2600 West Olive Ave, 5th Floor
Burbank, CA 91505

The good news is that’s simply not an issue because we offer 0% financing on our website design services. We understand that many companies desperately need to update their online image, but they just can’t afford to shell out their hard-earned money all at once. Our financing makes it easy for you to achieve the image you deserve, yet still keep your cash flow in control.

Why finance your website?

• When you finance your website, you can get started today with a smaller investment and easy to manage monthly payments.
• 0% Interest -You don’t pay us any additional fees.
• We don’t check your credit – all you need to do is fill out a simple one page application.
• You can improve your company’s image and make a powerful impression while your competitors stick with an outdated image.

What you should  do next?

Start from contacting our office 818-605-0595 to choose package and apply for financing. Once it’s approved, we will be in touch immediately to discuss your new website, usually within 24 hours or less.

How does our website design process work?

1. We start off by learning exactly what type of image you want to present, and then we create a completely custom website design based on that information.
2. We will send you the first draft as an image file and then make any necessary modifications or revisions based on your feedback.
3. Once you approve the design of your new website, we will code the W3C valid XHTML and CSS, and add any necessary pages, text and images. During this process, everything will be hosted on our servers so that you can see exactly how your new website will display and function in your web browser.
4. Once you’ve approved your completed website, we can usually make it live and available to the world in less than 20 minutes.

They are typically five to ten page sites and do not need to be edited or changed often after they are created. They may or may not include Flash animation, Custom Logo, a simple Paypal Shopping Cart, a database, forms, Search Engine Optimization or other features.

They are usually creatable, always with an elegant design and function, for from $800 to $1000. We’ve done them for a little less, and for more – again, it depends on what you need and want.

If you need a site that you can edit yourself, with a sophisticated shopping cart and online catalog, contact management for mass emailing, search engine registration, 6 language push-button site translator, database capability, toll free tech support and much more, we offer our Premium Sites which include all these features and more built in.

We guarantee that you cannot find these features in a website for a better price. These sites, including custom design, usually cost from $1500 to $5000, but may go higher depending on your needs. usually regular Shopping Carts cost about $2000 – $2500.

“Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010, in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc.,” the obit read. “Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as ‘IE6,’ is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.”

The Google and March 1 references come from the search giant’s recent announcement that it would drop IE6 from the list of supported browsers for its Google Docs online applications and its Google Sites hosting services starting on Monday, March 1. Yesterday, Google’s popular video site YouTube named March 13 as the end-of-support date for IE6.

“We thought it would be funny to do an IE6 funeral,” said Justin Toupin, Aten Design’s founder and creative director, in an interview. “It’s a humorous spin on a browser that a lot of us have loved to hate for a long time. We’re just saying that it’s a fun way to celebrate companies like Google saying that they’re no longer going to support IE6.”

But Toupin admitted that the reaction to the funeral announcement has taken him by surprise. Aten Design regularly hosts small in-office parties for the Denver Web design and development community, but those typically draw 30 or 40 people. So far, Aten has received more than 700 RSVPs to its March 4 event via its site.

“Now we have to figure out what to do about the actual party,” Toupin said. “We have a pretty small office. This kind of blew up on us.”

Aten’s clients include several major nonprofit organizations, including the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Habitat for Humanity.

Toupin said he had nothing personal against IE6 but acknowledged that, like many other Web designers, he wouldn’t be sorry to see it go. “It does involve, toward the end of a project especially, considerable work adjusting things like CSS and JavaScript to make sure they work,” he said. Aten now evaluates IE6 support for its projects on a case-by-case basis, Toupin said.

More than anything, he added, the decision by Google and others to stop supporting the nearly nine-year-old browser marks an important step in the Web’s evolution. “But it’s also a great excuse to get together,” he said.

“In lieu of attending, please send flowers,” Toupin said in a blog entry posted yesterday.

Microsoft‘s browser has weathered a “kill IE6″ campaign since February 2009, when Facebook prompted IE6 users to upgrade. That movement accelerated last summer when Digg announced that it would curtail IE6 support, and an “IE6 Must Die” Twitter petition collected thousands of names. Microsoft has endorsed the anti-IE6 efforts, going so far as to say that “Friends don’t let friends use IE6,” although it has refrained from forcing users or companies to upgrade to IE7 or IE8, arguing that the old browser is still required by some enterprises.

