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Making a proffesional website.
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30-07-2008 10:04pm#1
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SligoToday wrote: »Search engine optimisation is a real buzzword these days but its not that complicated.
Really?? I'd love to hear other SEOs view on this one!
It's not complicated if you aren't in a competitive area. When it gets competitive, that's where it gets complicated!0 -
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So I wonder what you can do then for my hotel site? And I wouldn't mind if you could help me rank my airline ticket site? Now how about doing this on a global scale, not just Irish search results?SligoToday wrote: »Search engine optimisation is a real buzzword these days but its not that complicated. A few simple truths we have found.
Obviously you haven't actually had experience of competitive SEO. I've been involved in SEO for a number of years now, and I still cant get my head around most of it. I confess to reading the odd patent, and running the odd SEO experiment, and I can say hand on heart it's extremely complex to work out the ins-and-outs of how and why Search Engines rank sites as they do. Even still the odd soul considers me to be an expert in this field.
I agree completely that SEO is a buzzword, but anyone who tells you SEO is simple obviously has limited knowledge, and has no experience in competitive Internet niches.
There's my €0.02 0 -
RedCardinal wrote: »
I agree completely that SEO is a buzzword, but anyone who tells you SEO is simple obviously has limited knowledge, and has no experience in competitive Internet niches.
There's my €0.02
I agree with the above! my statement was made from my own experience which has not been extensive when it comes to the competitive niches you are talking about.
I mistook the term "competitive" to mean competition between web designers, My bad. I need to go and read some stuff.0 -
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You're absolutely right, thanks oeb. I've made a bit of a correction in my original post
AFAIK though, it is law for government websites etc. URL="http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/#Ireland"]link[/URL, but not for anyone else. Anyone have more info on that? So anyone working on a contract to design a government related site must make it accessible.
In any case, making your sites accessible is just good practice, and I'm sure most businesses wouldn't want to lose out on potential customers due to their web designers laziness.0 -
You're absolutely right, thanks oeb. I've made a bit of a correction in my original post AFAIK though, it is law for government websites etc. URL="http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/#Ireland"]link[/URL, but not for anyone else. Anyone have more info on that? So anyone working on a contract to design a government related site must make it accessible.
In any case, making your sites accessible is just good practice, and I'm sure most businesses wouldn't want to lose out on potential customers due to their web designers laziness.
Alot of larger companies or organizations that I have dealt with (From Irish Chamber of Commerce groups to multi-national companies) do have accessibility very high on their checklist. I believe that any professional web development agency should feel the ethecial responsibility to deliver the best possible solution to their clients. Accesibility and useability should rate very highly on any potential solution.0 -
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Wow, there's been a few replies with a lot of interesting info since just last night, where do I start? :rolleyes: In any case, the one thing I don't want to happen is for this thread to turn into a "flame war" (I hate using that phrase). And tomED, my original reply wasn't meant to be a personal attack or anything like that against you, and there's been a lot of stuff which has been cleared up since then so I guess I'll just get started...With all the facts on the table. It's already requried under EU law for all commercial sites to be accessible - it just hasn't been enforced.
Thanks for clearing that one up. Any idea if there's any plan to start enforcing it any time soon?The fact remains - you don't need to code your website to the latest coding standards for it to be accessible.
Absolutely true, but not using the latest and greatest accessibility methods and using tables for layout are two entirely different things I think everyone here can agree.In fact, you could go as far as saying that coding your website to the latest standard actually goes against the fundementals of the EU accessibility directive.
One of the key factors in the directive is to provide "accessibility for all", which means that providing our sites in the latest coding standards, that won't work on older browsers, is in fact in breach of this. Now there's something you can debate and it's something that is being debated for WCAG 2.0 - hence the reason we don't see the new standards based around coding issues, but more common sensical approaches.
