HTML is an amazing language that has changed the online world. One of the great features of HTML is that, by and large, it works the same for all browsers. Credit for this goes to the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). This is a group whose goal is to bring the Web to its full potential and act as a gatekeeper of changes to HTML. The W3C offers a number of useful tools to help you validate your HTML. These tools are great, but the W3C’s standards are incredibly high. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a website with which the W3C’s tools can’t find a problem. Don’t worry: Use the W3C’s validation tool to catch the obvious problems, and don’t sweat the super small stuff. The Validator then checks your web page and returns a report with errors or warnings. The Validator is probably going to find tons of things “wrong” with your page. Read the report carefully and evaluate whether the errors and warnings are really important. Some errors are major, such as HTML problems you might not have caught, while others are very minor. Review the results, and use the Validator again whenever you make substantial changes to your website.
Not everyone on the web uses the same browser. Whenever one browser seems to have a dominant lead on the market another one comes along. In the early ’90s this became a big problem with web developers because the browsers all began using their own HTML tags and interpreting standard tags in different ways. This means that if you are serious about testing your website, you need to test it on the major browsers. To test your site on different browsers, you should have the latest versions of the following browsers installed so that you can check your website on them:
■ Mozilla FireFox
■ Microsoft Internet Explorer
■ Safari
■ Opera
■ Flock
■ Chrome
Keep in mind that some browsers read HTML differently than others. You should always pay attention to a couple of things when checking other browsers (they have all caused problems in the past):
■ Tables
■ Lists
■ Forms
■ Scripts
Just because you have your computer set at one resolution doesn’t mean that everyone has the same resolution. Testing your website at different resolutions shows you how other people can see your website. Do not design with only your own resolution in mind. It is common for new website designers to think everyone has resolution settings that are the same as those on the developer’s computer. This could not be further from the truth. In the early days of the web, you could depend on people having 800x600 or 1024x768 resolutions, but now with fancy plasma widescreen monitors the list of resolutions in use has grown. Graphics, text, and tables all can look very different at different resolutions. You can test resolutions in a couple of ways:
■ Change your own resolution — One way to see how other people see your site at different resolutions is to change the resolution of your monitor and look at your site. This works well but becomes tedious.
■ Use a web tool — Several websites can help you see the resolution on different browsers. The best of these is called Browser Shots. In just a few minutes, you can get images of a website on dozens of browsers at almost as many resolutions and color depths. Browser Shots shows you only pictures, but seeing images can point out problem areas that might show up on other browsers.
If a particular part of your website is intended to be printed — something like a map or form — make sure you test it on several different printers to see how the printed page looks.
How a visitor navigates around the pages of your website is part of its usability. You need clear markers of where the visitor currently is in the website, where they can go, and standard, easy-to-understand navigational elements on each page. It’s important that all your pages have consistent elements so your visitors don’t get lost in a mess of inconsistent web pages.
Along with consistent navigational elements, you also need to make sure your website is graphically consistent. Each page should look similar to all the others. This doesn’t mean they all have to be exactly alike, but they should share visual elements, such as font, color, and arrangement. One thing you might think of doing is making a template for each page. A template is just a model for the look and design of each page that you fill with different content. Templates can range from very complex to very simple. For more advanced web designers, testing consistency of design means testing that your CSS is working properly and the styles are applied to the appropriate text. For more information on using a CSS.
Your website’s security is worth worrying about. You might have created a simple website for your family photos and don’t think you have anything worth worrying about, but a web vandal could gain access to your site and destroy it, or worse, use your website as a base to destroy other websites or gain access to your personal computer. The best place to start is to check security with your hosting provider. You might want to ask your server provider whether they offer 128-bit security, spam protection, firewall protection, or something like ModSecurity, an open source web application firewall. If you are using something like Google Sites, your website’s security is handled by some of the best security on the web, so you have to worry more about spam than high security risks, but if you are running a business site that collects credit card information, you need to be very concerned with security. Check with your hosting provider about how it ensures your website’s security.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Wayne Sears at 01142010
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