According to Web metrics firm NetApplications.com, IE6 accounted for 20% of all browsers in use last month, while IE7 and IE8 held down about 15% and 25% shares, respectively. Much of the measured IE6 usage, however, apparently originates in China, where the application represents 50% of the browsers in use. In the U.S., IE6′s share is less than 10%.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on the funeral, or answer questions, including one about whether it would be sending a representative to the wake.

“We’ve obviously struck a chord, and maybe in some cases, a nerve,” said Toupin on his blog.

Naming a site after its domain name is important, for the simple reason that when people think of your website, they’ll think of it by name. If your name is also your URL, they’ll automatically know where to go. For example, when people think of thefreecountry.com, they don’t have to wonder what URL to type into their browser to get there. The name of the site is also the URL.

Imagine if your business (or website) is called “Acme”, but somebody else holds that domain name. Instead, you have some obscure domain name called, say, “mybusiness.com”. What happens when your customers, recalling that Acme has a product they want, type “www.acme.com”? They’ll end up at your competitor’s website. One lost sale.

In the modern world of the Internet, where people automatically turn to the Web for information, it pays to have a domain name that reflects your site or business. There are just fewer things for your customers or visitors to remember. Moreover, you don’t seriously think that they’ll try to memorise an unrelated URL just because you want them to, do you? The only people who’ll memorise it are you and your competitors who want to compare your prices.

What if you cannot get the domain name of your choice? It really depends on how committed you are to that particular name. If you have an existing brand name that you’re known for, you’ll probably not want to ditch that name just because you couldn’t get the domain name. After all, it took you a lot of time and money to establish that name. If so, you might simply want to try to buy over the domain name from the current owner. Check up the “whois” information for the domain, and contact that person listed to see if they’re willing to sell it. You probably should be aware that they are likely to want to charge a higher fee than you’ll normally get when buying new domains (assuming they want to sell it in the first place).

On the other hand, if you’re just starting out, you might prefer the cheaper alternative of trying to obtain a domain name first, and then naming your website (or business) after the domain that you’ve acquired. So if you’ve acquired, say, the domain name “acme.com”, then your website and business might be named “Acme” or “acme.com”. I know this seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse, but that’s the reality if you don’t want to lose out on the Internet.

Generic Names Or Brand Name Domains?

I know that a number of people seem to think that your domain name really must be some generic name like “cars.com” if you are selling cars. Witness, for example, how much money those generic names are being sold for. But seriously, if you were looking for a car, you’ll probably already have some brands in mind, and you’re more like to try out things like generalmotors.com or toyota.com rather than just cars.com.

For that reason, I personally feel that a domain name that matches your brand name is very important. The very name that you use to advertise your product is the name that you will want for your domain, because that is the first thing that people will try in their browser. It is also the easiest thing for them to remember, and whatever that is easily remembered, will be more likely to be tried out than the obscure domain name.

Long or Short Domain Names?

Domain names can be of any length up to 67 characters. You don’t have to settle for an obscure domain name like avab.com when what you mean is AcmeVideosAndBooks.com.

Having said that, there appears to be some disagreement about whether a long or short domain name is better.

Some argue that shorter domain names are easier to remember, easier to type and far less susceptible to mistakes: for example, “getit.com” is easier to remember and less prone to typos than “connecttomywebsiteandobtainit.com”.

Others argue that a longer domain name is usually easier on the human memory – for example, “gaepw.com” is a sequence of unrelated letters that is difficult to remember and type correctly, whereas if we expand it to its long form, “GetAnEconomicallyPricedWebsite.com”, we are more likely to remember the domain name.

Some of these arguments are actually academic. It’s increasingly difficult to get short meaningful domain names. I have not checked, but I’m fairly certain that names like “getit.com” and “good.com” have long been sold. If you manage to get a short domain name though, the key is to make sure it’s a meaningful combination of characters and not the obscure “gaepw.com” in my contrived example above.

Long domain names that have your site keywords in them also have an advantage in that they fare better in a number of search engines. The latter give preference to keywords that are also found in your domain names. So, for example, if you have a site on free C++ compilers with a domain name like freecpluspluscompilers.com, it might fare better in a search for “free C++ compilers” than my other site, thefreecountry.com.

