Archive For December, 2008

Cross-Browser Compatible Web Design

18 December 2008 at 11:59

With the advent of Web 2.0 and websites being at the forefront of everyone’s mind when it comes to marketing, website design is no longer simply about getting a presence online. Designing  a website now means making it not only look good but look good on as many different types of media as possible.

Granted a website cannot be guaranteed to work on 100% of browsers 100% of the time, but you can certainly create a website that will work on high proportion. For example, one of our websites gets on average 1,200 unique visitors a week using the following web browsers (figures since Sep 2008):

And take Internet Explorer for example we can explore which versions our visitors are using:

From the stats we can clearly see that most Internet users are now using fairly up-to-date web browsers, and one of the effortless means of achieving high cross-browser compatible websites is to design a website which is compliant with the latest web standards.

How to achieve cross-browser compatibility on your website

1. Build your websites using table-less layouts and nested elements arranged using an unfussy cascading style sheet (CSS)
2. Preview your new website in any one of the latest browsers and make the website you’ve designed fits that site
3. Using the W3C validation tools, validate your code. HostPipe generally validate websites to XHTML 1.0 Strict as this virtually guarantees a cross-browser compatible website
4. Start checking the website in the most common web browsers (IE7, IE6, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome) and tweak the site so that it looks right in all of the website browsers

Additional benefits of having a cross-browser compatible website

The website can now be viewed in 95% plus web browsers currently available, but by developing a website to strict web standards compliance there are plenty of additional benefits:

• Faster download speeds
• Higher level of accessibility
• A future-proofed website - you can easily create a new layout by changing the style sheet
• A search engine friendly website
• A wider market reach - to those users who couldn’t previously view your website

The best part is it there isn’t a huge amount of additional work required to make your website comply with web standards or in making it cross-browser compatible. Knowing your web browsers and their intricacies means your initial web design concept can be built with cross-browser compatibility in mind.

Posted in General Web Advice | Website Design | No Comments

External Links and Fickle Google

10 December 2008 at 15:43

It recently came to my attention that Google is a little bit fickle when it comes to listing a websites backwards links, and when I was asked why, I found it very difficult to answer why.

There are two ways to measure the backward links to your website; the first is to do a search using Google's "find:" function, i.e. in Google's search form enter "link:www.hostpipe.co.uk" and you will see a list of websites which are currently linking to your website.

The second and more accurate method would be to sign up to Google's Webmaster Tools. After signing up the first things you should do is add the verification code into your website's header so that Google knows you are the legitimate webmaster for your website.

The next step is to submit an XML sitemap of your website, making life a lot easier for search engines in general to index your website's pages.

Then select "Links" and "Pages with external links", you'll then see a list of urls from your website with the number of external pages linking into your site. In HostPipe's case "link:www.hostpipe.co.uk" produced 22 results, whereas Googles Webmaster Tools produced a whopping 1,344 results.

The reason for the difference between the two is quite simple, Google is protecting website owners and designers by not showing a comprehensive list on the basic search. If they published all of your competitors inbound links it would then be quite easy to copy them and increase your rankings...

If only it was that easy!!

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments