If you ask Tami Readling if she has any background in plants or gardening, she will say no. She has even said that, compared to the rest of us on The Garden of Words team, she does not even consider herself a gardener (gasp!). But you take one look at her monstera and any sane person would disagree.
What she likely means is that her professional background doesn’t have to do with gardening, as her career has been spent in technology and customer service. Which makes her an ideal team member to have the title of “Director of Client Experience.” And if you haven’t guessed by now, we at The Garden of Words tend to make up job titles to suit our whims and fancies.
Tami is responsible for onboarding new clients and making sure they understand every step of their process with us. She also maintains client info, Katie’s calendar (give that girl a medal right now), team billing, and project manages client website development.
It’s in that last part of her job description — website development — that Tami’s vast experience is so helpful to not only our clients, but our online readership. Her attention to tiny details is vital to helping people understand how other people experience a visit to a website.
Among her classic tips:
- Make sure your company’s physical address, phone number, and hours of operation are on your website
- Ensure that the most important info on your home page is “above the fold” — that part of the web page that you can see immediately without having to scroll down (see end of this blog post to learn why it’s called “above the fold” because it’s pretty interesting)
- Left-align your paragraphs rather than center align — this makes reading so much easier on the eyes
- Avoid crazy colors (hello, black backgrounds with neon font) and nonstandard fonts (too scripty and fancy are nearly impossible to skim easily)
While we greatly value Tami’s varied work that keeps us all on track, we are even more grateful for the fact that she is such a kind and warm human being. Katie has done an amazing job at compiling a team made up of good and decent people, and Tami absolutely exemplifies these qualities. Any question or problem we have is met with humor, grace, kindness, and professionalism — and we know that if we notice that in our day to day work, so do our clients.
Tami’s Offbeat Tip: You know those images with text overlay on them? They are very popular on social media, but they don’t play well on a website (like in a blog post) or in an email. Why? Because Google cannot easily “read” them. And when Google can’t do Google’s job, then your search rankings drop, accessibility fails, and your users face a poor experience.
Note: “Above the fold” refers back to old newspaper days when the newspapers were folded in such a way as to make the headlines visible before even unfolding the paper. Cool, huh?