Which would I go for? I’d go for the shorter name if I can get a meaningful one, but I’m not averse to longer names. However, I would probably avoid extremely long names verging on 67 characters. Aside from the obvious problem that people might not be able to remember such a long name, it would also be a chore typing it and trying to fit it as a title on your web page.

Hyphenated Names?

Should you get a hyphenated name? There are a few things to consider here:

• Disadvantages

  1. It’s easy to forget the hyphens when typing a name. Many users are used to typing things like freecpluspluscompilers.com but not free-c-plus-plus-compilers.com. They’ll probably leave out the hyphens and end up at your competitor’s site.
  2. When people recommend your site to their friends verbally, having hyphens in your domain name leads to more potential errors than when the name does not contain hyphens. For example, how do you think your visitors will refer to your site if it is named “acme-books-and-videos.com”? They might say, “I visited Acme Book and Videos dot com yesterday. It was fabulous.” Their friends, remembering that comment later, might type into their browsers “acmebooksandvideos.com”. Oops.
  3. It’s a pain in the neck to type. Enough said.

• Advantages

  1. Search engines can distinguish your keywords better and thus return your site more prominently in search results for those keywords occurring in your domain name.
  2. The non-hyphenated form may no longer be available. At least this way, you still get the domain name you want.

Personally, I prefer to avoid hyphenated names if I can, but I guess it really depends on your domain name and your situation.

Plurals, “The”, and “My” Forms of the Domain Name

Very often, if you can’t get the domain name you want, the domain name registrar will suggest alternate forms of the name you typed. For example, if you wanted website.com, and it was taken (of course it is), it might suggest forms like:

thewebsite.com
mywebsite.com
websites.com

and the like, if they were not already taken as well. The question is, should you take them?

My personal opinion is that if you take the “the…” and “my…” forms of the domain name, you must always remember to promote your site with the full form of the name. Otherwise, people are likely to forget to affix the necessary “the” or “my”. For that reason, I always advertise my sites as “thesitewizard.com” and “thefreecountry.com” in their full domain name forms, rather than just “Free Country” or “Site Wizard” (without the article).

On the other hand, I would not take the plural form of the domain name (eg, websites.com) if I cannot also get “website.com”, since the chance of the visitor failing to type the “s” in the name is very great. Think about the famous name tussle between etoys.com and etoy.com. Many people wanting to go to etoys.com were apparently going to etoy.com instead. If it happened to them, it can happen to you too.

COM, ORG, NET, etc?

One common question I encounter is from people who can’t get the “.com” domain of their choice, but find the “.net”, “.org” or other country-specific top level domains (TLDs) available (like .de, .nu, .sg, etc). Should they try for these?

The answer is not as straightforward as you might think. If your website or business caters to the local community, such as a pizza delivery business or recruitment agency or the like, then it makes sense to get a country-specific domain. You actually benefit from having such a local domain because the people in your country know that they’re dealing with a local entity, which is what they want. After all, if they stay in (say) the United Kingdom, they’re not likely to want to try to order pizza from pizzaparlour.com, which suggests an international site. You’ll have better luck calling it pizzaparlour.co.uk, ie, with a UK domain.

What if yours is a site or business that can benefit from an international audience? There are actually many schools of thought on this. I’ll just mention a few common ones.

The first school of thought goes on the premise that it is better to have a domain name of your choice “myperfectdomain” even if it has a TLD of “.net”, “.org” or some other country specific extension, than to end up choosing an obscure domain name for the simple reason you can’t get your first choice. Thus they would settle for domain names like “myperfectdomain.de” or “myperfectdomain.net” or whatever. Against this is the argument that if you get a country specific domain, people might think that your business only caters to that country.

Another school of thought finds that “.net” and “.org” extensions are actually quite acceptable domain names. For some, the “.org” extension actually describes the non-profit nature of their organisation. So, for example, the famous Apache web server can be found at “apache.org”.

