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R a n d o m W e b m a s t e r ' s T i p s
Tutorials: • Webmasters tips • Meta Tags • CSS • Choosing the right Hosting •
• HTML colors Palette • MySQL database •
• Images. Please check if all the images has correct alt tags, i.e. after the image source, you place alt="image description here". After that, every image must have width and height value. Example: <img src="images/picture.gif" alt="this is my photo" width="273" height="88"> Also, make sure the image`s path is linking to a particular folder on your server and not to your hard drive, nor to other`s servers.
• Links. You can use the Xenu freeware to check all if all your links and images are loaded properly on your server. Moreover, all the links that lead to other websites must have target="_blank" (so that they will open in a separate window).
• Meta Tags. The best way to check if you use your meta tags correct is to see what is your page rank. This tells, how "important" your site is to the search engines, and how many people link to your site, which are the main sources of visitors. You can check your Google rank here or here .
• Check your code for accuracy. There are a several online validators, W3C, WDG or your may want to download CSE HTML Validator Lite (freeware) for validation check while working offline. If you are using CSS style, make sure it also works with no errors by clicking here.
• Browser`s capability. Now everyone uses IE today, so your aim is to make sure that anyone will be able to view your website properly, regardless the browser he uses. The only way to check this, is by downloading all the major browsers, Firefox, Netscape and Opera, to browse your site in each and every browser and make sure it displays properly with no visual errors. Get these browsers here:
Firefox Opera Browser Netscape Browser
• Scripts. Make sure you have reduced the use of Java scripts to the utmost minimum. Excess of Java code may crash and freeze the browser or, most likely, slow down the loading time.
• Top •
• Navigation. Imagine that your visitor has no browser`s back button... will he still be able to navigate easily through your website? Always useful to have a menu that allows to access any page of your site and a "back" button, in case your visitor would want to get back to the page he previously read. You can use a simple Java script <a href="javascript:history.back()">Back</a> for this purpose.
• Spelling. Run online spell check, to make sure you exclude the possibility of typos. You can use SpellCheck or Spellex.
• Contrast. There should be a good contrast between your background and your text. Feel free to use Juicy Studio and analyze this aspect of your design, if you have doubts.
• Document type. before the <html> tag, always specify the type of the coding you are going to use. For HTML 4.01 transitional:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
For XHTML 1.1:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
• Copyright. Copyright violation is taken very seriously these days. Sometimes it happens that you want to take something from a page that has no option of contacting the master, no terms of use nor copyright statement. That does not mean you may use this material, as it could have been borrowed from another site with protected copyright. Copyscape could be the answer, because when you type the URL of the page you wish to use, it will indicate where else on the web, this material appears. You may, on the other hand, use it to protect your site from plagiarizm and copyright violation.
These were just brief tips as to how you can improve the quality of your website. I hope this would be of use to the beginners! Should you have any questions, or wish to receive a more extended explanation regarding any of the mentioned tips, please contact me and I would be glad to help in anyway I can!
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