|
|
| Webmaster Articles |
|
|
|
|
Mobile Accessibility - Your website in the year 2005Philip Wylie Throughout 2004 the number of web enabled portable devices boomed. By “portable devices" I mean PDAs and smart phones. What does this mean for you Well it depends whether or not you care about your visitors’ experience - you build your website for visitors so you really should! Nokia, Vodafone, Microsoft and others have already applied to ICANN for the new TLD Top Level Domain .mobi. If the new TLD is accepted not only will this create hundreds more “domain for sale” sites but will it will also help mobile users find optimized pages. When a website optimized for a desktop computer is viewed on a small screen, the horizontal scrollbars are usually stretched by the header and footer, inevitably this means the textual content area is also stretched. "Fit to screen" on Pocket PCs shrinks images on the page and attempts to display the text on one screen without horizontal scrollbars. There is no need to create a whole new site dedicated for mobile users, as not only would that be time consuming it is also unnecessary, due to mobile browsers being able to render most code without problems. Simply make your new site with a more logical, clean appearance. You should avoid relying on drop down menus for navigation as they use “mouse over” and JavaScript which doesn’t necessarily work. When building your website I recommend that you use a top header with a horizontal menu underneath - preferably not made from images as the user may have selected not to view images. If you must use images for navigation remember to add alt tags. If your content area uses columns be sure that the main contents are on the left. The “fit to screen” function will move the text to the left hand side saving the visitor from having to scroll. The footer should contain a link to the top of the page in the form of an anchor tag. A link to your sitemap is important as it allows visitors to reach the information they want quickly. Optimize your images as usual in GIF/JPEG formats. Testing your website is vital before you fully launch to the public, try viewing your site with a number of different devices. If the browser is able, use "fit to screen" and view the page without images. It doesnt have to be perfect just as long as you can easily navigate all your pages and view the content without scrolling.
| | | | RELATED ARTICLES Are You A Bill Clinton Webmaster One of the most frequent questions I get asked about my ebook, Dont Get Banned BY The Search Engines, is whether I amended it to include post-Florida Google."Florida" is the code name that search engine optimizer wizards gave to a November, 2003, shakeup at Google that left many webmasters covering themselves up with makeshift fig leaves while dangling upside down above the proverbial crocodile moat. How Web Design Can Affect Search Engine Rankings Uniquely built web sites can create unique issues when promoting your site on the search engines. From a basic 3 page brochure site, to a corporate site with hundreds of dynamically generated pages, every web site needs to have certain design aspects in order to achieve the full effects of an SEO campaign. Below are a few points to take into consideration when building or updating your web site. Beginner Guide to Web Hosting What is web hosting Whenever you visit a website, what you see on your web browser is essentially just a web page that is downloaded from the web server onto your web browser. In general, a web site is made up of many web pages. And a web page is basically composed of texts and graphic images. All these web pages need to be stored on the web servers so that online users can visit your website. The Benefits Of Outsourcing The year 2005 is expected to be the year of "outsourcing". Ten Basic Steps For Building A Web Site That Works Optimizing for Visitors not Search Engines Most people feel that optimizing is to target the search engines alone. In my opinion, this is not the only case. Optimization requires a balance of traffic enhancements and a user friendly atmosphere that provides clear navigation. Most will agree it would be much better to have people accept offerings from a Site, rather than masses of people who do nothing. Here are some general tips and thought to make pages user-friendly. Website Development: Become Your Own Expert Starting and maintaining a business is challenging enough without the additional financial burden of hiring a web site expert to put your vision on paper.If you are starting your business on a “shoe string budget,” hiring someone to take your written materials to type in a basic format, add a few pictures and edit what you tell them periodically may not be sound money management. Why You Need A Web Site "I have a small business with just a couple of employees and I don’t think my product can really be sold online. Do I need a web site" Tapping Into The Visual Stimulus Of Your Web Site Visitors "Oh, my eyes, my eyes! What an eye sore. Quick, click away! Click away!" Web Hosting: Shared or Dedicated - Which Should You Choose Before you begin your search for a web host you should first determine whether you need shared web hosting or dedicated web hosting. Email tips and tricks Excerpted from the upcoming book The Busy Persons Guide to a Profitable Website and PlanetLinks Enews - an email newsletter delivered for FREE to your computer. To subscribe, go to www.planetlink.com. Track Your Visitors, Using PHP There are many different traffic analysis tools, ranging from simple counters to complete traffic analyzers. Although there are some free ones, most of them come with a price tag. Why not do it yourself With PHP, you can easily create a log file within minutes. In this article I will show you how! Website Theft - Part 2 of 3 ~ How do I know if my website material has been stolen and what do I do if it has Please note that some of the information included in this article has been quoted from various locations while other information is simply my personal opinion and you will probably feel my passion in my words. How To Build Your First Web Site Getting Started! 7 Key Points to Consider When Choosing a Web Host With literally thousands of web hosting companies in the industry all vieing for your business, carefully consider these key points to ensure you make the most well informed decision possible. What is Blogger.com In the late 1990’s three San Francisco based web developers came up with the idea of being able to share information about anything on the web. The terminology they used was called blog. Its use was considered a mix of web page / personal journal. Its original usages were vast and wide, but more and more people came to use them as a personal tool that is available anywhere the Internet is. The three friends would eventually create Blogger.com one of the largest blogger sites on the Internet today. Blogger, which stands for Web Logger, has increased in popularity over the past three years. There has been so much interest in what capabilities it holds Google.com purchased them. Eventually, Google assimilated their technologies and imported them into the popular plug-in, The Google Toolbar. web page building for beginners 3 An inexperienced website builder must understand that free web hosting is a great way to get more than one site up and running quickly, and that www.articlecity.com is the fastest and easiest way to fill those sites with relevant material. For instance, my site at www.saquoyah.com has one hundred and sixty pages that were written by various authors and posted at ArticleCity by the writers. This arrangement fulfills five purposes to the satisfaction of everyone involved. First the writers of the articles get to help the readers and themselves by having links back to their websites. Second, ArticleCity gets many links to their index page and that in turn keeps their site in a top placement with search engines. Third, the little website owner saves an enormous amount of writing, yet gets his or her website full of pages that link back to their index page, so the search engines will place their site a little higher in placement. Fourth, the person doing a search gets to find a lot of points of view by various writers on the one subject they are poring over. Fifth, the search engines have more pages in their database for the searchers to look through. Search Engine Optimization and Web Site Usability Build a Web site and the people will come. Are Web Templates Worth It First off, I am a designer. Now youre thinking, heres this guy trying to convince me to hire a designer costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars instead of buying a pre-made web template for about $60. Well, these days most companies dont have the money to invest in a costly web site and there are thousands of hungry web designers out there, plus now there are web template resources. These resources can equal great value and effectiveness for the customer as well as increased business for the web designer. |
| home | site map |
|
|