Jun 22 2008
So, I have a friend who is a professor at a University here in Baltimore, and I came across a link on their Facebook page about this video. This is a video of how you should setup your web site. I thought it was a very unique and interesting way to discuss building a high quality web site.
Make sure to take a moment and review this video. Definitely should be one of your favorites.
Nov 26 2007
A well structured web site will offer access to all visitors, including the ability to easily access information throughout each page. By offering quicklinks to sections of the page, visitors using alternative browsers such as a Screen Reader or a text based browser can easily get to the meat of your page.
We recommend a minimum of three key sections on each web page. They include:
This navigation can be most easily achieved through the use of an unordered list and CSS. Here is an excellent article on skip navigation by renowned accessibility expert Jim Thatcher.
Once you have the list in place at the top of the page, you’ll need to place anchors through the page and the final step is to choose how to style these links and then you’re done. Make sure to read our Web Site Basics article with 25 items that create a solid foundation to your web site.
Oct 16 2007
Well, it’s been quite a while, but we’re picking up where we left off a few months back.
Our next point in our series on 25 items that make a quality web site is that each page should have an author declared within the meta information.
Inside the head tags simply add this tag
<META NAME=”author” CONTENT=”Author Information”>
While this more an item of politeness. In a well structured document identifying the author of the document allows folks looking for specific information a place to begin with and notes who holds the rights to the documents.
Jun 20 2007
While many people discount the work that can be put into Meta Keywords, from a basic standpoint, I would include this tag with 3-4 keywords from your site.
There is a general concensus in the industry that the major search engines no longer use the Meta Keyword tag as a part of their ranking algorythm, but I feel it should be included for quality versus ranking.
Add it in, make it on topic, but don’t spend weeks and weeks trying to decide whether you have written the perfect meta keywords tag.
To summarize, keep it short and sweet, 3-4 keywords, and call it a day. Keep it on topic, and page specific.
Read the complete article on 25 things your web site should contain as we continue through this overview of what makes a solid foundation for your web site.
Jun 04 2007
So this will be the first in our series on the 25 pieces that make up a solid web site. We’ll cover pieces numbers one and two in this article. They are the doctype and the language declaration.
These are two cores to a well built web site and while typically overlooked by many people. These are actually quite important pieces of information that should be included in the template for each and every web page you design.
Lets start with the Doctype declaration. To quote W3:
The document type declaration names the document type definition (DTD) in use for the document.
There are various Doctypes you can choose from. We feel the best two to work from are HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.1. Unless you truly need the XML functionality of XHTML we recommend going with HTML 4.01 Strict as an optimal base for your web site.
Here are some great resources for a more detailed look at doctype.
Declaring the language is also important so browsers and applications accessing the information can understand the language the document is in and not be forced to guess.
Language Declaration Resources:
Character Encoding Declaration:
Also important in the basic structure of your web site is a declaration of the Character set you are using for your page. The W3 tells us:
The “charset” parameter identifies a character encoding, which is a method of converting a sequence of bytes into a sequence of characters. This conversion fits naturally with the scheme of Web activity: servers send HTML documents to user agents as a stream of bytes; user agents interpret them as a sequence of characters. The conversion method can range from simple one-to-one correspondence to complex switching schemes or algorithms.
More Resources on Character Encoding:
In our next article we’ll discuss the all powerful Title Attribute of your page.
This article is a part or our series on 25 items that your web site needs to be successful.
