Web Standards - Page 3

Find out how web standards and best practices can improve everything you do as a designer. Learn how to build projects that are standards compliant!

Web Standards / 29 Jun 2010

5 Ways to Be an Ethical SEO Expert

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a huge buzzword among marketers for years. The reason for this is that search engines can be legitimate sources of mountains of traffic for your site and the higher you rank on them the better.

The problem that arose in the early days of SEO was a blatant abuse of the system. What began as a few innocent tricks to earn more visitors morphed into questions of etiquette and heated debates regarding what should and shouldn’t be allowed. The web design community has come a long way in the past decade but there are plenty of marketers that still follow the tactics of the 90s either through ignorance or defiance.

Today we’ll briefly look at how to engage in SEO in an ethical manner by pointing out five key techniques to avoid.

HTML / 5 May 2010

Entering the Era of Device Testing

This article will discuss the history and future of the web and what implications that has for how device testing will begin to play a larger role in the obligations of web designers.

As the presence of web enabled devices increases the key question that will arise relates to not only whether or not your design will function on a given device, but also (and perhaps more importantly) how high the quality of the experience will be on that device.

Accessibility / 1 May 2010

Learning From Microsoft: 10 Design Pitfalls to Avoid

Today we’ll look into the web design practices and trends of the single biggest name in software to see if we can learn anything about some mistakes to avoid in our own work.

Feel free to comment to either agree or disagree with the suggestions below. As professional designers your insight is valuable and I look forward to your thoughts.

Accessibility / 19 Mar 2010

12 Tips for a More Accessible Website

Making your website accessible to everyone is not only a moral duty, it’s a legal obligation. Many organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, have been sued for not making their websites accessible enough. With 50 million Americans suffering from some disability or other, improving your site’s accessibility makes clear commercial sense too.

CSS / 12 Feb 2010

Why You Should Build a Front End Package

How do you begin building a website?

The majority of developers probably start from scratch or pull in a few resources from previous sites. The more organized among us have developed a custom toolbox from which to begin a site that proves to be an essential part of their workflow.

Today we’ll discuss why you should consider building your own front end package to serve as a starting point for every single site you create.

HTML / 26 Oct 2009

HTML5: Get It Working Today (4 of 4)

This will be the final article in our series on HTML5. This go around we’ll have a brief look at which new HTML5 technologies major browsers are officially supporting and go over some techniques you can use to take advantage of the new elements in your coding today. Finally, we’ll discuss how you should start preparing to support HTML5 in all the sites you build from here forward.

HTML / 23 Oct 2009

HTML5: Semantic Changes (3 of 4)

In the last article, we looked at a number of new elements introduced in HTML5 and how to implement them properly. In this article, we’ll again be discussing a set of new elements but this time we’ll be examining only those HTML5 elements that represent a significant semantic change to the way you structure your sites. This article will cover how to use each of these new elements in a way that will bring much needed relief to the div-itus that plagues the structure of so many sites today.

HTML / 21 Oct 2009

HTML5: New Elements (2 of 4)

A couple of days ago we posted an introduction to HTML5 and briefly covered some of the content we’ll be outlining in this series. Today’s post, which is the second in the series of four, will take a look at how to use six of the new elements in HTML5: canvas, article, audio, video, meter, and mark.

Keep in mind that HTML5 is not exactly ready for widespread use – so don’t go changing anything on your site quite yet. Be assured that HTML5 is in fact coming soon, therefore these concepts may prove useful in the near future.

HTML / 19 Oct 2009

HTML5: The Basics (1 of 4)

The next iteration of HTML has been met with excitement by some, loathing by others and confusion/fear by everyone else. Love it or hate it, HTML 5 will soon define how you build websites. This is the first article in a four part series that will introduce HTML5 and its basic features as well as explain the key differences from HTML4.01 and XHTML 1.0 so you can start preparing yourself and your sites for the transition. Over the next week we’ll be focusing on three major areas:

1. New Elements
2. Semantic Changes
3. Getting it Working Today

This article will briefly introduce each of these topics to prepare you for the in-depth articles ahead.

Accessibility / 16 Jul 2007

The Basics of Semantics

Semantics is a word which strikes fear into many a designer’s heart, but it need not be a difficult or complicated topic. It concerns meaningful expression, avoiding presentational markup and using appropriate and meaningful tags where possible.

Essentially, designing and writing HTML code in a semantic way is as simple as keeping your HTML concerned with the content of the page and not the layout. Some of the simple steps below will help you to ensure that you stay semantically pleasing to search engines, spiders and visitors

Articles / 6 Jul 2007

The Need for Standards

More and more is being said about web standards and the need to build compliant sites. That’s all well and good, but why is that the case, and what are the benefits to you of designing with standards in mind? How can you persuade a client to spend extra money on a standards compliant website?