There’s more to creating a professional website then having a nice look and feel. Make sure your website lives up to the W3C standards (www.w3.org). Test it with their ‘tidy’ tool. This will make it easier for search engines to crawl your site, and also helps to allow disabled users to navigate your website. For example, a site with fixed font sizes (font sizes set in pixels for examples) will make it impossible for people that can’t see well to view your site. In your browser, if you go to ‘View’ and change the Text Size, you should still be able to view your site without having the template stretch or appear askew. This can be trickier then it sounds, but good and proper use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can do a lot to accomplish this.

Avoiding ‘landing pages’ also known as a ’splash page’. The majority of people browsing the web have a 5 second limit to their patience in having a web site load. If your site takes longer then this you’re going to loose a lot of traffic. You want your site to inform anyone viewing it of exactly what your website is about. This is also a key point in Search Engine Optimization.

The first headline on your home page should describe exactly what you are about. Keep your site consistent. Do not have one page appear differently then another if it can be helped. Changing the format of your pages from page to page easily confuses visitors and will cause a lot of people to hit the ‘back’ button before they get involved. Which brings us to the next point; get the visitor involved. Your opening lines should grab their attention, depending on the product or service you may be selling, let them know why they should choose you over your competitors.

Allow for the possibility that your visitors can’t see images, or, for security reasons, have Javascript disabled. Any of your website images should have an ‘alt’ (or alternative text) set, that describes what the image is, even if it’s something as simple as ‘placeholder’ (e.g. for spacer images).

Many of Search Engine Optimization articles will tell you how imperative it is to ’splash’ related keywords in your content. Looking at a lot of top-ranking websites you’ll see that this is hardly the case. You will of course naturally use keywords in your content that are related to the search phrases people will use to find you. That is the key point, keep it ‘natural’, search engines have evolved to expect this, and if anything, penalize obvious ’synthetic’ use of keywords. It looks like spam to them.

Spend time researching your target market. See what successful sites in your avenue are doing. Your closest friend is your ‘enemy’. Think about what they’ve done and see if you can take it one step further. Avoid popups. In all cases popups are considered obtrusive and annoying. Anyone telling you that they are a good way of grabbing peoples attention haven’t spent any time doing real market research. The fact is they drive people away, I have in fact seem traffic greatly decrease on sites that insisted on using them.

If you plan on using database driven scripts, avoid the use of ‘CGI’ queries in your URL’s. A good example of this would be a URL that looks like

‘http://localhost/mysite.cgi?page=my-designs&id=4934b’ There are methods that can be used, known as URL rewrites, that will allow you to take cryptic

URL’s like this and have then appear ‘friendlier’. A URL like that can be rewritten as ‘http://localhost/mysite.cgi/my-designs/4934b/all-about-my-designs.html The later part of the URL does not even have to be used in the script, but allows for a detailed description of what that page is about. This makes a big difference in the way search engines can index your pages as well.

About the Author

The article is sponsored by A-1 Technology Inc which is an established Software Development Company and is one of the best Software Development Companies in the era dealing in offshore outsourcing servies including website development, and software development. -

Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) have slowly but surely become a website design standard over the past few years. It was not that many years ago that people used Frames to position their content across their web pages and Tables gradually replaced this. Many low-end website developers are still very comfortable with Tables, as it ‘does what it says on the tin’. However, more and more people are now moving over to CSS, as virtually all the layout options can be achieved using the code.

One major problem with CSS is that not all Web browsers produce the same results and it has not been helped in the past by the various browsers employing their own way of interpreting certain CSS conventions. You can think your CSS design looks OK in the current version of your preferred browser and can then be crestfallen when you view your Web pages in another version that has destroyed the formatting. Therefore, when moving over to CSS, it is important that you use the capabilities that are consistently supported across the entire range of popular browsers. It is interesting that the new version 7 of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fixed a number of earlier anomalies, but many people are now waking up to the reality that IE7 has in fact caused problems arising from their earlier workarounds!

So why not bother with CSS, if Tables work for you? The principal advantages are as follows:

1. Web page code is generally much easier to follow;

2. The amount of code used to achieve the same result is much less. The general view is that by switching to a CSS layout, the typical page size reduction is between 50 - 60 per cent;

3. Download speeds for CSS pages are generally faster than their Table-driven counterparts. This is because browsers have to read through the table code twice before they are able to display the contents. They do this firstly to figure out the structure and then again to understand the content. It should also be recognised that a Table’s contents can only be presented to the screen in one go, whereas CSS content will drop in separately, thereby giving a better user experience. It is also possible to govern the order in which specific screen elements appear, so the user is not distracted by the more bulky and slower to load image files. Furthermore, because all the code involved with CSS page layout is held in one external CSS document and is cached, it is faster than Table layouts that need to be interpreted every time a new page is displayed;

4. It is much easier to edit existing pages and to add new pages, particularly in the area of subtle formatting amendments. For example, you can change the font or colour scheme across an entire website in literally minutes;

5. CSS delivers enhanced accessibility. In recent years the number of people using web browsers on hand-held devices has risen significantly and CSS plays an important function in delivering content to PDA’s etc through additional CSS documents. This just isn’t possible with Table-driven layouts;

6. CSS is considered to be more Search Engine friendly because they can spider CSS pages quicker. However, it remains to be seen if this has any tangible benefits such as an improvement on the your page ranking.

On the flipside, there are a few disadvantages to CSS web page design you should consider:

1. As compared with Tables, CSS involves a much bigger learning curve;

2. Because of cross browser support issues, the time spent implementing workarounds should not be underestimated;

3. New browser versions can catch website developers napping if you are not careful. You can find that earlier workarounds have been overcome and the look of your website has changed overnight.

Ultimately, your decision on whether or not to move over to see CSS will probably depend on your level of technical capability and the time you’re able to devote to understanding CSS layout alternatives.

About the Author

David Sielicki is Features Editor with Fetcher the UK’s products and services directory. He is also a freelancer with Web Affinity

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