Others settle for the “.com” extension and no less. As grounds for their arguments, they cite the browser algorithms used to locate a website when a user simply types a name like “acme” into the browser. Apparently, the browser searches for a domain name “acme.com” before attempting “acme.net”, etc. As such, people who do that will be delivered to your competitor’s site if you do not also own the “.com” extension. Indeed, even if people do not rely on their browser to complete their typing, many simply assume a “.com” extension when they type a domain name, so if your business is “Acme”, they’ll just assume your domain name is “acme.com” rather than “acme.net” or some other such name.

As you can see, there are actually good grounds for accepting any of the above views. My personal footnote to the above arguments is that if you get a domain name with an extension other than “.com”, make sure that you promote your business or website with the full domain name. For example, if your domain name is “dogandcatfood.net”, make sure that when you advertise your site or business, call it “dogandcatfood.net” not “dogandcatfood”. Otherwise people will assume a “.com” extension and travel to the wrong place.

In Conclusion…

In case the forest got lost in the trees (or the reverse) in my arguments here, let me reiterate the main point of this article: get that domain name before you start your site or business.

Don’t make the mistake of attempting to retrofit your domain name to your business or website. thefreecountry.com did not originally start out with that name, and I encountered a huge hassle (and lost visitors) as a result of the URL changes. Don’t make that mistake too.

O be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
- Shakespeare

Copyright 2000-2004 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this, on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from http://www.thesitewizard.com/

This article brings together some of the main points on how you can create a website or blog that is search engine friendly.

Add Text to Your Images, Flash and Videos
The first thing you should note about search engines is that their software can only read text. When I say text, I don’t mean text that you embed in an image or text that you place inside a Flash file or those that appear in a video. I mean text like the text you see everywhere on thesitewizard.com’s articles – plain, unadulterated, ordinary text.

While it’s true that some search engines have the rudimentary ability to scan a Flash file, you cannot assume that this ability is sophisticated enough to obtain all the information you want them to have. In fact, I suspect that only Google can do this, and even then only to extract straightforward links embedded in the file. And certainly no search engine I know can view an image file or video and determine the text that it contains.

This is not to say that you cannot create a photo-album site, Flash game site or a video site that ranks in the search engine results page. You can still place your pictures, Flash, videos on your site. However, you should write content for each of these non-text elements to describe them.

For example, you should describe each picture in the “alt” text for the image. For those who don’t know what I’m saying, images are put into a web page using HTML code like the following:

Notice the “alt” part in the example HTML code above. Here, I described the image as a picture of a search engine ready website. You should of course replace that text with a brief description of what your image really shows. While search engines cannot actually see your picture, they can read your “alt” text and will include that in their index for your web page.

Likewise, for sites with video files or Flash file, you should include additional text on that web page describing what your video shows or what the Flash file does.

To put it another way, when designing your website, make your website more accessible for blind and other visually impaired visitors and you will also reap the side benefit of making your site more search-engine friendly.

Validate Your HTML Code
I have written elsewhere on the importance of validating your web page. By validating, I mean checking to make sure that your HTML code does not have errors. Note that I’m not talking about spelling or grammar errors here. I’m referring to the underlying HTML code that allows the web browser to format your web page according to how you want it to appear. If you use a WYSIWYG web editor like Dreamweaver, Nvu or KompoZer, such code is usually generated behind the scenes by the editor as you type your text.

Whether you write your HTML code by hand or use a WYSIWYG web editor, it is a good idea to always run the final code through HTML and CSS validators. You can find details on how you can do this in my article on HTML validation at http://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/htmlvalidation.shtml

While the search engines don’t care whether your HTML code is error-free, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index. If your HTML code contains errors, it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine’s database. The errors, while undetectable in a web browser, may lead the search engine software to think that some of the text on your page is part of the HTML formatting information rather than your site’s content. As a result, the search engine may ignore that text, and your web page will not be shown in its results page.

Create Relevant Title Tags
Many search engines give additional weightage to the text appearing in the HTML

A number of new webmasters don’t bother to set the title tag to something meaningful. Instead, they just put their site name in the title tag of every page on their website. They should, instead, put the site name only in the title tag of their home page, and place a meaningful title on each individual page of their site. For example, on a page that describes a product “Widget XYZ”, the title tag should read “Widget XYZ Product Features” or something like that. If you feel that the name of your website is important to have on every title tag, place it at the end of your title for the sub-pages on your site, for example, “Widget XYZ Features – XYZ Company”.

