Site name: What is Progressive Enhancement & Why Does it Matter?
Site URL: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/what-is-progressive-enhancement.
What are Progressive Enhancements?
- Progressive enhancements are building a website with a foundation that be can be added to in the future with minimal frustration. This website compares it to the foundation of the house. The foundation of the house needs to be solid before beginning to add rooms or decorations. Progressive enhancement requires forward thinking but can help keep websites up to date more easily and has room to make sure the website is as accessible as possible.
Why are Progressive Enhancements needed?
- Progressive enhancements are needed because technology changes quickly and a website might get out of date and not function on the latest browsers or work with the latest assistive technology devices for individuals that need them. Progressive enhancements allow for more flexibility to make these changes without needing to completely recreate the website. Long-term maintenance is not as cumbersome. Additionally, ensuring the foundation of the website is accessible to a range of browsers and operating systems opens accessible to more individuals regardless of the device and browser they are using. Progressive enhancements can also help search engines locate and find information on the website, which more visitors can often mean more business, also known as “search engine optimization”.
Does the site's home page validate?
- When trying to validate the website, it comes back with 105 errors/warnings.
Find any other page on the site. Does the second page validate?
- I chose to click on the “graceful degradation” within the content. When trying to validate the website, it comes back with 93 errors/warnings.
Document how many validation errors and/or warnings may exist on each of the two pages you validate.
- See above - the home page lists 105 errors/warnings when trying to validate, and the second page I chose lists 93 errors/warnings.
How would you rate the site's design, on a scale of 1(horrible) to 10 (fantastic)? Why?
- I give the design of this website a rating of 7. I did not appreciate the box that popped up when I try to read through the content. I have to have my screen zoomed in, so it covered up the content. Some of the picture sizes seemed a bit extensive and created choppy breaks in the content. However, the choice in font and spacing was helpful to reading the content, and I appreciated the variety of content: text, video, and images. The colors seemed to also be consistent. Most of the content beyond text had a good purpose. I thought it was interesting that there was a bar that tracked how far down you were in the content, and if that is a useful element. I imagine if you are wanting to know if it is a quick read it could be!
How would you rate the site's usability on a scale of 1 (horrible) to 10 (fantastic)? Why?
- I give the usability of the site a rating of 9. Other than the box that popped up and blocked content, the site was very usable. I appreciated that the links I chose to click on opened a new tab! The language used in the writing was down-to-earth, understandable, and engaging.
Does the site meet its purpose?
- The site’s purpose was to help me understand what progressive enhancements are, and why they are important and I feel the website met its purpose.