That's an interesting point and one I've also been thinking about lately. There's really no easy solution to this, but I think we have to make progress, however slowly. At some point some browsers just have to cease to matter. I think we're in a situation now where we can safely design for at least IE6 and above (for people who are using visual browsers), and by using proper HTML / xHTML & CSS we can ensure that our site is accessible to people using screen reading software or text based browsers etc.Again - I don't know how long you are doing this, but I'd love to know how many companies you've worked with.
In short, not many. That's a fair question though. I'm currently working on my portfolio, and also working on a personal project that's stressing me out no end (I'm sure you can all relate to that one :rolleyes:). But the fact that I'm not around that long doesn't have too much to do with the fact that I really do enjoy doing this and learning as much as I can, and I think that's what's most important in these cases.Because someone uses a WYSIWYG editor, does not mean they can't code high quality HTML & CSS. It just means they know they can get the job done a lot quicker.
One point that is not being made clear here is what people are actually using a WYSIWYG for.
Obviously if you are in the midst of writing code, you are not going to be using the visual element of the WYSIWYG. However, if you are working on creating the template, the visual element is of great help.
Oh and yeah, I've still yet to see someone who cant type a hyperlink quicker than you can do one in a WYSIWYG editor.....
This is probably the biggest misunderstanding of this thread, and one I'd like to clear up right now. Everyone has a different workflow, and everyone likes instant gratification (I'm probably using that phrase in the completely wrong context, but you get the point). With tools like Coda, Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar you can write code and instantly see how it looks in a browser, which is great. And with advanced text editors such as Textmate on Mac, Notepad++ on Windows and Gedit on Linux it's possible to speed up you're workflow with templates and 'snippets' (e.g. you type <a and the editor automatically creates a full link tag, allowing you to tab into the href="", title="" sections etc.). This is a common workflow I know most designers to be using (through friends, blogs etc.) and it's also the one I use. If you use dreamweaver to insert a link because it's quicker then that's the same thing, and nobody's going to take issue with that.
What I personally thought you were talking about is people using the likes of Dreamweaver or other 'real' WYSIWYG editors to create their whole sites, which in pretty much every case outputs less than clean code, and just isn't proffesional. If you're a designer who can't code, then find someone who can and outsource the coding or even team up, just don't slice your Photoshop (or whatever graphics editor you use) design in a WYSIWYG editor and hand a shoddy website to a paying client.The only way to truly check if a website is accessible is to try use it with the tools available to people with activity limitations.
How many of you have actually tried this?
I would imagine I'm probably the only one here that has gone through this process.It is something I go through on a regular basis. And as I said above, I believe every professional designer should have the ethicial requirement to do it.
Absolutely, testing your design in whatever screen readers, browsers, text-browsers etc. you can get your hands on should be standard practice for every designer, and I think it is now (for the decent ones at least).And there are tools available to duplicate color blindness etc which I pass all sites through.
That's an interesting one, and something I admit I don't do. Do you find that affecting your design decisions oeb or are you just curious as to how people with the various forms of colour blindness see your sites?
I only have one more thing to quote and then I'm wrapping this up.However, you just have to look at the latest release of FF and IE8 Beta to see that it doesn't neccessarily mean that they will continue to PROPERLY support these standards.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for standards and we all know as developers how much easier our job would be if there were standards that everyone adhered to. However, that's an ideal world at the moment.
That's a great point tomED, but I do think those standards that aren't universal in browsers are mostly visual (such as text-shadow etc.), CSS3 stuff basically. Most modern browsers really do have a fairly consistent support for the standards which count for accessibility. I would be interested in finding out more about this though, to see if there are any accessibility standards not supported etc. but the most important thing really is the seperation of data from layout, and that that data should be layed out in a logical form.0 -
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@ Gazza - ok again I didn't go into detail on what the different versions of HTML were developed for. I really didn't want to go down that road. But yes I agree with you.
@ Never a flame war with me! It's just a healthy discussion - I've enjoyed it!
I agree that the biggest problem was specifying what exactly was being done with the editing of sites wasn't clear. That's where most of the conversation came from.
All in all - if the OP didn't get anything from this - he wasn't reading it! 0
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