Use Straight HTML Navigation Links on Your Website
I wrote an article some time back on the importance of a good navigation system for your website and how one website I examined used only JavaScript-generated links to lead to other pages on the site. Since the search engines do not understand JavaScript, they were not able to find the other pages on the website.

While that article only mentioned JavaScript-created links, this problem also applies to websites that rely only on links embedded in Flash files. Google is said to understand such links, but until search engine robot technology improves so that all search engines can easily figure out the links embedded in Flash files or JavaScript code, any website totally reliant on such links is surely at a disadvantage compared to websites that use straightforward HTML links.

Again, this is not a call to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You do not have to ditch all JavaScript code or Flash files from your website. Instead, what you need is to provide a way for search engines (and visitors who do not have JavaScript-enabled or Flash players) to visit all the pages of your site. Put simple HTML links on your web page linking to the other pages in addition to your state-of-the-art gadgets.

You should also add a site map to your website and link to that site map from your main page. That way, search engines and human visitors who don’t have JavaScript or Flash facilities can find their way around your site.

Eliminate Apparent Content Duplication
If you use a blogging service, blogging software or some other content management system (CMS), you will need to watch out for duplicate content on your website.

By duplicate content, I mean pages on your website that are identical to other pages on your site. If you manually create your website using a web editor, this will probably never happen. However, some of the automated services mentioned earlier create alternate routes to the same article. For example, a content management system or blogging software may duplicate the same article you wrote under two different URLs, such as www.example.com/archive/article-name.html and www.example.com/2007/01/05/article-name.html. Another manifestation of this is when your software adds a session id to the URL. Since every visitor receives a different session ID, he/she will link to your page using a different URL.

The problem with duplicate content on your own site is link dilution. As I mentioned in my article on How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Google, Google and other search engines take into account the number of links pointing to your page to determine how important your web page is. If you have identical content appearing on two different pages on your website, some sites will link to one page while others will link to the alternate page. The result is that neither of those pages will be regarded as very important in the search engine’s index since you have effectively halved the links pointing to your article.

Find a way to remove that feature in your software or service of allowing your article to be reached under different URLs. In the case of session IDs, see if you can use cookies instead to track individual users. Solutions like blocking out alternative URLs from search engines using a robots.txt file may seem like a possible solution, but they do not solve the problem of link dilution.

You may also want to read How to Solve Duplicate Content Issues by Specifying a Canonical Web Address (URL) for additional help on this if you face this problem.

Remove Hidden Text
Nowadays, everyone knows that it is counterproductive to use hidden text on your website. By hidden text, I mean text that is included in the main body of your web page but is not actually displayed on the screen when visitors view your page in a browser. In days of old, some unscrupulous webmasters used such text to add keywords to a web page to influence search engine results. Search engines try to deal with that tactic by not showing pages which they think contain hidden text.

As mentioned in another article, More Tips on Google Search Engine Results Placement, I inadvertently discovered that sometimes search engines wrongly penalize sites even if the hidden text was innocuous – for example, text that only showed for people using a particular browser to tell them that they may not be able to access certain features of the website due to deficiencies in the browser. If you have not read that article, you might want to take take a look to avoid facing the same problem.

You should also be aware that if you use a free web host, your site may contain hidden text on its pages without your knowing. In my investigation of some free web hosts for thefreecountry.com’s many free web hosting pages, I discovered that a few of the hosts that place advertisements on your websites include hidden text around the advertisements to influence the type of advertisements shown on your web page. This may lead to your website being penalised by the search engines through no fault of your own.

Unfortunately, you cannot simply look for a free web host that does not impose ads on your website, since such web hosts regularly disappear overnight due to the lack of a viable revenue model to sustain their service. If you can afford it, the best solution is to get a domain name and place your site on a commercial web host.

Creating a search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that you will get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a necessary first step if you want to rank anywhere near the first few pages of the search engine results. A site that is not search engine ready may not even appear in the results for any query. The tips in this article are the pre-requisites for any website aspiring the top positions in Google, Yahoo, and the other engines.

