Webmaster Apex
A Home for Webmasters

WCAG or Web Content Accessability Guidelines is a set of standards to help ensure that the maximum number of people who view your site can adequately view everything you’ve designed.

The guidelines help the following parties view your website:

• Those with old computers, old browsers, and no support for javascript, flash or other such web design components.
• Those who are blind that use screen readers.
• Many other people with disabilities and hardware/software compatibility issues

Although your site may not necessarily cater to these populations, these guidelines are conducive to good web design too. By following the guidelines and by spending the extra time to create alternatives to your media files, you make your website more search engine friendly and increase your rankings.

Proper usage of HTML and XHTML is very important for websites. Although your website may render properly on your browser with incorrect markup, different browsers treat different errors in HTML differently and you site may look horrendous to visitors on other browsers.

Below is a tool to validate your markup code.

W3C Markup Validator is a service provided by the W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, to help webmasters check the validity of their code. These folks are the people who set the standards for HTML, XHTML, and other markup languages.

In addition to proper usage of HTML, there are other guidelines for web accessability, site optimization and other facets of web design. Unfortunately there is no tool to check if you meet Web Content Accessability Guidelines, but the other guidelines have tools with which to check.

Our posting may not come out as frequently in the next few days as we add more areas to our site. Articles are nice  but often people need tools and resources to help them with their websites.

Without further ado, the following will be completed in the following days:

• Glossary of terms
• Compilation of useful tools and software
• Web host listing and reviews

The planning stage of web design is very important. Many people regard it as unecessary paperwork and ignore it. However it can save you a lot of time to have a clear purpose when designing your website, and it can save you a lot of time.

Structure

Unless you are building a site using a software or CMS like Wordpress or Drupal that has a structure build into it, you may wish to spend some time thinking about how you are going to structure your site. This entails figuring out how you want your website to branch out.

Generally, you don’t want too many levels of organization, that way all your pages are more easily accessible. For example, you could have a Services page and a Resources page and then have some more level of subdivision which includes pages that detail the services you offer and resources for people within your field of expertise.

An example of what NOT to do, would be to have an Articles page which divides into Resources and Services which leads down to various articles that contain special topics within them. If that were to happen, any visitor would have to click through a lot of hyperlinks to finally get to the page they wanted to view. If your site must be organized this way, create a sitemap or have site search to help expediate the process of finding pages.

Goal/Purpose

What is your website made for? If you say, “My site doesn’t have a purpose, I’m just using it to post my personal thoughts on the uses of rubber bands,” then that’s exactly what your purpose is.

By having a purpose for your website, you create a direction for your website and make clear to yourself what the image and the target demographic of your site is. Generally, if you’re not planning to create a major corporation out of your website, you don’t want to target every living internet user in the world.

It also helps you when you are designing you websites image to have an idea of what your site does in mind. If you are providing help and knowledge for professionals, you may wish to create a cleaner site with less bells and whistles and use more conservative colors.

Other

Other things that should be done during the planning stages of a website are highly dependent on what kind of website you are making.

Commercial website or any other website seeking monetary gains should definitely have a business plan written. It doesn’t have to be a full one, but a mini-plan should be written detailing their marketing strategy and features. The should list what competitive edge they have over others and what features they will include. Will the market through opt-in emails? Will they create a monthly newsletter? etc.

Sites providing infomation on their brick-and-mortar business should definitely plan out a FAQ and how they are going to create a quality website. These sites are an extension of the business they represent as people looking for quick information on the businesses will often look online for contact information or general questions. A good website can also help create validity for your business, despite a common notion that websites aren’t required if their businesses are running fine already.

Blogs, resources, and hobby sites generally don’t need as much planning because of the expected informality of their websites.

There are alot of pages that you don’t want to waste your valuable navigation space for, yet you still need to include on your website somewhere. These pages include: a privacy page, a disclosure page, a disclaimer page, an about page and a contact page.

Although the About and the Contact pages should be included in the navigation bar if they are essential to your website, for many smaller informal sites don’t need them in the navigation bar.

Privacy

The privacy page should discuss what you use collected emails for and how you protect the privacy of all your visitors. You can search online for examples of privacy policies and write your own with someone else’s privacy policy as reference.

Disclaimer

A disclaimer page is useful for people marketing goods or some other service that attempts to bring high ROI either in terms of monetary compensation, web traffic, or something else. You should put a disclaimer if it’s not guaranteed that they can recieve the same results you are advertising.

Disclosure

This page basically tells people if you are profiting off of recommendations or advertisments or if there are other external sources of influence that might be influencing what you are writing. Some people also contest that you must have a disclosure policy in order to ethically market affiliate products.

About and Contact

These two pages are almost always a must. The about page should be a short blurb about your website and whatever information about your or your site that you wish to disclose to others. The contact page generally should provide ways to contact you and usually also contains an email form.

Foveal vision is the sharp central vision necessary for humans to read books, watch TV, drive, or browse websites. To optimize creatives such as banners and logos, a quick web related understanding of foveal vision is very useful.

Foveal Vision on the Web

The width of most peoples foveal vision is the width of about five words. The standard logo or ad banner design that fits closest to this size is probably 125 pixels wide. For a 125 pixel wide banner, the standard height is also 125 pixels.

However, the optimal height for a logo or an ad creative is probably a bit shorter than 125 pixels high. This is because readers have a longer horizontal vision than vertical vision. If you think about it, a little more width and a little less height fits the fact that humans have two eyes that are aligned horizontally.

