To the groundhog!
From one of our favorite movies, Bill Murray's post-transformation speech is such a hopeful view on the cold dark days:
When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.
It's silly, and the Checkhov-to-groundhog allusion is a headscratcher, but later this year, when it's too hot to be out in the middle of the day, I'll look back, as if over a steamy cup of tea, on these chilly early nights with our friends and family and cozy community pockets.
Here's what's new at H+H:
Accessibility workshop
Accessibility can be confusing or even intimidating for site owners. If you’re uncertain, you are not alone. We'll review your site for errors with the code, missing content, and usability. And then we help fix it.
Our goal is to provide you with both a practical roadmap and immediate improvements, helping you meet legal requirements and avoid costly compliance issues, reach more customers, boost trust and loyalty, and improve SEO. Learn more about our accessibility workshop.
Recent client asks
Is there an app you'd recommend to make sure our site is ADA compliant? I've heard of companies getting sued, which is pretty much my worst nightmare.
The app we use to do a first-level check is the WAVE tool. That’s pretty much the same level of review that law firms that file suits use too. We’ve done court-ordered mitigations for clients and they’re pretty surface-level.
We don’t recommend remediation/monitoring apps from the app store. They can cause as many issues as they solve, and they don’t really improve the experience for impaired users. However, we just added a free app to check the products in your catalog for missing alt. text: https://apps.shopify.com/h-h-alt-text-checker.
And if you are missing alt. text on product images, we recommend using Shopify’s ai-generated alt. text. It’s fast and accurate and helpful. It’s the only time we’d recommend using generative ai for site content – the text actually describes the images and not the products.
From browsing to asking
Getting your Shopify store ready for ai discovery
We're changing our approach to ai discovery. Really, Shopify's new universal commerce protocol (UCP) is changing our approach to ai discovery.
Used to be, ai agents were accessing your store info from your web storefront. That's still important – how your storefront is coded, but UCP integrates directly with ai agents so the most important part is the content itself, your product listings. Product data is the new keywords.
How to prepare? Unique product descriptions, full product listings. And your knowledge base: Shopify's Knowledge Base app, FAQs, shipping, returns, policies.
Reach out if you'd like help or for us to review your shop.
Agentic shopping: announced, but not yet ready
Shopify has announced agentic storefronts (shopping via ai chat), but they're not here yet. And when it is available, we still don't know how widely it will be adopted. Previous experiments like social shopping and token gateways were a flop.
So our approach is to step forward cautiously and deliberately, remembering Amara's Law:
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