Footnote: if you are running a WordPress blog, you may also want to read the article How to Make Your WordPress Blog Search-Engine-Friendly.

Copyright © 2007-2009 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this, on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from http://www.thesitewizard.com/.

Along with this principle of catering to the widest possible audience is the principle of designing your page for compatibility with different browsers, operating systems and hardware.

In this article, I will discuss four compatibility issues. They are by no means exhaustive, but they are at least starting points to designing a site that will be viewable by more visitors.

Screen Resolution Issues
When I first wrote this article in 2000, the majority of visitors (53%) arriving at thefreecountry.com (where this article was first published before thesitewizard.com came into existance) used a display resolution of 800×600, 31% used 1024×768, and only 8% used 640×480. This situation has changed, and today, the bulk of my visitors at both sites are roughly divided between using a screen resolution of 800×600 and 1024×768 (with insignificant numbers using other resolutions).

If you design your site with fixed widths, you need to be aware of the above. For example, if you design for the 1024×768 screen resolution, you will force almost half your visitors (if your site has the same visitor make-up as mine) to scroll their screens horizontally to see the entire page. Horizontal scrolling irritates a number people (particularly if they have to scroll left and right continually just to read your sentences), hence many sites try to avoid it. They do this by either designing with a fluid design (as thesitewizard.com currently does), where the page automatically fits whatever screen resolution the visitor uses, or by designing it for a worst case screen resolution (either 800×600 or 640×480).

If fixed width is your cup of tea, in my opinion, you should not design your pages to require more than a 800×600 display resolution. Doing so will probably displease at least half your visitors, who will have to repeatedly scroll horizontally (back and forth) just to read the sentences on your page. If, despite this, you feel that you need a fixed canvas larger than 800×600, you can use a trick I’ve noticed on some sites: they put optional material (like advertisements) in the rightmost column of their web page. This allows visitors who have smaller screens to ignore the rightmost column; they can read the main content without having to scroll horizontally.

Of course, if you only use relative widths with percentages like 100%, 80%, your page already caters to different screen resolutions (unless you put graphic images on your page that exceed the widths of the columns).

Colour Limitations
It may or may not come as a surprise to you that a colour code like “#F2C3BE” results in different colours on different systems, depending on the number of colours in your visitors’ colour palettes, their monitors, etc.

For example, if you choose a colour that looks good on your 24-bit colour system (“True Color” on Windows, “millions of colors” on Mac), and your visitor goes to your site using a 256 colour setting on his system, your colour will be dithered to fit into the more limited number of colours in his palette.

What looks to you like beautiful shades of colours may thus turn out to be ugly combinations on a different system.

Of course, few people use 256 colours on their system anymore. As such, many webmasters are abandoning the old technique of only using colour combinations that are multiples of the hexadecimal “33″ (which are supposed to be safe to use in that they display fairly similarly across the main platforms).

However, if you think that you can now use the next lowest denominator, the 16-bit colour setting (“High Color” on Windows, “thousands of colors” on Mac) safely, think again. Contrary to what you might expect, the 16-bit colour palette is not a subset of the 24-bit colour palette: apart from black and white, the colours in the two palettes are not identical. If you design the colour scheme of your site while working from one palette, be sure to switch to the other colour setting to make sure that your colour scheme blends well in the other setting as well.

Frames
I’m looking at frames from two points of views here: screen resolution and people who browse your site using speech software.

One common complaint that people have against sites using frames is usually that webmasters tend to forget that visitors don’t have the same large screen resolution that the designers have when they created the web page. Sites with frames tend to provide a smaller area for people to view the main content of the site, since the outer frames occupy some of the screen real estate as well. If the web designer has not checked his site using a lower screen resolution like 800×600 and 640×468, and tested its usability with those lower resolutions, he may not be aware that the site is difficult to use in such situations. Visitors may have to scroll horizontally and vertically continually just to read the content. The situation is worse if the designer removed the scroll bar (because it looked fine without it on his high resolution screen), and visitors find they can no longer scroll left/right/up/down to read the content.

If you use frames on your site – be sure to check how it appears under lower resolutions. By “check”, I don’t mean to see if your site still looks pretty. Try reading all the content on your site with those resolutions. If you find that the site is inconvenient to use under those resolutions, you may need to rethink your design. Remember, your visitors don’t have the same amount of patience with your site that you have.

