KhmerAK* | Arts & Kodes

Great websites are not site that has only the great look and feel (Layout, or what you see on the screen) but it has to be also great to what we do not see on the screen. Because somehow the websites that we make are not only view from the same situation and used by the same people, some would probably view your site from their laptop or desktop using different web browsers, some might view your site from handheld device and especially some of those might found your site hard to navigate and find informations… and so on.  For example in the last decade you probably have heard about the browser war between Netscape, safari, Internet explorer, opera and some others that have made web designer always headache every time he/she making new website that can be view from wide variety of people because those browsers have developed by different companies and were trying to go on their own way of rendering ht ml pages that was why the web designers had to widely understand of each browser attitude so that they can code correctly for the browser to render their page because they cannot know which browser their visitor will use. Now this war is quiet because everyone has agree to go on a standard way or rendering the web page. Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Opera 9…all have upgrade themselves and brought a lot more features and benefit for browsing the web. If you design site for all these latest browser you would not probably headache to care how it will render in each browser, just code your site toward web-standard you site will automatically be a browser happy site. Sound’s cool?

However, the problem still exist because the site that we design should not only be designed to happy the browsers but it should be designed for the visitors ( Human and machine: not only human who will visit our site but some machine might visit our site too ) that is why we should always care about the usability and accessibility. How our site can be easy to use and can be used by many.

So, what should we keep in mind?

• Clean design is always good. Do not mes sup your site, you would probably make your visitor feel not clean
• Always keep the global navigation. A group of short-cuts to main or important pages. Do not make your visitor feel lost while walking in your house.
• Title every of the object used in the page so that everyone will know what it is event they cannot see it. Use attribute title=” “
• Stop using Table if you’re not displaying grid data ( Layout with CSS Layout )
• Use graphics as less as possible to style your site. Some possibilities can be done by using CSS
• Always care about the media that will be used to view your site. Code the CSS for screen, print, handheld, … so that your site is screen-friendly, print-friendly, and handheld-friendly. You may find Opera useful while working toward these possibilities.
• Keep the code tidy. Always valid your code vs W3C validator to keep your code tidy and valid in the standard. If you use WYSIWYG editor to html your page like frontpage, dreamweaver and some other programs, always care to check what those program generate the html code for you while you typing the text you want. If it’s not tidy, let’s tidy it up.
• Most of your visitor might still using old windows version with Internet explorer version so your site might not work properly if you code for latest version only. Alaways check vs old Internet Explorer version

Hm..well i think your site is getting more perfect now. But, there might be more from what I list above so if you have It is always good to share your best ideas make the list more useful. From above list are just what I have done and though it is good to do. If you do not agree, do not hesitate to should it now!

Happy Geekie!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.