Don’t use “click here” as your link text

Accessibility is accessible!

This is a basic accessibility principle.  When you are providing a link to another resource, your link text should be informative about what is being linked.  Consider if you were a user who utilizes a screen reader to browse the website.  Having the screen reader simply read “click here” offers no context about what the link is about.

The W3C (who is the consortium that makes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) has a few resources explaining how simply writing “Click Here” can be an accessibility concern.  A general overview is at the W3C Tips for Webmasters and a more in depth explanation is offered when explaining the success criteria for the WCAG 2.2.

Personally, I do prefer the action verb used in the link text, which the W3c advises against, but the UK Home Office supports.  I believe allowing verbs in the text creates a more call to action feeling for the link.  Note that not including the verb is only offered as a webmaster tip and is not mentioned in the actual success criteria, so you can likely use your own judgement on this for now.  (Note:  this is my opinion and not accessibility advic.e)

Need help with accessibility on your website?  Did you know that CU*Answers Web Services has an accessibility expert on staff?  Check out our Web Quality Assurance options in the CU*Answers Store.

What is Elementor Editor For WordPress

WordPress

While the Elementor Editor is not CU*Answer’s Web Services’ first choice when it comes to editing your website, we do have a handful of clients that are using it.  And using it successfully.

Elementor Editor is a user-friendly drag-and-drop page builder plugin for WordPress that enables users to create beautiful websites without knowing too much code.  Elementor Editor is the world’s most popular WordPress page builder plugin.  Basically, Elementor Editor is a plugin that overlays on top of the traditional WordPress page editing functionality to give your different controls.  It can be very powerful and allow your editors to create complex and highly customized layouts and pages.

The downside to this, is you are also locked into using Elementor Editor.  You will not be able to change to a different page editor later if you find Elementor too much for your needs.  Truthfully, this is a challenge with all the WordPress page builder plugins.  In general, CU*Answers Web Services finds these page builders overkill for the needs of our clients.  And the lock-in to that page builder complicates any future redesigns.

Search Engine Journal has a quick article introducing the basics of Elementor Editor and why you may want to use it.

How Many Websites Use WordPress in 2025? WordPress Statistics

WordPress

CU*Answers Web Services builds all of our client websites using WordPress.  We have invested and built our infrastructure to support, manage, and secure WordPress.  We firmly believe that WordPress is a great choice for credit union websites due to its flexibility and ease of use.  But did you know many other people feel that way too?

From this article at WPZoom, here are some usage statistics about WordPress:

  • WordPress powers 43.5% of all websites as their CMS.
  • Around 513.58 million websites are built on WordPress.
  • WordPress dominates the CMS market with a 61.7% share.

Read the full article over at WPZoom.com.

If you have questions about how CU*Answers Web Services can make the WordPress Content Management System work for your credit union or business, let us know!

 

WordPress in 2025 Report from WordPress.org

WordPress

Last week, WordPress.org released their WordPress in 2025 report highlighting trends in the Content Management System (CMS) space and how WordPress continues to compete.  WordPress is an open-source platform, meaning the source code is available for everyone to review, download and use, and also to contribute to its development.  This report contrasts the benefits of open-source with some of the closed-source/proprietary platforms. Once of the biggest benefits CU*Answers Web Services sees with using WordPress is you own your data and this fits right into our cooperative mindset.

In addition, this WordPress report also highlights the Block Editor (Gutenberg) and Full Site Editing (FSE) capabilities of WordPress.  CU*Answers Web Services has adopted FSE into most new site builds.  Artificial Intelligence (language model specifically) and headless CMS are also mentioned in the report.  Check out the full report for more information.

CU*Answers Web Services behind the scenes updates

Web Services

The CU*Answers Web Services team has been busy the last few weeks with some behind the scenes updates for our hosting infrastructure and your websites.

Over the holidays, we implemented several performance boosting enhancements to both the web and database servers.  While these enhancements sped up the delivery of websites to visitors they also include some aggressive caching.  Therefore, if you are noticing that your recent updates are not publishing on your website, please do a force reload on your browser.  This is usually done by holding down the shift key on your keyboard while clicking the reload button in your browser.

This year (2025) is also the last year of support for PHP 8.1.  CU*Answers Web Services has updated our development environments to support our testing and moving sites on PHP 8.1 to PHP 8.3  In fact, we’ve already moved a couple of sites to the new version with complete success.  This should be an invisible behind the scenes update for most clients.  PHP 8.2 is still supported through 2026, but we will move some of these sites also.

CU*Answers Web Services is continually looking to improve our products and services, as well as, constantly vigilant to keep our all our sites secured.

Network Maintenance – January 21

maintenance

On Tuesday, January 21st, from Midnight – 8:00 AM ET, CU*Answers Network Services will be performing internal network maintenance. During this time, there may be brief network interruptions to our website and email hosting.