Framed pages also pose certain difficulties for people who have to use speech software to access your pages, such as the visually impaired. Unlike people using a visual web browser, the speech software reads every item on your pages and frames serially. The person using such software does not have to ability to skip portions of the page because it appears irrelevant. Neither is he able to match what is displayed on one frame with the content appearing in another. Remember – matching the content of one frame with another requires ability to see the layout.

I’m not saying that this necessarily precludes the use of frames on your site. What is needed, instead, if you think you really need to use frames on your site, is to plan carefully so that both the user with a low screen resolution and the person using speech software are able to access your site as you intend.

JavaScript Availability
Should you use JavaScript on your web page? While it is true that many people use browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, all of which support it, it is also true that there is a small percentage of people who use browsers that do not support JavaScript. This small percentage is not confined to people using old browsers or those that have disabled JavaScript in their browsers. People who use handheld devices may not be able to read the content generated using JavaScript on your site.

My personal preference is not to rely entirely on JavaScript to get the job done. That is, whenever I use JavaScript in my pages, I try to make the page work even if JavaScript is not available. By “work”, I mean that the visitor is still able to navigate the site and read the material on the page. In certain situations, I use a combination of JavaScript and server side scripts (such as PHP scripts) to do the job: the JavaScript is used if possible, else, a server side script is invoked if the visitor hits a form button.

Conclusion
Plan your website from the start to take into account compatibility issues. This way, you know that your site will benefit from the widest audience that you’ve strived so hard to obtain.

Copyright 2000-2002 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this, on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from http://www.thesitewizard.com/

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

Some Background Information: What does Validating HTML or CSS Mean?
For those who are unfamiliar with what validating a web page (ie validating your HTML or CSS code) means, it basically refers to using a program or an online service to check that the web page that you created is free of errors.

In particular, an HTML validator checks to make sure the HTML code on your web page complies with the standards set by the W3 Consortium (the organisation that issues the HTML standards). There are various types of validators – some check only for errors, others also make suggestions about your code, telling you when a certain way of writing things might lead to (say) unexpected results.

The W3 Consortium has its own online validator which you can use for free. It may be found at: http://validator.w3.org/

A CSS validator checks your Cascading Style Sheets in the same manner; basically, most will check them to make sure that they comply with the CSS standards set by the W3 Consortium. There are a few which will also tell you which CSS features are supported by which browsers (since not all browsers are equal in their CSS implementation).

Again, you can get free validation for your style sheets from the W3 Consortium: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

There are numerous other validators around, both free and commercial, focusing on various aspects of ensuring that your code will run trouble-free across browsers and platforms. You can find a list of free ones (including specialised validators like those that check your code for accessibility) from Free HTML Validators, CSS Validators, Accessibility Validators at http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/htmlvalidators.shtml

Note that validating your web page does not ensure that it will appear as you want in various browsers. It merely ensures that your code is without HTML or CSS syntax errors. Ensuring that your code appears correctly in different browsers require cross browser testing. You can read more information about how to do this even if you only have one computer from the article How to Check Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Computer at http://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/multiplebrowsers.shtml

Why Validate Your HTML Code?
The proponents of HTML validation (and CSS validation, of course) say that there are a number of reasons why you should validate your code:

It Helps Cross-Browser, Cross-Platform and Future Compatibility
Although you may be able to create a web page that appears to work on your favourite browser (whatever that may be), your page may contain HTML errors (or CSS errors) that do not show up with that browser due to an existing quirk or bug. Another person using a different browser that does not share that particular bug will wind up viewing a page that does not show up correctly. It is also possible that later versions of your browser will fix that bug, and your page will be broken when people use the latest incarnation of the browser.

Coding your pages so that it is correct without errors will result in pages that are more likely to work across browsers and platforms (ie, different systems). It is also a form of insurance against future versions of browsers, since all browsers aim towards compliance with the existing HTML and CSS standards.

