on a browser bookmark. But these days, the ‘direct’ bucket of traffic captures a lot more than that.

A better choice of name would be ‘untraceable’. If Google Analytics (and other website analytics platforms) can’t detect how the visitor came to your website, that traffic gets put in the ‘direct’ bucket.

This means that direct traffic can also includes things such as clicking on links in emails, or links in most messaging apps. Other sources of direct traffic include links on platforms like Apple News or links inside private Facebook groups.

The dark side clouds everything

‘Dark social’ is the broad (and nebulous) term that has emerged to describe a subset of this untraceable direct traffic. It was coined by Alexis Madrigal in 2012 in his blog post Dark social: we have the whole history of the web wrong.

It is typically used to describe traffic that might come from some social media platforms and messaging apps. WhatsApp is very likely a big source of ‘dark social’ traffic for many websites.

Because direct traffic is – by its very nature – untraceable, you can’t really ever know where it came from. Some tell tale signs of dark social traffic is that the traffic is to a specific page that might have been shared by someone, e.g. a news story or blog post.

It is also probably is more likely to have come from a mobile device as most social media is still consumed on phones. If you didn’t know, analytics platforms can track a lot of data about the technology used to visit a web page (desktop PC vs mobile phone, Mac vs Windows, Firefox vs Chrome etc.)

There are other signals that can be also used to potentially identify subsets of direct traffic but ultimately this is all just educated guessing and you can never know for sure.

Rise of the machines

AI is rapidly changing the landscape of how website traffic is captured. First and foremost, if you run an information-heavy website with lots of resources, then AI tools might be leading to a big decline in your traffic.

This is simply because many more people are getting their answers from an AI chatbot and no longer need to click through to a website to find out more. This is assuming that chatbots provide a link to your site which may not always be the case…and even if they do, that link might be very easy to miss.

A lot of AI tools leave a digital fingerprint that enables web analytics platforms to put them in the ‘referral’ bucket of traffic. I.e. where traffic to your site was a referral from another website or tool.

A recent update to the website analytics platform that I routinely use (Matomo Analytics) has started capturing this known AI traffic in a new ‘AI Assistants’ bucket which lets me see traffic from popular tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity etc.

AI Assistants traffic as it appears in Matomo Analytics

This traffic is growing rapidly but doesn’t neatly explain all AI-related traffic. If you use Google’s new AI mode in their search interface and then click through to a website, this is still captured in website analytics platforms as search engine traffic. But if you use a tool like Siri or Alexa to open a webpage, this might show up as direct traffic.

A tangled mess

All of this means that it is getting harder than ever to disentangle the various strands of traffic that bring people to your website. Dark social contributes an unknowable, and possibly increasing, subset of direct traffic and I imagine that the growth of WhatsApp is a big part of this.

AI tools - which are causing a reduction in traffic to many websites - might record what traffic they do generate in several different ways.

I’m finding that I’m increasingly using terms like ‘presumed WhatsApp’ traffic in some of my regular analytics reporting as the real answer about where our website traffic is coming from is increasingly ‘I don’t know’.

Regular recording of data is helpful as you can then start spotting trends that might reveal which areas of your website are seeing differences in traffic.

I’d also recommend using Google’s search console tool if you are concerned about AI tools displacing and replacing traditional search engine traffic. I’ve already noticed that the biggest drops in search engine traffic are to those sections of the website which are ‘informationally rich’. I.e. the content that is more likely to have been regurgitated as part of an AI tool’s answer to someone’s question.

Good luck with your website analytics detective work…it’s a jungle out there.