So this would lead us to conclude for the standard web creative, the standard designs of: 120*90, 120*60, 125*125, and 180*150 are the optimal sizes.

Reasoning

If you can focus on one creative and be able to absorb it in a glance without any scanning or eye movement, it becomes easier for you to process the information. Also, many people on websites are simply browsing and anything that doesn’t catch their interest quickly will quickly be ignored. By having a creative that is easily processed, it benefits you immensely.

The rest of my website looks empty now!

Its true that just having an eye catching logo will leave your site looking bare and unprofessional. However, the logo in itself is not your whole website. Don’t skimp on the rest of your site that compliments your main creatives.

A good analogy is that of when you see a dolphin jumping out of the water. All of your attention is focused on the animal and your eyes are not focused on anything else; however, the glittering water, clouds, and bright blue sky make the dolphin look more majestic. What if you saw the same dolphin jumping around in a garbage dump? The dolphin definitely wouldn’t look as majestic.

Tip: You could always use bigger creatives and simply incorporate the concept of foveal vision to various aspects of the creative.

Generally, in web design, there are three main types of navigation menus. Theres the type that goes across the top of the content, the type that goes down the left side of the page, and the type that goes down the right side of the page. Generally, in good web design, you don’t want to stray from these three common navigation bars.

The reason is ease of use. The majority of time that people spend on the web is on other websites and those websites generally use the standard three types of navigation menus. Any non standard one generally will only be intuitively easy to use for the person who made it. The biggest problem with a cool navigation is that new visitors are easily dissuaded from leaving your site and if they can’t figure out how to navigate, they simply won’t.

The most common types of navigation for sites that don’t use standard navigation panels are: no navigation menus, image menus and flash navigation menus. If they look like standard navigation panels, then it should be fine, but usually if a webmaster creates these type of navigation menus, it will be nonstandard. No navigation menu is highly not recommended unless your site only has one page. Image menus could work if all the links are readable and intuitive (Test how intuitive it is by asking friends). Flash ones generally are whole page animations that end with a navigation page. It could work, but it has no SEO value and using the back button is very annoying as the animation must reload.

With all the people still commenting on blogs in an effort to publicize there website, it seems appropriate to address this topic. Blog commenting simply isn’t a viable way to publicize your website.

Blog Commenting’s Origins

What is blog commenting for? It’s for interested blog readers to voice and comment, opinion or discuss a blog post that they found interesting. However, Google changed their search algorithm so that backlinks matter and comments on blogs have links back to the commenter’s site. So the result was that people started commenting on other people’s blogs to get backlinks and juice their PageRank.

Change in Google’s Policy

Google obviously caught onto blog commenting and created the rel=”nofollow” tag. What this tag does is that it makes it so that whatever link contains that small bit of code doesn’t get PR for the link. Supposedly the bot won’t follow the link either, but experimentation shows that the bots probably still do.

All the major blogging software including Wordpress have implemented this nofollow tag so basically ALL blog comments don’t provide you with any PR (PageRank). Note that even if they did, the PR would be divided among hundreds of comments so the boost wouldn’t be very big anyways. Read Understanding PageRank to know more about division of PR.

So Does Commenting Help at All?

It does help. If you write some interesting comment or observation, people will wondering where you’re coming from and will naturally click on your name, which should have a URL to your site if you signed up and added your site’s URL.

You need to be realistic though and realize that on blog posts that actually can give traffic, there will probably be hundreds of comments and your one comment may generate the interest of maybe one or two people unless you’re lucky enough to be above the fold. (Above the fold means visible upon loading of the page. It’s not likely to happen unless the article is super short.)

So in conclusion, comment on blogs when you truly have something worth saying and perhaps it’ll help your site as a bonus. However, don’t comment simply to get traffic to your website.

One of the issues with content intensive websites is that even if you are away on vacation or simply staying overnight at a friend’s house, you may still need to update your content, especially if you have a commercial site that requires maintenance. Most people can get by with just borrowing their friend’s computer but there are special situations where you may need to access files from your main computer. There are a few common solutions to this.

So if you need files you have on your main PC, Mac or laptop… the first three options are the most economical but you CANNOT forget anything you might need. You can’t go home and retrieve files. The last one is convenient if you ever forget anything on your computer at home but costs a nominal fee after the free trial.

FTP

The most hassle free solution is to upload everything you’ll need onto your server and simply download them later. I know there are paranoid people who refuse to put sensitive information such as passwords onto other computers so here are some other options. Another thing is that some webmasters do not have access to FTP for one reason or another.

External Drive/Laptop

If you backup your website on an external drive or laptop (as you should), then you can bring it with you and plug it into an outlet or computer at whatever place you are moving to.

Email/File Uploading or Sharing

There are more and more collaborative file sharing programs nowadays such as Google Docs. You can also email items you will need to yourself or put images on Flickr. The biggest issue is the supported file size if you are using large images. And of course, you could simply email yourself the items you need if you know what files you’ll need to maintain your site while you’re away from home.

Remote PC Access

Another viable option is remote access to your PC. These options generally cost money. Remote Access tends to be used by webmasters of higher end websites and outside of the web industry, it is used by many business executives. Basically, as long as your home computer is on and has internet connection, you can access it remotely to check email or files. You can also allow other people, (trusted partners and friends) to access your PC remotely and help you maintain your website.

PCNow is the leader in this field and has a free 30-day trial if you would like to see if it suites your purposes.

Note* There are also non-standard uses for remote access. I have personally used it to install programs for friends remotely or help them solve software issues. For a full list of features, visit PCNow’s website.