Search Engine Visibility
When there are errors in a web page, browsers typically try to compensate in different ways. Hence some browsers may ignore the broken elements while others make assumptions about what the web designer was trying to achieve. The problem is that when search engines obtain your page and try to parse them for keywords, they will also have to make certain decisions about what to do with the errors. Like browsers, different search engines will probably make different decisions about those errors in the page, resulting in certain parts of your web page (or perhaps even the entire page if your error is early in the page) not being indexed.

The safest way, it is held, is to make sure that your web page validates error-free. That way, there is no dispute about which part of your page should be scanned for keywords and the like.

Professionalism
Even if you test your web site with all the various browsers in existence on all the platforms in use (Mac, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc) and find that it works perfectly in all, errors in your site reflect poorly on your skill as a web developer.

The issue is two-fold: firstly, a poorly coded web page reveals that either the web designer does not know his stuff or is a sloppy worker; secondly, it affects his marketability.

Why Not Validate?
Those who are against a blanket rule about validation often cite the following reasons:

Validation is No Guarantee that Page Works
Even if you validate your code, you still have to test it in the various browsers. Having code with no syntax errors does not mean that the HTML or CSS code does what you want. Hence some of the proponents of this view argue that the main goal when designing a web page is to make sure it is viewable and usable by your visitors, not some esoteric goal of standards compliance.

Time Constraint for Conversion
In an ideal world, you want all your pages to be usable and error free. In the real world however, many web designers with thousands of existing pages will be hard-pressed to find time to convert all those pages so that they validate correctly. Since these pages are already doing well on the web, both with existing browsers and search engines, time is better spent doing work that is actually productive.

The Average Visitor Does Not Check Your Source Code
Against the argument about professionalism is the counter-argument that the average visitor to your site is not likely to go around your site viewing the source code to your pages in an effort to locate HTML or CSS errors. To the visitor, how the page appears in his/her browser is the true test of the web designer’s skill.

One Possible Solution
Like some web designers, I started designing web sites long before I realized that there were tools that could validate my pages for correctness. By the time I started validating and correcting my pages, I already had hundreds of existing pages that I needed to correct, including pages on thesitewizard.com and thefreecountry.com.

My concerns were primarily cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility as well as search engine indexability. I didn’t want an error on my pages that I might miss seeing with my browser but that creeps up in other browsers, systems or the search engines. However, the problem was that converting hundreds of pages is not exactly my idea of a pleasant day’s work.

I decided to take the approach I saw on a website. If I remember correctly, I think it was the W3 Consortium’s own website that mentioned this method. At that time, they had a notice stating that they knew that not all their pages complied with the standards. However, all new pages they created will validate correctly, as will any old pages that they updated.

I realise that this is not the “ideal” that some webmasters argue for; but it is a practical solution for a web designer with many existing pages. If you are in the same boat, with too many existing pages to contemplate revamping everything, you might want to consider taking this route. It may not salve your pride (ie, the craftsman’s pride at producing a perfect work), but at least it will help you cope with the workload.

How Often Should I Validate?
Some people validate every time they make a modification to their pages on the grounds that careless mistakes can occur any time. Others validate only when they make a major design change.

I always validate the template for my pages when I make a major design change. I try to validate my pages each time I make modifications, although I must admit that I sometimes forget to do so (with the occasional disastrous consequence; Murphy’s Law doesn’t spare webmasters).

I find that having an offline validator helps to make sure that I remember to validate: having to go online just to validate my pages tends to make me put off validation till later, with the result that it’ll occasionally get overlooked. For those not familiar with the terminology I use, when I say “offline validator” I simply mean a validator that I can download and install in my own computer so that I can run it on my pages without having to go to the W3 Consortium’s website. You can find offline validators on the free validators page I mentioned earlier, that is, http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/htmlvalidators.shtml

The HTML Tidy validator (listed on that page) is available for numerous platforms (including Linux, Mac, Windows, etc) and has proven helpful to many webmasters the world over.

Conclusion
Validating your HTML and CSS code for standards compliance has certain benefits: it protects your pages from problems arising from syntax errors in your code due to different ways of interpreting errors by the search engines and other browsers. If, however, you have a large number of existing pages that have not been validated and corrected, but nonetheless work well in search engines and other browsers, you might need to consider some sort of strategy (such as the one I used) to prevent webmaster-overload.

Copyright 2003-2004 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this, on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from http://www.thesitewizard.com/.